The Intangible Attraction to Vintage Synths
From iconic sounds to synths becoming the stars in their own right
Our curiosity and attraction to vintage synths is a strange old thing, as strange and old as some vintage synths themselves. What makes a slowly decaying piece of hardware that’s well past its prime so desirable? And what gives a bit of old technology a personality?
We’ve all heard phrases like ‘it’s got that intangible something’, ‘there’s a certain quality to the sound’, ‘it sounds alive’, and ‘you can almost feel the electricity running through the circuits’. I’m as guilty as anyone of throwing such phrases around and I’m sure, given a few very expensive sessions, a psychologist could pick them apart to reveal a deeply broken teenagers sole desperately trying to regain its youth.
Apart from nostalgia, there’s something intriguing about something capable of creating sounds that can move us to our very core, a tool used to create art that touches the hearts of millions. And yet, it’s a mass produced piece of electronics that was a technological masterpiece of its time. Surely circuit boards, resistors, capacitors and transistors aren’t capable of invoking emotions?
But it was the very fact that they were built on production lines, a retro futuristic Ford-like vision of the future that gave them an almost mystic quality. It’s technology, but it makes me feel! And because they were built in their thousands they’ve all had a shared experience. Thousands of identical instrument played by musicians across the world through the decades. A Prophet 5 may have first been used by a 1970’s prog rock band, then took residence in a studio in the 1980’s recording new romantics before being sold for almost scrap values to a couple of DJs experimenting with electronica in the 1990’s. Another may have sat in a home studio for a decades before being relegated to the attic. The instrument has become the star; each synth will have had its own journey but they are all associated with all the tracks and all the bands that have ever used them.
The opposite can be said of the sonic character of each, they’re not all the same. Listen carefully and you’ll hear each sounds a little different. Hundreds of aging components decaying at different rates, repaired by different hands, with different parts swapped with new replacements. They’re all individuals. They’re analog, and owners can build a personal relationship with the specific quirks and character of their own synth that software emulations don’t replicate.
This has always come with a price tag. In the early days of polysynths the technical challenges of controlling voices to give identical tuning, envelope times, filter responses along with the size of the components resulted in two aspects of synth design that were probably more a result of financial limitations plus size and weight implications than by design.
Firstly, they are relatively simple machines. All original analog Junos have a single oscillator single envelope, single LFO, and limited to only 6 voices. This creates a very easy to understand structure, something that anyone can understand and become a reasonable competent programmer or at least a tweaker in a short space of time. A consequence of this is that the sounds it can produce are limited. If you’ve a very little knowledge it’s very hard to get a bad sound from a Juno or a Prophet or an Oberheim. They’re almost one huge wooden panelled sweet spot. It’s difficult to get lost in the patch and lose track of the modulation, there’s so little of it. They become inspirational tools, the more you play and tweak, the more great ideas spring to mind. They become an integral part of the creative process.
Secondly, soundwise they are reliant on the tolerances of the discrete components, which 40 years ago were wide enough for a high level of precision in the control of each circuit to be impossible. Individual voices were seldom identical, if ever. This gives a warmth to the sound, those imperceptible differences that maybe our ears can’t hear but our brain interprets as more interesting, more natural, almost alive. Simply put, they sound great, which brings us back to the inspirational experience above.