Weekly synth bits for November 18, 2022
Moog and Buchla, Soft synths, synth tutorials, and a surprise from Moog inc.
Synth War
Nifty episode about East Coast vs West Coast synthesis on the Twenty Thousand Hertz Podcast
Best value for your synth dollar
The Arturia V Collection 9 is on sale this week for $299 - that’s 50% off (or if you are upgrading from a previous version, just $99). You get amazing detailed and (to my ear) accurate software emulations of all of the great synthesizer. Hours and hours of noodling. Pairs well with Ableton and the Arturia MiniLab keyboard.
Film composer, Guy Michelmore walks through the collection in this review:
As Guy points out, the cost of the entire collection of 30+ synths is probably less than what you’d pay to just to ship one of these vintage synths.
Music Producer / Youtuber Andrew Huang held a producer challenge organized around the Arturia collection. The results sound great.
Syntorial - the ultimate synthesizer tutorial
One of the nifty things about working at a music-focused company like Spotify is that there are lots of musicians working at the company. There are at least 3 separate slack channels devoted to synthesizers on the Spotify slack. These channels are great places to trade gear, share patches and clips and talk technique. This week, my colleague Matt pointed us at Syntorial - an online synthesis tutorial that helps you learn how to build a patch by ear. I’ve gone through the first few lessons and already its help me to better distinguish between a narrow pulse wave and a triangle waveform. There seem to be a gajillion lessons. I’ll work through the first 22 or so free lessons and if I am still learning stuff, I’ll invest in the whole pack (199 lessons).
Minimoog Model D is back
Moog is re-releasing the Model D - their synthesizer that changed the world of music forever. You can pre-order them for just $4,999.
When I was 16 years old I had a Model D in my garage (long story). Every day after school I’d spend hours just noodling around figuring out how it all worked. It is really a marvel of design. Even though I knew nothing about synthesis, or filters or what an oscillator or an envelope was, I was able to figure it out based on its intuitive left-to-right signal flow of the controls, that can be seen echoed in the most modern synths like the Hydrasynth:
It was great fun. $5,000 is definitely out of my price range, so I’ll have to be satisfied playing with my Arturia Mini V3 emulation.