Queen refused to use them. The Musicians’ Union tried to ban them. Then computers overtook them. Synthesisers have been mocked, despised and discarded throughout their history, yet somehow they are entering a new golden era.
A new wave of synth makers has emerged, creating machines that are more ambitious and often quirkier than their bleep-making predecessors, feeding the appetites of an expanding pool of enthusiasts.
Thousands of them, including Portishead’s Adrian Utley, gathered this weekend in Bristol at Machina Bristronica, a festival “of knobs, buttons and discussions”, to play and even make devices that their designers believe sometimes cross the line from musical instruments to conceptual art.
Less than a decade ago, anyone hoping to discover the latest in electronic music-making had to make a pilgrimage to Berlin’s annual Superbooth fair, but now there are several in the UK. Last week saw SynthFest UK in Sheffield, and Synth East in Norwich opened its doors for the first time last year.
“Loads of people came into making electronic music via the computer,” said Ben Chilton, co-founder of Machina Bristronica. For the last 20 years, software such as Cubase, Reason and Ableton Live has made it easy for anyone to make music with a computer or even on their phones. Software synthesisers are heard in nightclubs everywhere.
“People sold their synths when computers were exciting, and after a few years they’ve been yearning for something they can touch,” Chilton said. The ability to shape sounds on the fly in a performance, rather than feeling like you’re programming a machine, is behind the resurgence of synth hardware, he added.
Synths have inspired generations of musicians in different ways. Pink Floyd created a menacing soundscape on Dark Side of the Moon with a synth that came in a briefcase. The Human League, Gary Numan and Cabaret Voltaire pioneered the 80s synthpop sound that was later supercharged by the Yamaha DX7. And while Donna Summer’s I Feel Love brought the Moog to disco, modern dance music would have been very different if DJ Pierre and Juan Atkins had not discovered they could push the Roland TB-303 – intended to be a bass replacement – into creating the squelchy sounds of acid house.
Modern synthesisers fall into two categories. Self-contained desktop synths usually have a keyboard and many knobs, dials and faders for the player to make the instrument swoop and soar. Then there are synths assembled from different modules – some to generate sounds, others to manipulate them. Modular synths can be simple affairs or extraordinary masses of cables and metal, like a £15,000 colossus created for film composer Hans Zimmer this year for his relaunch of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. In 2013, Sound On Sound reported that there were about 730 modules available for Eurorack, which has become the modular standard. Now there are more than 16,000.
Yesterday also marked the 60th anniversary of the Moog modular, the first commercially available synth. Until 1964, anyone interested in the possibilities of electronic music had to build their own machines, as Delia Derbyshire did with the Radiophonic Workshop when she used tape and BBC test equipment to create the Doctor Who theme tune. Robert Moog’s synth was followed by the Buchla Easel.
“At first they were designed with home organists in mind, but by the mid-70s people worked out that they were instruments in their own right – [Jean-Michel] Jarre, Tomita, Vangelis,” said Oli Freke, a synth historian and author of Synthesizer Evolution.
Not everyone liked them. Some musicians feared being replaced and some bands took a stand. Queen put “No Synthesisers!” on the sleeves of four of their albums, and in 1982 the Musicians’ Union passed a resolution to ban synths and drum machines.
Now that almost any sound imaginable can be conjured from a computer, endless choice has driven creators towards more limited devices. Tom Whitwell, former editor of Mixmag, now makes synth modules as Music Thing, and will demonstrate his latest gear, a portable modular synth, at Machina Bristronica today.
Rising interest in synths is due a to post-pandemic boom and the easy access to Chinese factories, said Whitwell, whose devices have been used by Thom Yorke from Radiohead, James Blake and Ryuichi Sakamoto.
“The barriers are much lower,” he said. “I can design something, send a couple of files to Shenzhen, then three weeks later these magic circuit boards will turn up for £25. It means you can try weirder and weirder things for very little risk.”
He will help Machina Bristronica attendees make a Mikrophonie, a musical joke inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen that captures sounds of synthesiser switches with a microphone to feed back into the machine.
The key to synthesisers’ success is that they enable people to play again, said Jack Edwards of BeepBoop Electronics. “It reignites this spark of interest in your environment and the universe, like a child,” he said. “It’s a conversation between the player and the instrument. You tap into something that words can’t describe.”
