Hi everyone, Found this old song from the early 80's, and I want to see if the synths can be identified. The singer is "playing" an SH-101 (seems pretty proud of it!) and I can hear a Casio VL-1 rhythm sequence toward the end of the song. The drums sound Roland-esque. Here is the song: http://www.yo...

I've been told that the most common reason for two identical synths sounding different is the electrical outlet they are plugged into. Voltages fluctuate and vary from location to location, and this has an effect on the output of an analog synthesizer. My brother had a band back in the 80's, and I r...

Hi rano, Sorry, I misunderstood what part you meant. I thought you meant the orchestra hits. The underlying pad sounds sort of Juno-esque. It does have an analog quality to it, but I think that this particular sound could also be reproduced with a rompler. This is how I would do it: 1) On the romple...

Back to the question at hand, I think a synth's popularity is the result of a combination of things happening simultaneously. Functional capabilities, uniqueness of sound, era of release, marketing, popularity of users, etc, etc. I think the question should be more like "What made the (insert synth ...

Hi rano, It sounds like the strings on "Vogue" are samples of actual orchestral strings, and are probably being played from a rompler synth. This is actually good news for you, because it means that there is no [i]one[/i] synth that makes this particular sound. This increases your chances of re-crea...

Even though I used it frequently, the synth with the worst interface I ever owned was the Crumar Bit One. It's a great-sounding synth, and can do some good stuff, but the interface was non-intuitive. Aside from pitch bend and modulation, no other parameters could be effectively modified in realtime....

I'd have to agree with matia. The MKS-80 is most likely the synth used for that bassline. Syncing it to a drum machine would have been no problem, as MIDI was available in 1984, although it would have had to be run through an external sequencer in order to get the consistently sharp hits you hear in...

"Hardware's the truth, software's the spoof"