Groove out of the box

Andre Korso (DJ Kanyon).


Groove out of the box.
In search of the lost sound of the 90s.


This version of the book should never have been published. I made this translation for my internet acquaintances - for all five of my die-hard fans (lots of laughter), because English is the language of international communication. It is highly doubtful that my friends from Austria, Australia and Japan will suddenly become familiar with all the amazing peculiarities of the Soviet language, just for the sake of reading this small collection of random notes, barely united by a common theme...
So I took on the task of translating.
It was much harder than writing this little book itself; I used machine translation, then cleaned up all the errors, then sent the text back to the text enhancer, then cleaned up the new errors again. Then I had to work with a lot of phrases that sound perfect in my native language but are completely stupid in English. In particular, my culture uses the term IRON to describe a physical (rather than virtual) synthesiser, and the english word HARDWARE doesn't translate into my language at all. I've also left out a lot of expressions that are untranslatable into English, such as the phrase 'ot slova sovsem' - a phrase that is barely understood by native speakers, but is used regularly in conversation (it means that something was completely done for). So it's been a lot of work and I'm sure the result will be disappointing. I even messed up the translation of the English quotes - first they were translated FROM English into Soviet, and then the machine made it even more cryptic, so PLEASE always follow the links provided.

I have never written a book about synthesizers before, and certainly not in English. I have no confidence that the book will appeal to readers even in my own language environment (although the first reviews were very positive and even included financial encouragement) - after all, this is my first and only experience of this kind.

If I were writing a book on philosophy or on love (which I have done more than once), I could take full responsibility for the quality of such a book in advance.. In the case of a book on synthesizers, I can only humbly submit my creation to your judgement, knowing that it is kitsch and not perfect.

I'm sure that many points of this work will be ridiculous, both semantically and linguistically - and with good reason!
There's a lot I don't know, and a lot I'm talking about with a heavy dose of audacity and ignorance that doesn't match my knowledge in the field, and I'm expressing it in someone else's language.

What do you expect? I'm just a guy from the internets.
Have fun!


01. INTRO

The author of this book does not claim to know all or even part of what he is writing about. Everything in this book is just the guesswork and speculation of an ordinary person interested in something - and that 'something' is highly subjective: we are talking about music and sound, after all. Of course, the book does not cover even half of what could have been covered - modular, workstation and granular systems are omitted, many topics are treated superficially, and some have been ignored altogether: all in favour of a small volume and to prevent the already blurred narrative from becoming a mere reflection.
What is said in these pages is, to a certain extent, an assumption on a given subject and may not correspond to certain facts. When the book says 'this or that factory manager did this or that', it does not mean that this was the case. We weren't there at the time. You are free to take this book as fiction and not to take it seriously.


Let's talk about electronic music in general - the kind of music that caresses the ears of music lovers who remember the 90s. Let's take Juno Reactor's well-known composition Control as an example: it has everything we're going to talk about. Powerful kick, acid leads, fat bass, upbeat tempo and, of course, melody. What genre should we put this one in? It's a thankless job to talk about genres on paper. But it is generally referred to as 'techno', 'acid' or simply 'electronic music'.

It peaked - of course! - in the early 90s...
It is worth mentioning that the so-called techno, as it appeared in Detroit, was not particularly 'technological' - it was rather dance music, albeit electronic. Today, when music is called 'Detroit techno', it only remotely resembles what was originally made there (just listen to the classic Rhythim Is Rhythim). Today's techno is a strange symbiot of the German version with American industrial and the British version by Prodigy. But one thing is true - what was born in Detroit has stayed in Detroit. Today, the word 'techno' means something completely different - for better or worse.

This kind of music found its way into the mainstream in a roundabout way. Towards the end of the 90s, techno and "disco music" in general practically disappeared from the social life of society, remaining only as "niche pop culture". And raves and other things that were purely social phenomena - suddenly migrated into the tenth years of the 21st century with a completely different colour and atmosphere... After all, the word 'acid' no longer conjures up images of a Dettroit party in a small club full of real drugs, and the word 'techno' no longer conjures up images of a basement of German Trezor...

So how did it all get a second life, and a brighter one than the first?

