Today I put the fin­ish­ing touches on part two of the 4 part con­cept series inspired by Charles Sheife’s book “Zero”.  May I present, A Neu­tron Star:

A Neu­tron Star is the stage of growth where the star has expanded and grown so mas­sive, that the force of grav­ity it cre­ates smashes elec­trons into pro­tons. The result is a big cos­mic bouncy ball full of neu­trons. Words I tried to incor­po­rate when design­ing the sounds include: mas­sive, wide, mag­netic, trans­form­ing, a lit­tle pain. I sort of equated this state of a Sun’s being lying some­where between the feel­ing you get when you hit your thumb with a ham­mer and when you stick your tongue on the end of a nine volt bat­tery. If that makes any sense.

A Neu­tron Star was cre­ated entirely with 100% ana­logue syn­the­siz­ers in order to achieve a type of vin­tage outer space sound. These include the Ver­mona Mono Lancet, Ver­mona Kick Lancet, and the entire range of Moog Mooger Fooger ana­logue effects.

The track is free to down­load. And as always, we wel­come your feed­back. Stay tuned for the next the in the series — A Quark Star…

Inspired by Charles Shiefe’s book “Zero”, A Liv­ing Star is the first in a 4 part con­cept series. A mostly ambi­ent series using 100% ana­logue cir­cuitry, each piece echos the life and times of a star from a bright source of energy to its the­o­ret­i­cal death.

The first of the series is called “A Liv­ing Star” and it attempts to cap­ture the essence that a mas­sive ball of plasma held together by grav­ity con­sists of. Bright, fear­less, epic, strong, tire­less, life. These are words that I tried to incor­po­rate when cre­at­ing the right sounds.

A Liv­ing Star was cre­ated entirely with 100% ana­logue syn­the­siz­ers in order to achieve a type of vin­tage outer space sound. These include the Ver­mona Mono Lancet, Ver­mona Kick Lancet, and the entire range of Moog Mooger Fooger ana­logue effects.

The track is free to down­load. And as always, we wel­come your feed­back. Stay tuned for the next the in the series — The Neu­tron Star…

Today both the Deutsche Welle and the UK’s Guardian had inter­est­ing arti­cles regard­ing an exper­i­ment con­ducted by test researcher Clau­dia Fritz of the Uni­ver­sity of Paris. This exper­i­ment was com­pleted in 2010 at an inter­na­tional vio­lin com­pe­ti­tion in Indi­anapo­lis, IN. She dimmed the lights, had 21 pro­fes­sional vio­lin­ists put on weld­ing glasses and then gave them each six dif­fer­ent vio­lins; three newly made vio­lins, two orig­i­nals made by Anto­nio Stradi­var­ius circa 1700, and 1 vio­lin made by Guarneri del Gesu circa 1740. The pro­fes­sional musi­cians were then asked to rank the playa­bil­ity of each of the vio­lins. The results were sur­pris­ing. In all cases, the musi­cians pre­ferred the playa­bil­ity of the new vio­lins to the old and respected relics. One of the Stradi­var­ius vio­lins actu­ally came in dead last.

Anto­nio Stradi­vari, by Edgar Bundy, 1893

Read­ing about this won­der­ful exper­i­ment sent me on a philosopher’s trip about the amaz­ing power of brands and how we per­ceive the value of a prod­uct. If you turned up the lights, removed the welders gog­gles and gave these same vio­lin­ists a Stradi­var­ius fol­lowed by a new vio­lin, I’m guess­ing the vio­lin with the 10 mil­lion dol­lar price tag will win the per­cep­tion of what a mas­ter vio­lin should sound like. This sus­pi­cion was some­what con­firmed in the Guardian’s ver­sion of the arti­cle when they inter­viewed Kai-Thomas Roth of the British Vio­lin Mak­ing Asso­ci­a­tion. Roth reported that there have been dou­ble blind tests where peo­ple and exper­i­menters were blind­folded and asked to tell the dif­fer­ence between a new vio­lin and a price­less antique. Here again, none could dis­tin­guish with any cer­tainty which was the new and which one was the old. Fur­ther­more, Roth sum­ma­rizes in the arti­cle, “There’s some myth-making that helps old instru­ments. If you give some­one a Stradi­vari and it doesn’t work for them, they’ll blame them­selves and work hard at it until it works. Give them a mod­ern vio­lin, and they’ll dis­miss the instru­ment straight away if it doesn’t work for them. That’s the psy­chol­ogy at work. Mod­ern vio­lins are eas­ily as good, but even a good maker can make an instru­ment that doesn’t work out.”

