When electronic music sounded new, like the future... what went wrong!

[dark water]

KVR SHOCKER!!

Bored middle aged man talks about being done with music.
Instead of making new music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGNojF9qKS0


It's simple: listen to the music you like.
Make the music you enjoy.
Stop over-thinking 'what went wrong'...

[Dasheesh]

you asked!

[SLiC]

KVR SHOCKER!!

Bored middle aged man talks about being done with music.
Instead of making new music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGNojF9qKS0


It's simple: listen to the music you like.
Make the music you enjoy.
Stop over-thinking 'what went wrong'...

I am rarely accused of over thinking, or even thinking

My post was triggered by yet another series of threads (one already locked!) comparing filters and sounds from a 40 year old synths than 99.99% of people at KVR ever even heard live (just us middle aged people!). I just don't get why people spend so much energy copying something so perfectly and not using their obvious talent to make something new that we haven't heard before rather than a more perfect copy. I can and do get bored of technology and I prefer new, original instruments rather than re-hashing the old stuff to look and sound like the old stuff, that my opinion!

FYI Actually I am a guitarist (and occasional drummer if people are really desperate) and still play live (ironically playing 1960s blues and 70's rock!). I am also happy trying new tech, playing with my modular (500+hp- I am never bored!) and over analysing how close one filter sounds to another filter from 40 years ago, I just consider that 'tech', 'not music'. I will never be bored of playing music and am currently spending most of my time learning music theory as I migrating from blues to jazz, its what us old people do.

[dark water]

Fair enough SLiC - it's a reasonable point to make about the (perhaps overly) fascination with old synths and their designs.
To play devil's advocate, I would argue that not only might such a longing for familiar synth sounds etc provide a comfortable springboard initially to then be extended in a new and/or inspiring musical way (at least personally for that musician), but also plenty of other non-synth musicians also seem (imho) to want to refer back quite heavily to the tone, sound or style of their favourite guitarist, drummer or bassist etc for inspiration.

Either way, you can probably guess how many threads have been created at KVR by middle aged blokes over the years commenting upon the lack of novelty with regards to instruments or music!
However, new types of music (and new twists upon familiar instruments or their accessories) appear quite regularly despite these KVR threads

[SLiC]

Fair enough SLiC - it's a reasonable point to make about the (perhaps overly) fascination with old synths and their designs.
To play devil's advocate, I would argue that not only might such a longing for familiar synth sounds etc provide a comfortable springboard initially to then be extended in a new and/or inspiring musical way (at least personally for that musician), but also plenty of other non-synth musicians also seem (imho) to want to refer back quite heavily to the tone, sound or style of their favourite guitarist, drummer or bassist etc for inspiration.

Either way, you can probably guess how many threads have been created at KVR by middle aged blokes over the years commenting upon the lack of novelty with regards to instruments or music!
However, new types of music (and new twists upon familiar instruments or their accessories) appear quite regularly despite these KVR threads

Yup- Guitarist are even worse, we still use valves and if a guitar manufacture even changes the angle of a tuning peg on a Les Paul people will riot! Guitar 'tech' often revolves around a small change to a chamfer or a different wood!

I guess my point (rant) was that the synth world is where I expect to find new, novel, interesting innovation. It is there in hardware and the Eurorack world where you will find lots of complex oscillators and west coast stuff...but almost everything I see coming out and being discussed now is some form of east coast subtractive architecture (normally copied from hardware). As you say, that seems to be where the demand is for whatever reason, and they make what we buy (and I am a hypocrite as I bought Synapse Audio Obsession!)

Other than AAlto and Buchla Easel V (Arturia) I cant think of many West Coast Style VST's- I guess the East Coast won!

[dark water]

If it's any consolation, I'm a drummer who's been unsuccessfully trying to copy the swagger / sound of Reni from the Stone Roses for years

[Cro-magnon]

IDK, I think I have a less cynical view of electronic music than many people my age (early 50s) and, while I agree that it's been a while since I've heard anything that sounds "futuristic" or "new", it seems to come in waves, or nodes, or something and tends to happen at a broad macro scale, rather than at the subgenre scale. 80s new wave and industrial music were big ones IMO. House, techno, and trance were game changers, too. I'm not particularly fond of dubstep as a genre, but I'd say that's the last thing I can think of that sounded "new" to me in the electronic music scene.

Dubstep was just an evolution of Drum'n'Bass if you ask me.D'nB sounded futuristic in mid 90's,yes.

I agree with the rest,nothing sounds new since 2000's.

I imagine the next trend like early moombahton,ultra slow tempo with stupid lyrics on top of that.Ultra boring !

[BONES]

So as yet another emulation of a 35 year old synths drives the KVR forums crazy, I was reminiscing about when electronic music sounded new, like the future...

When was that? I don't recall a time when I thought that about electronic music at all. In the 70s and early 80s it mostly sounded lame and synths only ever interested me when they were combined with guitars. EBM was really the first time I thought electronic music was able to stand on its own.

Now we seem to try so hard to look and sound like the past...

