Given the endless stream of reunions of beloved bygone bands, is it any surprise that similar nostalgia is afoot in recording studios and technology labs? The big news at this year's National Association of Music Merchants event (or NAMM, a trade show dedicated to musical instruments and music technology) was the unexpected return of some of the great synthesizer brands and models of yore. Korg unveiled the remake of the ARP Odyssey, an iconic analog synthesizer from the 1970s. Dave Smith Instruments, which in recent years revived Sequential Circuits' legendary Prophet line under its own brand, announced the new Prophet-6, the first instrument to bear the Sequential Circuits name in 28 years. And Tom Oberheim's Marion Systems gave a sneak peek at the Two Voice Pro, a reissue of Oberheim’s original 1975 model bearing the same name.
These aren't just imitations, either. Korg brought back David Friend, the founder of the '70s firm ARP Instruments, and the lead designer of the original Odyssey, to oversee development of the new instrument. (Even if you don’t think you’ve heard one, you probably have: that’s an Odyssey solo in Elton John's "Rocket Man", for starters. More recently, Todd Terje’s It’s the Arps EP was made with an ARP 2600, the Odyssey’s more sophisticated older sibling.) Dave Smith, whose eponymous Napa company is one of the synthesizer scene's great independent success stories of the past decade, founded Sequential Circuits in the early '70s. The company folded in 1987, its assets sold off to Yamaha, but Sequential’s legacy is untouchable: a Sequential Prophet-5 gave Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" its bassline. (Fun fact: "Sequential Circuits" is also the title of the introductory track on Panda Bear's recent album, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, even though no actual Sequential Circuits gear was used in the making of the album.) In recent years, Dave Smith Instruments revived the iconic Prophet line under its own brand, but the news that the new instrument will once again bear that shiny, champagne-colored Sequential Circuits badge on the faceplate feels more than merely symbolic; it's a nod to the fact that, in many ways, things have come full circle. After years of industry dominance by multinational corporations, it's once again small shops like Smith's that represent the apex of synthesizer craftsmanship.
A cynic might say that this is all just a way of cashing in on legacy brands, much in the same way you might argue that a Jesus and Mary Chain tour, in 2015, is little more than a craven attempt to separate nostalgic Gen Xers from their overcompensated tech money. But while it's tempting to lump the synth revival in the same category as the vinyl-is-back craze, what's happening here isn't entirely about the warm, fuzzy keeping-it-realism (plus material luxe) that has elevated vinyl to the status of fetish object, even though it is often misidentified as such.
A Los Angeles Times report on this year's NAMM, for instance, focused specifically on the analog architecture shared by most of these new, vintage-inspired machines: "Because these early synthesizers employ analog circuits and controls, 'it's an infinite process — a fascinating and endless and marvelous process,' said [synthesizer advocate Malcolm] Cecil [...]. Digital technology made many aspects of making music with synthesizers more convenient but, a growing crowd of analog enthusiasts say, at the expense of the unlimited flexibility of analog instruments." (emphasis mine)
But while most people tend to think that analog circuitry tends to sound warmer and nicer, it really depends upon the listener, and upon the context; there are certain types of sounds that digital synths do better than analog synths, and that includes plenty of "vintage" music. (If Scritti Politti is your primary touchstone, instead of, say, Tangerine Dream, you're going to be reaching for a DX7, and not a Moog.) And, in fact, a lot of the new vintage-inspired machines may use analog oscillators to generate their raw sounds, but they add on a variety of digital processes—wavetables, filters, sequencers, arpeggiators, effects—that analog can't do, or can't do as well. (This Create Digital Music article does a good job of explaining the differences between the analog and digital components in the Prophet line.)
I was struck, in the reports coming out of NAMM, by the number of hardware sequencers coming on the market. A sequencer is a controller for generating and manipulating musical patterns; in contrast to a synthesizer or a sampler, it doesn’t generate sounds on its own (although on-board sequencers are often built into synths and samplers alike). It’s a task that you might think would be best, or at least most cheaply, accomplished by computer software. But it turns out that vintage-inspired hardware units, with their rows of dedicated knobs and trigger pads, offer a kind of immediacy that laptops can’t provide. It seems telling that Arturia, which started out making software emulators of classic analog synthesizers, has moved into actual hardware—DJ Tech Tools called their Beatstep Pro sequencer the "Best Live Performance Innovation" of this year's NAMM—and that the unit includes CV/gate connectivity, a standard that ostensibly should have been supplanted by the arrival of MIDI in the 1980s, but lives on in both vintage machines still in use, like the Roland TR-808, and new devices produced for the exploding modular synthesizer scene.
Once upon a time, such backwards compatibility would have been almost unthinkable. But the Arturia Beatstep Pro seems indicative of a new philosophy in electronic instrument design: futurism doesn’t mean shit, if you can’t also jack into the past.