Synthesizer: Difference between revisions

==[[Player Of The Month (Beat Instrumental 1978)]]==

==[[Allan Holdsworth (Beat Instrumental 1979)]]==

That’s something I’ve got really tired of, that curtain of sound over everything all the time. You get this backwash and it never stops, everything is built onto this blanket of sound. There are occasions when it can be beautiful - there are a couple of tunes on Bill’s last album where it was nice - but l just wanted to break loose from all that and play the music that I’ve been working on for a long time.

I tried adapting some of my existing pieces to SynthAxe, and it works really well for some. But there’s really so much more I can do with it. I would like to stick mostly to new things because it has opened up so many doors for me, compositionally and sonically. I’m not too interested in sampling, but I like creating sounds from scratch.

I didn’t realize how great those '''synthesizer'''s were until I started using them. I’ve always liked the Oberheim sound anyway. It seems that every '''synth''' manufacturer has its own voice. The Oberheim has a vocal quality or something. With the Matrix 12, you can assign two voices to each string. And you can pan them anywhere in the stereo image and get some really beautiful stuff.

When I got the SynthAxe, it just sparked off this incredible interest in '''synth'''esis which I’d never thought of before. So I’m trying to get a deeper understanding of '''synth'''esis so I can create my own sounds and programs. And that is really exciting to me, because I’m so new at it. I’ve got all this energy again like I had when I first started playing. It’s a different kind of energy than the one I have for just developing my musical knowledge. So one helps the other. It’s a new inspiration for me.

“But I’ve got a reasonable understanding of it now. I’ve created a lot of my own patches from scratch and it’s getting closer. No cigar perhaps, but it’s getting closer.’

"I’ve been trying - and I haven’t succeeded yet, but I keep getting closer - to create a kind of a horn sound that’s somewhere between an oboe and a soprano saxophone. And since there’s no real acoustic instrument that I can learn how to play, I use the '''synthesizer'''s that I control with the Synth-Axe to create a sound which is somehow like that. I’ve always liked the idea of '''synth'''esis. I mean, there must be so many sounds - unheard sounds - that would be wonderful to hear. The real quest is to find some of them. Hopefully, eventually I’ll come up with a sound that isn’t trying to be something else, but which is definitely identifiable as something else.

Because I long to be a wind player - I always wanted to play saxophone - when I go to a '''synthesizer''' to create a sound, that’s usually where I start. I’m not trying to replicate anything specific; I just say, "Well, let’s try and get a wind-instrument-from-Mars tone." So long as it’s a wind instrument, that’s all that matters. I quite liked the sound on "Spokes," which is just a lone Oberheim Xpander. In the middle, I had a second Xpander detuned a tone away from the first, and faded that in during the middle section where Jimmy and Vinnie are just completely reaming. I wanted to leave it kind of open there for the bass and drums to do a bit of savaging.

CH: To what extent has the "MIDI revolution" affected your music?

AH: Oh yeah! There’s a lot. It would depend on '''synth'''esis... you know, the way it goes and how much the instruments develop. The sad part about it, of that thing, is because of the instruments that I’ve got now, is that I only have a SynthAxe that really doesn’t belong to me because I sold mine. But the next thing would be like, perhaps this instrument that Harvey Starr makes, which is like a keyboard. You know, totally like... it’s a keyboard, with like two necks. A guitar... it looks like a pedal-steel guitar. But there’s buttons instead of strings.