It is simple - cinema and video games. Let's not forget that this music really took off after the release of the Mortal Kombat film (even though the games in the series didn't have techno motifs in pure form). After that, video games entered people's existence as a way of life.... and their music still enjoys a certain retro popularity - if we care to remember the chiptune scene, the FM renaissance born of the popularity of old Sega games and so on. Think of the hits of Jesper Kidd or Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima - these people actually made music albums under the guise of games....

But the heyday of music in video games was, of course, the CD era, the late '90s - early 2000s, when the soundtracks to video game hits of the time were glistening with the most elite acid techno that had taken root so well in racing and fighting games...
At the time, the world was experiencing a kind of virtualisation of social things - muzzling was increasingly moving to the format of 'watching boxing on TV and fighting in Mortal Kombat', and deadly street races were being reborn into three-dimensional analogues inside consoles and computers.... The underground clubs and discos were long gone - but the music from it moved into the digital emulation of social life.

The apogee of this sub-genre was, of course, the Need for Speed games.

To quote Wikipedia:

Composers Rom di Prisco, Saki Kaskas, Junkie XL, Lunatic Calm, DJ Icey, Dylem Rimes and others worked on the music for Need for Speed: High Stakes. Some of them have already written soundtracks for previous Need for Speed games. The compositions are in the genres of electronic music, funk and drum 'n' bass.
On 12 April 1999 Need for Speed: High Stakes - The Album was released, containing 14 tracks from the game, as well as Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit.

Having started with NFS, this train didn't think of stopping.
Virtually any fighting or shooting game - not to mention racing ones - had its fair share of electronic hits. It's no secret that 'music for the PS1' has long been an underground genre among connoisseurs, and has its own niche in music history. The same trend continued on PS2. The Japanese, of course, had a huge influence on the genre - their version of electronic music with light funk and city pop motifs, long hidden behind the walls of a semi-closed civilisation, was finally becoming known to everyone.

Music from Einhander, Unreal, Crusader, Tekken, Gran Turismo, Descent and even Spider-Man 2 (for which KMFDM wrote the entire soundtrack) represent the most serious and interesting music. Of course, it has gone down in history as something 'not serious' because games were treated a bit negligently back then (unlike today, when games have billion-dollar budgets). But anyone who ignores music from computer games should not be considered a connoisseur or specialist in electronic music, because the bulk of it has been created within the games industry.

Also, the music of those years - the mid-90s to the mid-2000s - was in many ways superior to the releases outside the game world. That's not surprising. Products designed for release into the wider commercial arena were usually of a higher quality than just 'another album or single'. Even today, if a band or project wants to 'hype up', they will rent out their best songs for promotion somewhere in sports shows, games or, more often than not, films. The same thing happened in the world of electronic music: you could release as many ordinary techno albums as you wanted, but you didn't want to use passable material for a game compilation. And even if a composer worked directly for a game studio (many thanks to the demanding editors at Bandai Namco and other publishers), the approach and standards were just as high. A normal musician, especially a famous one, can produce albums of average quality and rely on old hits; the one contributing to a game or film is obliged to give his or her best - here, now, and to a specific deadline. That's why many game soundtracks are full of hits of the highest quality. The aforementioned Juno Reactor is no exception: where have we heard their best work? On the film's soundtrack, of course.

Until the mid-twenties, game music continued to be heavily electronic, but then was replaced by the rock bands, and then symphonic suites replaced both.

And now the main thing...

When we, the inhabitants of the new era, got our hands on synthesizers, even analogue ones (which became finally financially available at the time), and tried to use them to 'play something in the style of NFS or Juno Reactor', we heard... 'something very different'.
Something was missing.
Everything that can be played today pales in comparison to what was recorded twenty or even thirty years ago.....

What happened...?


2. LOST SOUND.

It's no secret that around the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, the world of electronic musical instruments began to revive interest in analogue technology. In the 90s, "solid state" instruments like the Roland JP ruled the roost; in the 80s, analogue synthesizers were crushed by the iron heel of FM synthesis in the form of the Yamaha DX7; "analogue" was considered an obsolete and niche product - and it was considered as such for quite a long time, practically for decades.... That's a long time for the industry.
And yet, as the twenty-first century dawned, there was a sudden revival of interest in the technology. Why did this happen?

