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The 10 greatest synthesizers of all time
The machines that changed music
Scot Solida, Mon 26 Oct 2009, 12:14 pm UTC
7. Korg Wavestation
To understand the pull of the Wavestation, you have to take yourself back to 1990. Analogue was dead and FM was on life-support. Sample-playback instruments had taken hold and the biggest sellers of the day were seen as little more than glorified organs, capable of calling up a reasonably convincing sampled ensemble for the Holiday Inn crowd: "Thank you ladies and gents, I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip your waitresses".
It was into this very environment that Korg dared to release the Wavestation. The product of a US-based team of designers rescued from the now-defunct Sequential Circuits, the Wavestation shared the vector synthesis of Sequential's Prophet-VS.
The onboard samples were of a decidedly electronic nature, with none of the usual drum kits, pianos or nylon guitars (for the moment, anyhow). They could be stacked, layered, filtered and processed by a still-impressive selection of effects. Better still, you could crossfade and blend your sounds with the joystick mounted above the pitch and mod wheels.
That might have been enough to shake synthesists out of their doldrums, but it was the inclusion of wavesequencing that tipped the scales. The Wavestation gave users the ability to string any of the onboard waveforms together in a row with individual control over pitch, volume, and crossfade time.
Using this technology, it was a breeze to fashion sounds that shifted and evolved over time. Complex rhythmic passages could likewise be created. It was, and is, brilliant, though it is seen as being difficult to program. Fortunately, there are software editors available for the thing even to this day, not to mention an utterly convincing virtual incarnation from Korg itself.
6. Yamaha DX7
In this age of retro-fetishism, it can be hard to believe that musicians might once have grown weary of analogue synthesizers. Yet, as the 1980s kicked into gear, that is precisely the mood that had settled into the electronic music industry.
After over a decade of nothin' but analogue, musicians were looking for that Next Big Thing, and a mega-corporation just happened to have been working on exactly that. It was dubbed the DX7 and it shook the entire music world upon its release in 1983.
Offering a then-staggering sixteen voices of polyphony, a full-sized, velocity and aftertouch capable keyboard, the DX7 was different on the outside as well as under the hood. You see, the DX7 was the first mass-produced instrument to make use of FM synthesis, a technique devised by John Chowning at Stanford and licensed by Yamaha.
Unlike the familiar analogue-style FM seen on a few semi-modular instruments, Yamaha's variant of FM was no mere effect; it was the core of the instrument's architecture, and it left some old hands scratching their heads. In fact, the DX7 quickly earned FM synthesis a somewhat undeserved reputation for being difficult to program, giving birth almost single-handedly to the third-party sound design industry in the process.
Truth be told, FM isn't too difficult to fathom; it simply wasn't much fun to patch one parameter at a time and with very little visual feedback. For better or worse, the DX7 also ushered in the era of menu-driven synthesis, thanks to its spartan front panel and diminutive display. Yet those who programmed the thing discovered a wealth of new and exiting timbres.
The DX7 could be cold, clear and crystalline. It was capable of crisp percussive timbres and hard-as-nails basses. The sounds could be quite lively, too, if you were one of the few who bothered to employ the many real-time controllers, including the much-underused breath control input.
Most users, however, contented themselves with the numerous presets. From the now-famous electric pianos to the overused harmonica (!), the DX7 quickly became ubiquitous, selling in numbers that had been heretofore unheard of for a synthesizer. It's easy to slag it off today, but it was a breath of fresh air back in '83, and revitalised (and to an extent commercialised) the synthesizer industry.
NEXT: ARP 2600, PPG Wave 2.2/3
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