I’ve opened up the listening room for you all. This is a page I will post all (or most) of the best of my classical synthesizer recordings. At the time of this posting, there are 12 pieces, listed below:

Classical/Romantic/Impressionistic

Fetes from Nocturnes by Dubussy

Mars, the Bringer of War from The Planets by Holst

Holst/deCosta – Mercury, the Winged Messenger from The Planets

Holst – Neptune, the Mystic from The Planets

Eine Kleine Nachtmusique Mvt. 4 by Mozart

Organ Music transcribed for Synthesizers

Marcel Dupré – Prelude No. 3

Prelude, Choral et Fugue by Franck

Baroque/Renaissance

Claude la Coucou by Daquin

Noel-X by Daquin

Misc. (TV Themes, Experiments, etc.)

Danny Elfman – Beetle Juice Main Titles

Keeping Up Appearances Theme Music

Fawlty Towers Theme Music

I will post an update whenever I add a new piece.

Feel free to

SEND ME A REQUEST

(by adding a comment to this post)

for a piece you’ve always wanted to hear performed on synthesizers. I will do my best to accommodate.

VISIT THE LISTENING ROOM

It’s not all that often I run across a live synthesizer performance that warrants note. Here’s one that really deserves attention: Bach prelude in c minor played by Kjell Gierstae on his MiniMoog Yoyager.

From WikiPedia:
The Minimoog Voyager or Voyager is a monophonic analog synthesizer, designed by Robert Moog and released in 2002 by Moog Music. The Voyager was modeled after the classic Minimoog synthesizer that was popular in the 1970s.

Like the original Minimoog, the Voyager has six sound sources. Five of these (three voltage-controlled oscillators with switchable waveforms, a noise generator, and an external line input) pass to a mixer with independent level controls. The mixed output of the sources is then passed through the voltage-controlled filter and a voltage-controlled amplifier, each of which has its own ADSR envelope generator. The voltage-controlled filter can itself be made to oscillate, thus comprising the Voyager’s sixth sound source.

In addition to similar features of the original Minimoog, the Voyager was designed to have a memory bank capable of storing 128 presets, a touch pad modulation control, dedicated LFO, two modulation buses (one controllable via the modulation wheel and the other with a foot pedal), two ADSR envelopes for filter and amplifier control, a pressure-sensitive keyboard, 14 voltage-control inputs, and MIDI input/output.

Unlike the original Minimoog, the Voyager’s modulation buses can be set to affect almost any parameter of the sound, not just the filters. Although the synthesizer features MIDI control and advanced patch storage, all audio paths in the Voyager are analog with the sound originating from any of three oscillators designed for high tuning stability, as the original Minimoog oscillators tended to slightly shift out of tune while playing.

With the Voyager, certain parameters that were fixed on the original Minimoog can be programmed to suit the player’s preference. This includes selection between low-note, high-note or last-note priority. Also, the envelope generators can be set to retrigger with each pressed note or they can be set not to retrigger until all notes are lifted and the next note is played.

Believe it or not, the Commodore 64’s SID chip was my first real synthesizer. An amazing little 4-voice digital synth packed into one amazing chip. Here’s a rendering of Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring on an emulated C-64.

From Wikipedia:
The SID was devised by engineer Robert “Bob” Yannes, who later co-founded the Ensoniq digital synthesizer company. Yannes headed a team that included Yannes, two technicians and a CAD operator running Applicon (now a part of the UGS Corp.), who designed and completed the chip in five months’ time in the latter half of 1981. Yannes was inspired by previous work in the synthesizer industry and was not impressed by the current state of computer sound chips. Instead, he wanted a high-quality instrument chip, which is the reason why the SID has features like the envelope generator, previously not found in home computer sound chips.

The SID chip featured:

• three separately programmable independent audio oscillators (8 octave range, approximately 16 – 4000 Hz)
• four different waveforms per audio oscillator (sawtooth, triangle, pulse, noise)
• one multi mode filter featuring low-pass, high-pass and band-pass outputs with 6 dB/oct (bandpass) or 12 dB/octave (lowpass/highpass) rolloff. The different filter-modes are sometimes combined to produce additional timbres, for instance a notch-reject filter.
• three attack/decay/sustain/release (ADSR) volume controls, one for each audio oscillator.
• three ring modulators.
• oscillator sync for each audio oscillator.
• two 8-bit A/D converters (typically used for game control paddles, but later also used for a mouse)
• external audio input (for sound mixing with external signal sources)
• random number/modulation generator

Interested in playing with the SID for your own recordings? Hop on over to Madame Blavatsy’s and get yourself a SID VSTi plugin for your favorite DAW.

As much as I dislike the use of the prefix “Switched-on” for any new synthesizer recording, I’d like to present this quaint little snippet of Handel’s Water Music played on the Yamaha SY1.

From the same performer, here’s the 4th movement from Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 4.

From WikiPedia:
Johann Sebastian Bach (German pronunciation: [joˈhan] or [ˈjoːhan seˈbastjan ˈbax]) (31 March 1685 [O.S. 21 March] – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and organist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity.[1] Although he introduced no new forms, he enriched the prevailing German style with a robust contrapuntal technique, an unrivalled control of harmonic and motivic organisation in composition for diverse instrumentation, and the adaptation of rhythms and textures from abroad, particularly Italy and France.