(Let's clarify what we mean by 'solid state'. Here we draw an analogy with the guitar world: there are tube (analogue) amplifiers, there are all-digital amplifiers (in boxes or as VSTs, where the sound is essentially produced by software emulation), and there are those in the middle, i.e. 'transistor' (solid state). We have transposed it to the world of synthesizers to make it easier to understand).

The answer, by the way, is not the nostalgia for analogue synthesizers - however much we might think that to be the most reasonable answer - but the almost complete disappearance of high-level solid state (!) devices during this period.  All the classic synths of the 90s were practically out of production (we'll talk about why later, in a separate section); and it was incredibly difficult to replace them.  After buying a whole bunch of synths from 2017-2020, like Gaia, people started to feel a certain 'hole in the mix' that they couldn't plug.
Classic Grooveboxes and Groove Synthesizers with the obligatory Super Saw were not only an attribute of the "dance genres of the time" (as some try to convince us today), but also a necessary basis for a "tight sound in the mix". The same sound that gave us tracks like Control by Juno Reaktor..... And that sound is gone, because its carriers are no longer available.

This was the hole that analogue synthesizers tried to fill. After all, the basis for the sound of the older models is a technology called 'VA', or Virtual Analogue... Its closest relative, anyway. Unfortunately, it was a half-measure. Unfortunately, no matter how good an analogue synthesizer is, its job is not to replace the JP-8000 or Korg Prophecy - and it was those very JPs and Prophecy that provided the lost backbone of the 'lower tight middle' in the sound.

Of course, musicians tried to recreate this very sound with a combination of digital emulations and analogue systems (for example, a Behringer Odyssey is quite capable of producing an elite 'super saw', and in combination with a digital Juno it can even replicate something of the old school). But all this was complicated and expensive, and above all it prevented the synths themselves from doing what they were designed to do (because, no matter how you look at it, an analogue synth like the Odyssey was designed for completely different tasks). And the prospect of building a whole chain of expensive devices (to replicate a common (!) 90 synth) appeals to very few people - so the 'hole in the mix' (due to the lack of a powerful soild state virtual analogue) remains to this day....


3. MORE ABOUT VIRTUAL ANALOGUE.

The term 'virtual analogue' itself is very vague and imprecise, and can be understood in very different ways.
This is typical of an industry that 'dances around architecture' - after all, music, sound and art in general is the triumph of personal perception over reality. As are most of the technical terms used in this industry (especially slogans from advertising brochures).

Old-school VA is based on specialised parts - mostly DSP chips, "tailored" to the synth, if not at the factory, then at the level of component selection.
The sound is born from these DSPs, and only they can give you that 'density' (which is why we don't hear the Prophecy sound anymore, because the DSPs made for the Prophecy are most likely gone or obsolete).

Modern VA sound is different because the technology used under the term has moved from conventional DSP chips to the ARM\Raspberry Pi (basically a computer chip with a semblance of a VST on board).
Put simply, what we now think of as virtual analogue is generated by the software on the chip, and the hardware simply provides the 'horsepower'. We'll call it 'Raspberry' sounding.

In fact, the battle between the 'digital' movement and the 'OG' sound is a very old one.
It started back in the days of the Kronos - which was basically a powerful computer - and both branches developed in parallel. The first - oldschool - branch suffered greatly from the natural scarcity of parts, while the second continued to develop.

At the end of October 2024 that Korg released the Multi/Poly synthesiser.
Its introduction was loud enough:
"Developed at KORG R&D in California, the Multi/Poly is inspired by the legendary KORG Mono/Poly. The new multi/poly is a brand new synthesiser designed to be the ultimate VA synthesiser. It features a powerful sound engine that mimics the feel and sound of analogue to a level of detail unparalleled in digital or virtual synths.

This seems to be a cause for celebration!The return of the virtual analogue! .....
Not quite.
After listening to this synthesiser, many people 'smelled something' and started to specify in the comments what kind of 'virtual analogue' is inside the new device.....
You could already guess that the so-called VA here has nothing in common with the 'OG' sound of the past.
It quickly turned out that .... inside the box was the Raspberry Pi CM4, the industrial version of the Raspberry Pi. It's a quad-core ARM chip, similar to the ones Eventide uses in its H9000.

