https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_wGBttO_gg

A while back, I got big into synths. Nowadays, you can download virtual instruments and they sound like just about whatever you want, so in a way hardware synths are obsolete. But, I still think they’re cool. The Grandmother, they only “fancy” hardware synth I own, is analog, which means the sound comes from an electrical circuit, not a computer program; and modular–you can plug other synths into it so they can play together in various ways. This is a good way to force yourself to buy more synths. So far I’ve been pretty successful at avoiding that, but we’ll see what the future holds.

Anyway this video is a pretty good demonstration of the Grandmother. I think I’d been hoping to learn some tips on how to use it. I’m not sure whether I ever closed the tab. Either I didn’t watch the video but planned to, or else there was something good in it that I wanted to watch again. But now watching the video he’s mostly just goofing around with it, which is more or less what I do. It’s a good instrument for goofing.

I think my introduction to these sorts of analog synth sounds was the soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange by the incomparable Wendy Carlos. Ironically, what those warm, buzzy sounds reminded me of was cheap video game music from the 90s, which, when it was really good, transported you to this sort of lofi epic wonderland, That early video game music really was just an extremely “pixelated” version of a Moog. I’m not sure you’d get way with it in a format larger than a 90s video game, with it’s built-in speaker and 8-bit display. Things that feel big in an intimate and novel setting don’t scale up to the wide open and familiar world we are constantly born into. I think I like the sounds of an analog synth because they’re capable of the sort of fuzzy sonic immensity needed to meet the present moment, where the world feels too big while we are too small.