Imagine the symphony, in your own home!
Help me! I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole, and now my world is filled with sonic dreams.
My fault, really. After ignoring “synthesis” for better than forty years, I made the slip of buying something simple. Inexpensive. And of course, it can’t do what the big toys can. To compensate, I started paying attention to the reviews on YouTube. Thank you, Nick and Woody. Now I want to twiddle knobs and check waveforms, without any clear vision. Just like the others.
When you have a piano, you build your sound picture based on what 88 keys and some well-tuned strings will allow. Slip into the dark side, where anything can be designed, and the piano loses colour. Tonal colour. I tried settling for the Hammond Organ settings on my piano (I never said it was analog), but there’s so much more to do. A square wave here, a sawtooth there, some PWM…
Now I’m comparing hardware specs, and trying to rationalize the inherent price gap between what I can afford and what is available. Those dealers! No wonder so many of our young people have signs of addiction. There’s even an acronym: GAS, which has nothing to do with hydrocarbon fumes… “Gear Acquisition Syndrome”. Seems so harmless, until your basement is filled to overflow, and you’re trying to wedge just one more MIDI connection in there. Imagine the power of your own orchestra, in the privacy of your own home.
I think I should travel for a while. Leave behind the temptations of the “ebony and ivory”. Declare that the only sounds in my life will come from nature.
On the side, I’ve been reading Omorosa. An amalgam of truth and fantasy.