The synthesiser itself was made by Korg's American division by people who specialise in 'computer' music technology, with Wavestate, Modwave, Kronos and so on under their belts. And, of course, these developers believe that a synthesiser is first and foremost a computer (and not a device for creating sound with chips carefully selected for the certain instrument - there's a big difference). And - probably - the American department thought that VA on RPI was something amazing...., but unfortunately the sound of 'raspberry chip' was immediately recognised even by ordinary people in numerous comments..... And they recognised it without much enthusiasm. The sound of 'Raspberry' is too thin and flat to be mistaken for 'old school'.

Of course, it's not that the Korg developers in California make bad synthesizers. Lots of people like their models, and lots of people buy them - even for thousands of dollars. The main message of this section is that the so-called digital sound is quite different from the OG sound, even after thirty years and even if they use the same term.

All in all, the ‘stigma of sound without a tight lower middle’ is still with us and still easy to recognize by even the most casual ear.


4. MORE ABOUT DSP

In fact, it is not the various 'Moogs' and Oberheims and their ilk (to which the modern members of the sect of Analogue Witnesses sing dithyrambic praises) that are the rarity, but the so-called 'VA's' of the 90's and 00's.
We are not saying that analogue (or digital) sound is bad - as we said above, it cannot do double work because it was not designed to do so... It is probably not worth looking at analogue technology as a holy grail that can serve as a panacea for all the ills of modern sound.

What was the secret of these synthesizers?
Nothing less than a DSP processor.

What is a Digital Signal Processor (DSP)? Generally speaking, it is a specialised microprocessor designed to process digitised signals (usually in real time). Basically, these are specialised chips that only work with audio signals, and these chips do not have to deal with what computer CPUs do (i.e. processing signals for operating systems), which makes them more efficient - because they perform a  direct task.
Of course, they are most often used for ordinary audio things: amplification, effects, etc.; in external audio cards or guitar effects processors. But their use in synthesizers is a separate topic. Which we will try to cover now.

But what do effects and processors have to do with sound synthesis?
It's not even about 'pure synthesis' - it's about all the things that are usually ignored.
It's a matter of working competently with the board and the transistors, choosing the right ones and, of course, the right combination of DSPs. All this is easy to observe in the guitar world, for example. Everyone can buy stock a Marshall valve amp, but with the help of a combination of pedals, the sound changes dramatically. This is thanks to the right combination of effects, in the right order and according to the guitarist's sound and musical taste. What's more, If we look at a guitar 'pedalboard' from the right angle, we will see that it is a DSP chip, only not in miniature, but on a larger scale...

It is this micro-pedalboard DSP that is the 'individually coloured part of the sound'. Of course, the original chips or tubes at the base (and nothing but) of the sound. But one doesn't work without the other (a pedalboard plugged into a cheap digital amp will immediately lose all the beauty of the sound), but the individuality of the sound comes from the many DSP signals mixed together.

To understand this better, we can carry out a simple experiment: the reader can understand a lot by picking up a Volca Keys device. On this synthesiser, bypassing all delays and LFOs, you can switch on the Fifth mode and ... just turn up the detune knob. By simply detuning all three signals at the same time, you get the sound of a classic Super Saw! One move and the sound is completely different. Without any complicated circuitry or combinations - by skewing the normal pitch by 2-5 percent...
And this is a simple 15x10 cm analogue board.
There are many more options and variations of this type on DSP chips.

You may find that most classical sounds are a combination of effects (reverb, compressor, distortion, detuning, etc.). Each of you can check this by getting hold of the simplest and cheapest equipment. For example, an ordinary analogue signal from a Crave synthesiser, passed through the simplest digital effects of a cheap ZoomG1 pedal, changes beyond recognition.
It is, however, visible to the eye (a person visually observes how a cable goes into the right box and comes out through another one). When this scheme of cables and boxes is hidden from the human eye and placed on a chip, and the settings are stored in its memory as different sound presets, there is a sense of 'technological wonder'.

