Brian Willis bemoans the lack of creativity in synthesizer programming and electronic music.
One Sunday evening in the late '50s, I was watching the magazine programme Arena on the BBC. I remember this programme in particular, because it contained an item on some new instruments played by a group of French musicians. There were strange tubes and rods which made sounds completely unlike anything I had ever heard. These sounds were sometimes raw, sometimes ethereal, and the timbre changed with time; even on my very lo‑fi television, this music was fascinating. I remember to this day a piece by Vivaldi: the sounds, though they should have been alien to a classically trained musician, were such that I just had to listen. Each line was clear, distinct, yet blended with everything else.
About 20 years later, my memory of this programme was shaken into life by two records I have played as much as any in my collection — Switched on Bach, and The Well Tempered Synthesizer, performed by a certain W. Carlos. It became clear to me that what I had heard way back in my youth was now called a Synthesizer. I marvelled at the way artistes like Carlos played every note, accurately, and one part at a time, into a tape recorder and built up wonderful soundscapes where every sound was new to me.
Then, to my mind, something went badly wrong. With all the developments in electronics, digital control and countless other things I do not understand, we now have synthesizers capable of making 'millions of sounds'. I own three such machines, and they can indeed make more sounds than I have time to listen to. And my setup is modest by any standards — professionals have much more equipment. Why then, does everyone who uses this and similar equipment succeed in doing little more than making often very poor imitations of orchestral instruments? Surely this is a complete waste of hard‑earned synthesizer power.
When I read the reviews in this excellent magazine, I am told that such and such a synthesizer has 10 string presets, 15 basses, and a good piano — but I can play these without recourse to electronics, as can so many others, and they are all copies of acoustic instruments. Then I read articles by people who have recorded an album, who explain that they tweak the reverb, or open a filter two notches to 'get the right sound', but all this seems to make no detectable difference to the final recording — they still sound like either reasonable imitations or totally naff caricatures of orchestral instruments. They are certainly not original sounds.
Now add to this the idea that no melody must be more than four or five notes long and the less involved the better, and the results do not seem to warrant all the time and money spent on the development of the synthesizer. The latest physical modelling efforts by Korg and Yamaha take this mockery of orchestral instruments to illogical extremes.
But it may be that I have got the wrong end of the stick. Perhaps the world of music is all about copying, perhaps people are happy to have poor imitations of acoustic instruments, perhaps four notes is all most people can take (though my GCSE music classes suggest otherwise). Perhaps the point of ever more powerful synthesizers and sequencers is to allow each one of us to have our own orchestra and recording studio, so our boring four‑note melody, our three‑note killer riff, our stonking bass line and one‑note hook can be recorded for posterity, played on a poor imitation of some real instrument. Ingenuity, imagination, and creativity seem to have dried up.
Dig out the Carlos recording of the third movement of Bach's fourth Brandenburg, with its totally original sounds and eight tunes playing at the same time, and deny that it has depth, drive, and anything else you need. It may not be to everyone's taste, but it is a better use of the creativity that should come from synthesizers than all the recent recordings I have heard put together.
Then we have the sampler — God's gift to the unoriginal and uncreative, and a real curse. 'This bass riff is an aardvark breaking wind inside a large garage, built with London brick and an aluminium door to resonate, tuned down three octaves and fifteen ticks. But this one was fed on organic rice to give it a new sound!' Believe me, you are only kidding yourself if you think this is worthy of attention.
Personally, I try to make new sounds. I write my own arrangements of Welsh folk music (everyone usually does Irish and Scottish music) without the infernal ticking of some bloated analogue drum, and if you are into one note riffs, boring basses and flatulent aardvarks, then you just won't understand my music at all. I just wish that someone would use all the creativity inherent in synthesizers to create some music which might be beyond my imagination, and as original as those early examples which promised so much yet have been stifled on the cross of commercial viability. I would love to hear it!
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