jmtd → log → synths

Although I've never written about them, I've been interested in music synthesisers for ages. My colleagues know this. Whilst I've been off sick, they had a whip-round and bought me a voucher for Andertons, a UK-based music store, to cheer me up.

I'm absolutely floored by this generosity. And so, I'm now on a quest to buy a synthesizer! Although, not my first one.

Alesis Micron on my desk, taunting me

I bought my first synth, an Alesis Micron, from a colleague at $oldjob, 16 years ago. For various reasons, I've struggled to engage with it, and it's mostly been gathering dust on my desk in all that time. (I might write more about the Micron in a later blog post). "Bad Gear" sums it up better than I could:

So, I'm not truly buying my "first" synth, but for all intents and purposes I'm on a similar journey to if I was, and I thought it might be fun to write about it.

Goals

I want something which has as many of its parameters presented physically, as knobs or sliders etc., as possible. One reason I've failed to engage with the Micron (so far) is it's at the other end of this spectrum, with hundreds of tunable parameters but a small handful of knobs. To change parameters you have to go diving into menus presented on a really old-fashioned, small LCD display. If you know what you are looking for, you can probably find it; but if you just want to experiment and play around, it's off-putting.

Secondly, I want something I can use away from a computer, as much as possible. Computers are my day-job, largely dominate my existing hobbies, and are unavoidable even in some of the others (like 3d printing). Most of the computers I interact with run Linux. And for all its strengths, audio management is not one of them. If I'm going to carve out some of my extremely limited leisure time to explore this stuff, I don't to spend any of it (at least now) fighting Pulseaudio/ALSA/Pipewire/JACK/OSS/whatever, or any of the other foibles that might crop up¹.

Thirdly, I'd like something which, in its soul, is an instrument. You can get some amazing little synth boxes with a huge number of features in them. Something with a limited number of features but which really feels well put together would suit me better.

So… next time, I'll write about the 2-3 top candidates on my list. Can you guess what they might be?