As I mentioned last month, I recently had the opportunity to visit GLOSS (Glasgow Library of Synthesized Sound) situated in the Gorbals area of Glasgow. GLOSS is a non-profit, artist-led and community-based organisation, providing access to electronic music gear, instruments, education, workshops, performances and more. It may come as a surprise that, as someone deeply involved in synthesized music, I had never handled a hardware synthesizer before. For me, it has always been about software synthesis using computer plug-ins such as Serum 2, Equator 2, and Massive X or software emulations like Arturia’s CS-80 V.

The experience itself was very interesting and I spent most of my time there playing with an analogue synth called Fourm. It is made by a company called Sequential which was founded by synthesizer legend, Dave Smith, who is perhaps best known for his previous company Sequential Circuits, which gave us the famous Prophet-5 synthesizer. In the early eighties the Prophet was owned by lots of big names including Gary Numan, Phil Collins and Vangelis. I was told by Lewis Cook, the main driving force behing GLOSS, that the Fourm synth had only recently been acquired by them and this gave me the opportunity to work out for myself the purpose of all the knobs, buttons and switches. I have to admit it was great fun. In the short time that was left after I had worked out the basics, I had a go at a fairly straightforward drum machine to complete my visit.

The experience made me think of  the development of the synthesizer from the early days of the Moog Modular and ARP 2600 through to the Korg M1 of the late eighties and early nineties and, in particular, the cost of these instruments back in the day. For example, the Fairlight CMI, which was one of the first synths to include sampling, cost in the region of £20,000. What is amazing is that you can still buy the CMI from co-designer Peter Vogel for £14,500 or you can settle for the software emulation from the same company for around £40. Indeed, there exist many software emulations of these grand old machines from companies like Arturia and GForce, incorporating extra features such as arpeggiation, for a tiny fraction of the price of the hardware original. There are many purists who say that the analogue hardware versions are still superior to their software equivalents, but even they admit that the gap is narrowing.

What the software synths will never have is the history, including the chart-topping records that were produced on these analogue machines. I have the greatest respect for the effort and expertise that went into their invention and production, and enjoy reliving the pleasure that it brought me as a listener and DJ playing eighties music at the time. It is clear that they brought about a revolution in popular and film music that is still evident today.

I think, however, that I will be continuing to use software synths for my productions for a whole variety of reasons such as cost, ease of use, and the fact that very few people can tell the difference.