Some people do but the world is full of sad f**ks.

Is there nothing left to do with synthesis other than tiny incremental improvements in copying something that already been done? Analogue, FM, Samples, PM, WT, Granular.

Those are just the tools, you can make whatever you want with them and even if no new synths were ever made, we could all keep pushing the boundaries for decades with what we have today.

Is that it, are we done?

I don't know about you but I've definitely got another album in me. Hopefully more than one.

I mean, which new (unique) analog synth came out in the last 20 years which can really hold a candle in regards of becoming such a classic like the Minimoogs, Oberheims, Prophets, Rolands, whatever.

Pretty much anything that came after those things. None of them can hold a candle to a Roland D50 or a Korg Prophecy, for example. And a softsynth like DUNE can run rings around any of them. Honestly, if someone offered to give me any of those old pieces of krap, even a SEM, I'd tell them to bash it up their arse.

Can you truly write a song, paint a picture, create a poem without thinking of the 'here and now'?

Of course you can. Read The Resurrected Man by Sean Williams or Peter F. Hamilton's latest trilogy.

I tend to agree with that, both my daughters both have much broader taste than I have now!

Do they or do they actually not have any taste at all and will, therefore, listen to anything? That's been my experience - the broader someone's musical "taste', the less important music is to them. Because once you find that thing that really moves you, that's all you ever want to hear.

the software scene seems more conservative and very subtractive (filter) orientated.

I don't see that, certainly no more so than in the hardware world. Go into any music shop and see how many synths on display aren't built around subtractive synthesis. The only one I can think of is Korg's soon to be released FM synth.

Maybe a decade ago, possibly two - many kids knew absolutely nothing of what came before them.

Again, not in my experience. I've noticed the opposite - how many kids over the last 20 years or so like the same music as their parents. To me that's the saddest thing imaginable.

[chk071]

I mean, which new (unique) analog synth came out in the last 20 years which can really hold a candle in regards of becoming such a classic like the Minimoogs, Oberheims, Prophets, Rolands, whatever.

Pretty much anything that came after those things. None of them can hold a candle to a Roland D50 or a Korg Prophecy, for example. And a softsynth like DUNE can run rings around any of them. Honestly, if someone offered to give me any of those old pieces of krap, even a SEM, I'd tell them to bash it up their arse.

Find the mistake.

[excuse me please]

Can't remember. I'm just too old.

[HunterKiller]

So as yet another emulation of a 35 year old synths drives the KVR forums crazy, I was reminiscing about when electronic music sounded new, like the future...

When was that?

Have you been in hibernation for the past 45 years?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGrwfjNU0Tg

[excuse me please]

Cheer up!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h0FAYXFGHfA

[foosnark]

1. In the past, people didn't expect synthesizers in music, and had no idea what they were capable of. Especially once digital synthesis became widespread, we have all gotten used to the idea that any sound is possible.

Wendy Carlos amazed people with an arrangement of very formal music that was composed more than 200 years earlier. But now it requires creative composition as well as sound design to present something new and exciting. In a sense, things have gone back to normal.

2. In the 1950s-1980s, there were coherent, popular visions of the future -- robots and rockets, a life of leisure or infinite exploration. But then those visions started to turn more dystopic and fractured and grungy.

It's not hard to find complaints that there haven't been many huge new ideas in science fiction since cyberpunk, and that everything is just a combination of existing ideas. Again, I think that's almost a return to normal -- you need good characters and plot and craft to tell a good story, not just gee-whiz wonders of technology.

3. When electronic music was exciting and new, it was mostly weird fringe stuff. Most music of the time was stodgy old stuff or safe, saleable commercial pop, with a minority of pop musicians pushing the envelope a bit.

Kind of the same condition as today, isn't it? A lot of pop music and electronic genres, aside from minor trends in composition, sound like they could be from the 90s. But there are people on the fringes doing crazy shit and mostly being dismissed or going unnoticed.

4. I wish people would stop thinking of different kinds of musical instruments as obsolete. We've had a few million years to exhaust the musical potential of the human voice and haven't done it yet. We've had hundreds of years with guitars and people are still doing interesting things with them. So why would a 40 year old synthesizer be obsolete or "krap?" The responsibility for creativity is in the musician, not the machine.

5. With streaming and other easy access to media, people are listening more to the best music of the past few decades, instead of just whatever's in the current top 40. I've seen surveys where 25 year olds rate the 2010s as the worst decade for pop, and prefer the 80s-00s. Surveys about familiarity with hits from various decades show similar results. So yes, people are looking backward, and finding things that are fresh and new to them.

[RugerioDelStereo]

The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were also channeling blues artists from 30 years before. Rock n Roll was declared dead by the mid 70s, then punk happened and played all the 60s garage riffs again with new enthousiasm. You're just an old geezer...

Everything has already been done. Just not by today's kids. Times have changed, archives of music are easily accessible and it is up to people now to take all these influences and styles and make them their own or make 'em sound fresh again.

[melomood]

What went wrong?

You forgot to stay young
Stay young
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