Olds go nostalgic for the good old days of tech

Culture
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Yes and no. There are very good digital recreations of analog modular synths available now. I’d imagine that, with a little work, we could even reproduce the temperature-dependent vagaries of the oscillators (although I recall quite well that the designers of analog synths did not consider that a “feature”).

Well, digital synthesis was taking baby steps still back then. What digital offered musicians like Carlos was reproducibility of performance conditions, and that is a real desideratum for many musicians, enough to forgive some of the flaws of the resulting sounds. You know that, if you set up everything the same way, you will get the same results, nothing will drift.

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Just control the oscillators with envelopes that have ~hour long attacks and 100% sustain, no release, at very low (and different) levels. But it could be this kind of thing is already implemented, somewhere.

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Time-dependent random noise added to the tuning parameters should do it. Still, I understand why people like analogue synths - I like them myself. I also understand why many keyboardists fell in love with digital synths. Perfectionism is a job requirement for a good artist (oh Hell, let’s call it what it is, OCD), and controlling performance parameters is one of the possible outlets for this. I’m primarily a composer of the old school, I suppose. Performance parameters are the one thing I cannot control, so my own musical outlets for my OCD are rather different.

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The history of that divide was fascinating. It seemed to me (as a non-musician enthusiast) like digital had completely replaced analog in the '80s, but I guess it remained a niche. In the mid-80’s I designed and built a module that took in a triangle wave and outputted a shark tooth wave, like that on the Minimoog:
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which I’d never seen anywhere else. I tried to sell an article about it to Polyphony Magazine (precursor to Electronic Musician) but it was rejected* due to modular going out of style!

*by editor Craig Anderton, no less./shameless_bragging

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Well, even then there were hybrids, I think. I have Chamberlin’s “Musical Applications of Microprocessors” from that time, and he spent almost as much time on microprocessors as interface controllers for analogue synths as he did on digital synthesis itself. (Good book. The processors have aged; the book’s core ideas haven’t.)

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There are some great emulations. I have Arturia’s Buchla Easel V software and… while I don’t own an actual Music Easel for comparison, it sounds like they do in recordings, so long as some of the extra features are avoided. Ditto for d16 LuSH-101 (or Roland’s own “Boutique” SH01A) vs. an SH-101. They might not be perfect, but they’re definitely close enough for most purposes.

But digital emulations still have their limitations, things designers just don’t model or can’t reasonably model. Issues of audio rate modulation, feedback, and some of the bizarre unintended quirks (not just temperature drift!) that analog circuits have. Or even digital circuits, which exist in an analog world :slight_smile:

Take BBD emulations for instance – they all go for the pedal sound, relatively clean but dark, and some are pretty okay. But I haven’t found one yet that sounds like a Doepfer BBD, which intentionally has no filter and can be clocked externally and/or way slower than its chip was meant for. I also haven’t heard an all-digital model of a PT2399 delay (itself sort of a hybrid digital-ish imitation of a BBD chip) that does the characteristic noisy breakup thing it does when it’s slowed down too much. Could those be modeled? In theory…

I had a Pittsburgh Lifeforms Double Helix for a while – an analog complex oscillator that’s got all this weird crosstalk and self-modifying behavior that isn’t really designed in, so much as a consequence of the design choices. Totally full of character and I kind of wish I’d kept it, but it draws way too much on the -12V rail for my case :frowning: Nobody models stuff like this though.

Plogue has a couple of very nice FM synth VSTs where they exhaustively probed and tested and emulated the Yamaha OPN2 (Chipsynth MD) and OPLL (Chipsynth PortaFM). I love the effort they put in and those things sound like you’ve got a crappy old Yamaha keyboard or a Sega MegaDrive sitting there playing the music…

But I recently picked up an Akemie’s Castle – a Eurorack module built around NOS Yamaha OPL3 chips (as used in the Sound Blaster Pro 2) and the real thing is just miles beyond, in terms of weird crusty artifacts and gorgeous overall sound. It’s digital in an analog shell, with some of the weirdness a result of the cost limitations at the time and some of it the result of analog interactions.

I’m not anti-digital at all – very happy hybrid here. I always run my Yamaha Reface CS (digital) through an Elektron Analog Drive, before going into my DAW. All my current Eurorack oscillators are digital, and I integrate my modular with Bitwig Studio. I happily use tube and tape emulations in software rather than messing with the expense and hassle of the real things.

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Yeah. Why use a mellotron when a wavetable will do the same thing a lot more robustly, eh?

Yeah. Nonlinear behaviour galore, but then, nonlinear is just part of sound generation sometimes. The results of various digital algorithms (*cough* FM) are distinctly difficult to forecast.

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I’ve posted this before, but this looks like a good time to post it again.

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How come they’re called Orkestra Obsolete? The instruments look current enough to me. :wink:

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I think it’s us that’s obsolete.

Have these guys done anything else? I certainly can’t find anything with my advance google-fu (looking at 2 pages that is).

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I’ve tried to find more from them and have come up empty. I would love an album of their music.

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Also @kxkvi. I’m guessing that they were a BBC one-shot to commemorate the anniversary of Blue Monday.

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Defender of the crown for the Intellivison. I remember playing it on a Apple IIGS. Kind of simple gameplay that was redeemed in part by the graphics and sound. Of the cinemaware games, Rocket Ranger was more fun.

So, finally it can be seen on the Intellivison-- and it’s recognizable.

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Only old fogies like us like acoustic music without autotune, synthesizers, or even amplification!

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Well . . . . . I love synths too, which don’t sound right without amplification.

But autotune really needs to be banished from studios everywhere.

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Sorry for the necro-thread (that’s me going nostalgic for the good old days of Elsewhere!) but you reminded me that when I first moved to Hollywood in 1991, I was delighted to realize that my new phone number was HOllywood 7-4144. I lived on Orchid Street, directly behind the Chinese Theatre complex.

There are still a great many numbers based in that neighborhood that begin with 46:

Hollywood Wax Museum: 462-5991
Museum of Death: 466-8011
Musso & Frank: 467-7788
Mel’s Drive-In: 465-3111
Pantages Theatre: 468-1770

etc., etc.

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My best randomly assigned phone number was my college dorm. 99H-ELLO.

My best chosen phone number was 000-WI PLATT for my Google voice phone for that account. (Can’t remember the area code)

Sadly, I used it seldomly and they took it back. :frowning:

I did manage to get my office number to be (000) 111-SCCM (which is the now former initialism of my primary infrastructure software)

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Too close to SCAM. :grin:

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IRS: 1-800-VAmpire-91040

I doubt that it was the original 82 mnemonic.

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