Modern-day mas­ter vio­lin maker Rainer W. Leon­hardt of Geigen­bau Leonhardt

In other words, the power of the Stradi­var­ius brand is so suc­cess­ful that if one where to shell out 10 mil­lion dol­lars to pur­chase one and then pro­ceeded to play a rather weak sound­ing Bach no 1 pre­lude than on their every­day prac­tice vio­lin, they would blame them­selves and not the instru­ment. To me there is no greater illus­tra­tion of the power of brand­ing. What is the dif­fer­ence between this idea with the vio­lins and say the idea of pay­ing $150+ on a pair of designer jeans?  Elim­i­nat­ing the crowd of con­sumers who pur­chase the designer jeans for social sta­tus or pea­cock mat­ing rit­u­als, there is, I sus­pect, a great num­ber of peo­ple who would expect a $150 dol­lar pair of jeans to out per­form a $40 pair. Chances are this ‘prac­ti­cal’ crowd will stick to the $40 pair of Levis because they know the pants are going last for­ever, thus is the power of brands. How­ever; if you gave the $150 pair of jeans to one of these prac­ti­cal thinkers as a Christ­mas gift, they would most likely treat them with more care than the Levis, and expect them to last. When a month later the jeans tear at the restau­rant when they bend down to pick up some keys they just dropped, they might think that they ate too much or are too fat.

A bet­ter exam­ple, or one that rings more true to this old vs new debate when it comes to musi­cal instru­ments, is the com­men­tary that con­tin­u­ally shows up within the world of music tech­nol­ogy. As one who has logic and rea­son embed­ded into his DNA, I have often mused over the many post­ings in music tech­nol­ogy forums, blogs, and online mag­a­zines arti­cles about the dif­fer­ence between vin­tage and mod­ern syn­the­siz­ers or record­ing equip­ment. For­get about the dif­fer­ence between Ana­logue vs Dig­i­tal (indulging that debate is like drink­ing a soda you found in the fridge that was opened last week), I’m talk­ing about the lust for pur­chas­ing elec­tronic musi­cal relics from the bygone glory days of Synth-pop.

When a syn­the­sizer enthu­si­ast is born, they might first start out by dis­cov­er­ing which instru­ments were used in the mak­ing of their favorite song in their own musi­cal col­lec­tion. That’s a nat­ural place to start. Often once this dis­cov­ery is made, they research the instru­ments fur­ther and then get eas­ily swept away in the mythol­ogy of the instru­ment. You find out more about who used it, what tech­nol­ogy it brought to the table, the ease or flex­i­bil­ity of per­form­ing with it, all parts in a greater def­i­n­i­tion that defines the per­ceived value of the vin­tage prod­uct in ques­tion. For me, and I assume many other syn­the­sizer tech heads, read­ing about the life and times of a Sequen­tial Cir­cuits Pro One is not unlike read­ing one of the Broth­ers Grimm’s fairy­tale or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It’s the sort of mythos that sur­rounds the instru­ment or brand that draws you in and makes you drool. So one day you might end up on Ebay and see that your Pro Ones are going for $1500. At the time of this arti­cle there were two of them sold in the last two weeks. Sequen­tial Cir­cuits pro­duced roughly 10,000 of these between 1981 & 1984.