Of course, these effects should not be too powerful: reverbs, compressors, HPS and overdrives and their companions should only deliver about 5-7 per cent of their full capabilities, and the result of their work will only be heard in the sum. On serious synths, these effect chains can consist of dozens or even hundreds of links, and the waveform fed into the DSP effector remains unchanged, whether it's a 'saw', 'square', 'triangle' or anything else. All of this is ‘algorithmised using DSP’, if we may say so, after which combinations of soundwave-based effects are fed to buttons called ‘preset change’.

The above is the simplest explanation. In reality, things are a bit more complicated, because almost every DSP of this kind contains developments by the manufacturer that nobody wants to reveal.Of course, there is no such thing as "secret technology not available to others" - just a "personal recipe based on publicly available ingredients" - but the schematics of such devices are nowhere to be found (e.g. BMC chips from Roland, etc.). Of course there are other factors involved in the 'recipe' of a unique sound - down to the presence of certain ores in the composition of the semiconductors supplied... But the basics of DSP operation should now be much clearer to the reader.


5. CAN THE CLASSICS BE RECREATED?

Having finished the technical explanations, let's return to the synthesizers of the "golden years" as such. Is it possible to recreate their sound today, with the rapid development of computer technology?
Well... you have to realise that the industry followed the Pied Piper of the computer world, but ended up in a dead end. Despite the fact that systems based on DSP are formally obsolete, their emulation is too demanding on the system (as well as now it is almost impossible to correctly and fully emulate game consoles from 2006 on computers from 2024!) To fully recreate the polyphony and each chip of an old synthesiser, you need a computer with a processor no weaker than a basic i9 (otherwise the sound will 'crunch').

For example, serious work with the emulation of Roland's basic synthesizers on the Zen plug-in from Roland itself barely works on i5 series PCs, and only starts to 'breathe' more or less on i7. The cost of a serious PC on i7 is comparable to the cost of a vintage JP8080, which makes such emulation almost unnecessary.

What about 'hardware' solutions that can be solved with the help of factory screwdrivers and soldering irons? Unfortunately, the 'iron' resurrection of such technology requires an even more complex element - chips and parts that are simply not produced today.

It's no secret that even Roland doesn't have access to old chips and even the simplest resistors that were in the first Jupiters and even the latest SH-201. And it's not just Roland. Access Virus synthesizers used Motorola DSP chipsets, with the Motorola 56k DSP at their core, but the days of this platform were numbered, as these chips have a certain support period (about 15 years); nowadays the architecture of these chips has to be ported to standard ARM, but this seems to be incredibly difficult.
Simply put, if some chips are not available from the factory, they are not available from the synthesiser designer.

This situation is not uncommon in the world of digital technology. But if the differences in chip design are practically insignificant in the field of TV and radio receivers and ordinary household appliances, things are very different in the field of sound. The absence of a single chip can put an end to a whole series; the classic sounds of the Jupiter, JP and SH series, the Electribe MX Grooveboxes and others are forever in the past just because of the lack of necessary parts. And since there are many such elements in electronic musical devices (and they are all closely interdependent), it becomes impossible to recreate a complex symbiotic relationship between these parts and external conditions.

Roland were the first to recognise this problem - from their own bitter experience! - and now makes chips on its own equipment. Those who relied on external factories fell into a trap set by Mother Nature herself: if there is no certain ore for a certain alloy in the mountains, there will be no microprocessor...  It's the same with some acoustic instruments - some woods, like African mahogany, can become too rare....Guitarists know this first hand.

Let us go back to where we started: the development of today's technologies does not allow us to
a) physically recreate old instruments (for example, it is impossible to recreate a 19th century violin because the type of wood used to make it is no longer available in nature).
b) to adequately reproduce some musical instruments of the past because of the excessive difficulty of emulation.

In fact, the makers of the time had at their disposal the rarest materials, the cost of which, if they were on the market today, would reach exorbitant sums; they used them without further consideration and, without realising it, missed out on the technological miracle.

These old - but by no means obsolete - electronic musical instruments are a kind of... Stradivarius violins! Like classical acoustic instruments, they are steadily increasing in value on the second hand market as owners realise what they own - a rarity that is not so much cultural as .... geological.

So we have a situation that cannot be solved at the moment. No matter how good or expensive today's synths are, be it PolyBrute, 3rdWave or whatever, they are far from being be all end all  - and no matter how trendy and popular the Electron series of groove boxes are, none of them can even produce the 'fat kick sound' of the Electribe EMX.


