Project Pete
The Synth Station
If I'm honest with myself, I think the reason I'm into old school synths has not so much to do with a particular 'warmth' that analogue oscillators and filters have (true but capably emulated nowadays); rather it's the immediacy of them as an interface to sound design and playing more generally. There's nothing worse than an electronic instrument (drum machine, sequencer or synth) that has a 'menu deep' experience. The same can be said for arranging music in a computer DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) like environment. The process of putting together musical ideas (production) should feel like playing an instrument with as little GUI friction as possible. For me this means getting rid of qwerty keyboards, mice and laptops in pursuit of the 'DAWLESS' set-up exemplified by the likes of Ricky Tinez (prolific music gear influencer):
Ricky Tinez who has lots of cool videos about music gear - also like how his pronounciation of DAWless sounds like Dallas
My synth station comprising: Alessis Strike drum pads hooked up to a Kenton Merge 4 MIDI Hub which feeds all of the drum and keys data into the Akai Force (which is essentially a computer and DAW with loads of buttons to improve the UI experience) - the main workhorse synth is the Prophet Rev 2 poly (though this is also a nice controller for Akai's onboard synths) along with the little microKorg auxiliary synth (sometimes substituted for with an Arp Oddyssey or my friend's Moog Sub-37)
To be honest though, I don't think I agree with the characterisation by the DAWless community that this is a software versus hardware thing or even that what we are striving for is a DAWless setup. At the end of the day all standalone sequencers which co-ordinate with other instruments run a lot of embedded software with modern systems probably running Linux on a pretty capable embedded system with powerful DSPs. I think ultimately it's all about achieving the most seamless user experience when capturing musical ideas and trying to structure them (the underpinning objective of any DAW (laptop or no laptop). To that end, I've built a 'Synth Station' for exploring musical ideas and jamming things around for an Oxford band I play synth for called In-Flight Movie.
The schematic above captures the main elements of the set-up. The idea of it is to have some really nice sounding synths which can be looped by midi clips using a hardware sequencer called the Akai Force. Feeding into this I've got an Alessis strike drum pad which works with the Force's on board drum machine. Then I've got two outboard synths to cover bass, mids and lead sounds. Recently I discovered the depth of Akai's synth engine which is also pretty good. Whilst playing keys, I've also got the MIDI pedals to shape things like filter sweeps, envelopes, release and mod, for more details on that see my other page on it here.
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The setup allows me to capture ideas quickly and acts like a 'black box' flight recorder by capturing all notes and drum hits via MIDI. You can also do some production/mixing/effects on the fly once you've got some stuff down to begin with.
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For now I think I've got the right setup for what I like to do and am trying not to haemorrhage more cash into yet more synths/gear! The singer and producer from In-Flight-Movie (James Askwith) has been a big source of inspiration for me getting into more capable synths and thinking more carefully around workflow, mixes and much more. I have to be very careful going to music shops with James who can easily convince me to go bankrupt!