I’ve added some new con­tent to the Sound Pages; straight from the archive. I’ve always believed that to know where you are going, you have to know where you came from. You can click on ‘Tracks’ and ‘Sound & Vision’ to nav­i­gate to the sam­ples. On the Sound & Vision page is the first piece of film I scored. On the Track pages are 4 songs from the first ‘album’ I fully assem­bled called ‘Insides Out’ (full piece will be down­load­able in the archive soon). Both were made using 100% soft-synth and soft-recording tools. Circa 2002, this mate­r­ial doc­u­ments a par­a­digm shift in the way I make music. 9 years ago some of us found our­selves scratch­ing our heads at a plethora of  new tech­nol­ogy that not only was afford­able, but sounded as good as the ‘real’ thing. Scrap­ping together a bunch of 2nd-hand lay-about elec­tron­ics and sav­ing a small for­tune just to pur­chase one Reagan-era ana­log synth so you could be the next Fat-Boy Slim, was now all a thing of the past. You could have as many square waves and 24db low-pass fil­ters your com­puter could han­dle. Soft synths were here to stay. But how long did it take before we were all over­whelmed with such easy access to all the amaz­ing syn­the­sis tech­niques that were sud­denly afford­able? The man­u­fac­tur­ers cer­tainly didn’t wait around for us to catch up. They kept push­ing the lim­its of dig­i­tal syn­the­sis to new won­der­ful ter­ri­to­ries, in many cases sur­pass­ing their hard­ware com­peti­tors in raw innovation.

No one could keep up with all this. Look at Aphex Twin’s Drukqs album, this came out in 2001 and remains the North Star of what some­one can pro­duce with a lap­top. Hon­estly, sit through that album and then try to think of a piece of com­puter music that can ace that. If it came out this year, it would be just as incred­i­ble. A few mile mark­ers down the road, we see softs-syths have earned their place in most pro­fes­sional stu­dios. Mean­while, hard­ware synths have stepped up their game and met the soft­ware crowd in the no-man’s land of usabil­ity. And this is why it’s such an excit­ing time to get into syn­the­sis right now.  I feel now more than ever, it’s less about the tools you use and more about the hands that use them.

Maybe it’s just me, but now that the giant music indus­try drag­ons are look­ing for caves to sleep in, I feel like that the most grat­i­fy­ing music to hear is the kind that doesn’t come from the radio or some mar­keted musi­cal ‘move­ment’. What shines through is not another track made with the lat­est and great­est tech­nol­ogy (I hear the boyscouts are offer­ing an auto­tune badge now), it’s the Idea. The Idea sounds through. Even if something’s not mixed down by Dead­maus, chances are it’ll sound good enough to enjoy at least for a moment. It’s those moments that really count, not just their part in some name-your-New-Something move­ment. But wasn’t that what it was always all about?