OLD-SCHOOL DREAMING…
We’ve never had it so good, right? We 21st century, DAW-reliant composers and producers take for granted that our instruments have near limitless polyphony, that we can run tens (even hundreds) of them at the same time, that we have swathes of hard-drive space available for squeaky clean digital recording and that, in the main, the software tools on which we’re reliant cost a tiny fraction of the hardware equivalents which were the only choice of our ’70s- and ’80s-based predecessors. And yet, the advantage of the tools on which that previous generation relied was that each piece of hardware was a bona fide musical instrument or a dedicated device designed only to produce audio signals – a Jupiter-8 can’t access your Facebook feed; a Prophet 5 won’t let you book a holiday, and an E-mu SP-12 won’t let you upload your latest track to Soundcloud.
Computers aren’t, in themselves, musical instruments. Bear in mind too that so much of the connectivity and sound design at the heart of the music we make is carried out for us. We browse presets endlessly, and the ‘connections’ between our chosen soft synths is automatic; there are no patch cables to negotiate, no preamp stages to set-up. In the blink of an eye, there’s an instrument, packed with starting points, eager to make a sound for us. Compare that to the studio of yesteryear, the pre-MIDI days where the connections between synthesizers were either non-existent or reliant on CV and Gate connections. ‘Sequencing’ meant something very different back then – if you were lucky enough to own devices capable of stringing series of notes together, they were highly unlikely to be ‘playable’ and they would almost certainly have been restricted to a specific number of steps before cycling around again.
Many synth-based composers accepted that real-time performance was often the best way forward but, of course, these were – for most people – the pre hard-drive days, so multitrack tape machines were also heavily involved, adding colour and warmth, of course, but also further levels of technical restriction. All of the best music requires exactly that: not an infinite number of possibilities but, ultimately, a decision to fix on a set of sounds and a musical idea, commit to it and then intuitively circumnavigate any technical restrictions to find a way to get the idea recorded, whatever it takes.
But don’t assume we’re advocating selling your computer and replacing your plugins with hardware: the hallmark sounds of that era are available to you through modern systems too, as we’ll see through the following pages and walkthroughs. If this era of synth soundtracks appeals to you, try to creatively restrict your options. Ignore presets; try to limit the number of notes each part plays and how many parts are playing together at once. Imagine you’ve only got one delay and one reverb unit… and so on. Often, the best results spring from deliberately imposed limitations, not from having all of the choices in the world.