Sequen­tial Cir­cuits Pro One

The truth is, the maker of the Pro One is still pro­duc­ing syn­the­siz­ers. Dave Smith not too long ago launched a prod­uct called the Mopho Key­board which is essen­tially an insanely improved Pro One, but also has a mod­ern afford­able price of around $800 retail.  But despite the won­ders of mod­ern tech­nol­ogy and the endorse­ment of one of the great syn­the­sizer crafts­men of our time, there are peo­ple who will fiercely defend the Pro One’s sound over the Mopho’s as if it was some com­pe­ti­tion. What I worry about is what part of the mythol­ogy will these mod­ern own­ers play in these old instru­ments? Will these old instru­ments from a bygone era limit their cre­ativ­ity? Is the inspi­ra­tion for the tracks they pro­duce with this Pro One entirely their own? If not, will it actu­ally make their end musi­cal prod­uct sound bet­ter or worse than if they had a Mopho?

Dave Smith Instru­ments Mopho Keyboard

Per­son­ally I’m indif­fer­ent to this sort of vin­tage synth fanati­cism, if I saw a Pro One at a yard sale, I’d prob­a­bly res­cue it. But to pay more than a Mopho for it seems a lit­tle counter intu­itive. I pre­fer to pur­chase instru­ments from my own time both ana­logue and dig­i­tal. I want to be a part of a new mythol­ogy around these instru­ments. Vince Clarke of Depeche Mode/Yaz/Erasure fame has an amaz­ing col­lec­tion of synths, but he lived those synths. He brought the Pro One when it was new and made some incred­i­ble pop tracks with it. But as much as I love his work and love the sounds he cre­ated, I also feel this sort of unspo­ken respon­si­bil­ity not to cor­rupt these sounds with my own inter­pre­ta­tion of his type of work. True, if some­one gave me a Pro One, I’m not going to sound like Vince Clarke sim­ply because he has a much dif­fer­ent play­ing style. But, what I’m get­ting at is will I be think­ing about sound­ing like him when I play the Pro One due to the mythol­ogy around it that encour­aged me to want one? Will this kind of influ­ence limit my capac­ity to inno­vate with this relic of an instru­ment? In other words if I buy a Stradi­var­ius, will this not set an unrea­son­able expec­ta­tion for my vio­lin per­for­mance? Will the influ­ence be pos­i­tive or negative?

These ques­tions are what made read­ing the arti­cles so inter­est­ing and valu­able. I’d love to see author­i­ties on music tech­nol­ogy such as Sound on Sound, Elec­tronic Musi­cian, Key­board, or Future Music mag­a­zines try to answer these ques­tions in terms of vin­tage syn­the­siz­ers. I’d also encour­age any­one to spend some time try­ing to recre­ate vin­tage sounds with mod­ern instru­ments, this is one way to get a new lease on your newer, not so leg­endary, less expen­sive instrument.

For more information:

Read the UK Guardian’s arti­cle here.

Read the Deutsche Welle’s arti­cle here.

http://www.violin-leonhardt.de/en — mod­ern day mas­ter vio­lin maker Leon­hardt in Mit­ten­wald, Ger­many. I had the plea­sure to visit Mit­ten­wald a few years back, I was fas­ci­nated with the cul­ture of vio­lin mak­ing still thriv­ing in this beau­ti­ful Alpine vil­lage. There have been vio­lins built here since the 17th century.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YFNTP7qriE — Video of Dave Smith of Dave Smith Instru­ments, cre­ator of the Sequen­tial Cir­cuits Pro One and the DSI Mopho Key­board, explain­ing how he thinks the Mopho “runs cir­cles” around the Pro One.

http://www.vintagesynth.com/sci/seqpro1.php — Infor­ma­tion about the Sequen­tial Cir­cuits Pro One on at Vin­tage Synth Explorer.

http://www.vinceclarkemusic.com/video/index.html — Vince Clarke him­self reviews the SC Pro One and some other vin­tage synthesizers.

Syn­the­sizer pho­tos cour­tesy of Matrix Synth.