I have come to that conclusion (yet again) after playing around with ‘romplers’ for quite some time now. Now, all of these are not of the same ilk. Most were designed truly as playgrounds for the designer of the synth itself to create presets from. This is a fact. Most folks cannot program things such as a Korg M3 or a Yamaha Motif (or whatever the new one is). These are essentially pop-preset-playback devices. But underneath these monstrosities, there is still a vast auditory playground. And it is a playground I’ve come to love spending time in.
The first aspect of these machines is that I do not think of them as romplers, but rather as wavetable synthesizers, capable devices able to mangle the sounds beyond the boring confines of their preset worlds via the manipulation of the source wavetable material. The sample fodder is fantastic because I have literally hundreds of oscillator choices to play with, unlike most modular systems (save a few rompler Oscillators here and there). And yet, these machines are very modular in that the way the sounds and effects interact with each other can be endless.
In software, these machines have really come to life for me, something that as hardware I found boring. Menu diving to change one parameter killed these things when they were contained in a box. But in software, these devices are quite friendly, understandable, and quite predictable (meaning that recall of the sound is instant). And the sounds can be huge. Devastatingly so. Brutalist.
One downside, of course, is that you cannot make these things look sexy in a video. At least, not in a way that’s meaningful. People want to see a guy fiddling with 200 wires sticking out of a bright box to show, or rather prove, that he’s a capable synth nerd at the helm. So if you are planning on being a Youtube performer and using these things to make those videos of your instruments playing themselves in a room next to a house plant, these will not really do. Not that I don’t like those videos of modular synths playing “bloopy” sounds next to houseplants mind you. It’s just not the same to have a lonely laptop sitting there trying to take the attention away from the plant. The plant wins every time in that sense. But I will have to attempt it. Just to see.
Just when everyone I know in a band has told me to go out and buy a modular synthesizer, I went the other way and got into modular via Reaktor and VSTs. Go figure. I can never follow it seems. This was pretty much the same thing when I first got into my ESQ1 and everyone was buying Roland D50s. I did not care about the fad of it all, but rather what the device could coax out of me in the form of sound and music. And that, in the end, is all that matters. What can I make with it?
And it is with this in mind that I enter into the next year with a whole new subset of ideas of how to make electronic music that’s meaningful to me. I’m going to stick to digital synthesis. I'm going to dive ever deeper into it as I’ve never done before. I’m going to go so deep as to lose myself in a new world, far away from house plants.
