Sonically Charged...

Since every other music blog on the planet is reprinting Sonic Charge’s press materials without even trying the synth (except Peter) I’ll leave the free press to others and just do what I do well: bloviate.

I assume this isn’t the only music industry blog you read, and thus I assume that you already know about Synplant’s existence. What I find intriguing is that I am sadly in the minority as far as people that understood right away what it was. I’ll grant two things that are almost certainly true: first, I suppose it isn’t readily obvious outside of a context, and second, I make user interfaces for a living, for all intents and purposes, so it would theoretically stand to reason that I would be able to figure out an interface better than someone that didn’t do that very thing. (Actually, that latter statement is demonstrably untrue, so we can let it slide for now.)

The reason I bring this up is that I was lately pondering a similar thing. Not what Magnus did exactly, but a different mousetrap to essentially catch the same mouse. And the response to his product makes me a little nervous. I mean, if a synth doesn’t look like this, is it doomed to failure? One could make the argument that after 1970, the Minimoog topology was the most logical way to lay out a synth, or maybe the most accepted. But that doesn’t immediately obviate all other methods of programming, does it?

One could also make the argument that there are way more D-50s in the world than there are Minimoogs, but I counter with the following: nobody that didn’t have an editor/librarian or hardware programmer has ever done more than touch up the factory sounds in a D-50. The JD-800 is, for all intents and purposes, a D-50 with a hardware programmer, and look how much fun that isn’t.

Now, all that nonsense aside, I’ve spent a couple hours with the Synplant, and it really comes down to the same problem all products of this sort have. Ultimately, you can diddle around for hours, but you can’t just think up a sound and program it. Anyone that spends two hours with a Minimoog can make a bass sound, a lead, a brass fart, pretty much anything the Mini is capable of, within a minute or two, which is the beauty of the box in the first place. But with this, I’ll be god damned if I’m gonna say “I need a resonant bass register pad” and whip it up. There is a fair amount of luck involved in getting a sound that is usable, in my opinion, which is interesting, since the synth engine itself is perfectly capable of doing the sound I thought of.

So, it really comes down to the interface, as always. So tell me: could you tell what this did the second you saw it? Or did you think it was a device for making generative music like Wire To The Ear did? Or can you not tell what the fuck is going on at all? And maybe a sub-question: is it useful at all to have what is for all intents and purposes an unprogrammable synth with a sophisticated randomizer?

(And yes, I know individual sounds can be gussied up with the “DNA” thing, but that is just a pretty face on a big slab of D-50-style programming.)