6. IS THERE A WAY OUT?

Most likely, the way to get out of this technological deadlock is through a dense forest of mundane things - developing new ores, building factories, etc. Most likely, some Motorola or Texas Instruments are quite capable of creating something new - which may later become a classic - but, apparently, music companies have left this path. And the only ones who are now ‘digging’ in the right direction are... are Roland. Of course, the process is ‘one step forward, two steps back’ - but at least it is moving.
To explain.
As we've already established, Roland has its own factory that makes its own chips. These are some BMC (Behaviour Modeling Core) chips, consisting of several (!) DSPs and CPUs. Jun-ichi Miki (CEO of Roland Corporation) himself spoke about them with great pride.
‘Roland's patented BMC chip contains a large number of DSP blocks and CPU cores, as well as hardware implemented logic - incredible power!’ - he proudly proclaimed.
And that same ZEN-Core is ‘a synthesiser engine powered by the immense power of the BMC.’
The Phantoms themselves have several (!) of these chips on board (which themselves, in turn, consist of many blocks), and that's why ZEN-Core sounds great on them, while on other models, where BMC chips are very few (or none at all - it's quite possible, see the PC plug-in) - very, very mediocre.

These new chips replaced old ESC ones (or ROLAND R8A02021ABG ( Renesas R8A Series SuperH SoC) and ROLAND ESC2 5100015275.
https://forums.rolandclan.com/viewtopic.php?t=56664

Other proof links:
https://rolandcorp.com.au/blog/fantom-the-ultimate-guide
https://www.roland.com/ru/promos/jupiter-x_story/

Of course, the cost of Fantom-series workstations is close to the prices of old-school synthesizers - and that's probably why they are called Fantoms (Ghosts)...? Because they are painfully reminiscent of the ghosts of the past....


7. GHOST STORY.

The history of the Fantom is rather complicated.

Roland doesn't even acknowledge the existence of early Fantom models (before 2004) on official website - see https://www.roland.com/global/company/history/ - but there were two. The original came out in 2001, the improved S version - in 2003. The Fantom X, acknowledged by Roland itself, was released in 2004. And there was also the FA76 (the confusion with the Fa and Fantom series will haunt the company to this day).

The first series of Fantoms were really something like Korg's Triton, the engine was the XV-5080 (sampler-roller). There were several of them: G series, X series, S series (and of course the confusion with FA continued).
In 2004 it was announced that "the new series of Roland Fantom X workstations is based on a new generation processor developed by the engineers of Roland Corp. It is the most powerful chip ever created in Roland's history".  What kind of processor? - unclear, as well as the engine - is it the old XV or the already new Super Natural?

The second generation of Fantoms already included the Super Natural engine (see the release of the Fantom G in 2008). It's also hard to say what kind of DSPs were in the Fantoms back then (we've already know about the modern ones).

In 2014, the Fantom that made the series legendary - the FA-08 - was released. And in describing it and its hidden secret, we quote: "The built-in sounds of the FA series music workstations include the SuperNATURAL synthesiser timbres and the XV-5080 INTEGRA-7 PCM sound module". This meant that the second generation of Fantoms included both the ageing XV and the trendy Super Natural (all of which were also sold as separate Integra modules).

Other models released after that (from 2019) already included the Zen engine in addition to the rest. This 'three-in-one' at a price of 'one synth for the price of three'.

The new 2024 Fantoms includes a fourth engine (ACB technology). This same ACB was in such demand following the success of the miniature AIRA and Boutiq series that it had to be added to the flagship, which for some reason had previously shunned its 'poor cousin'.

Let's talk about that 'poor relative' next.


8. ACB TECHNOLOGY.

No matter how much the head of Roland said that it was not worth chasing ghosts, it had to be done, and in the most direct way. Roland - metaphorically speaking - 'went to bow' to those engineers who had been involved in the development of the good old Jupiters, 606s and so on and so forth. Just to create the ACB technology with the help of these "ghosts". Quote:
"Throughout the development of ACB, Roland worked with the original engineers"

New TR-06 was created with the creator of the original TR-606, for example.

The remake of the 909 was made by the same engineer who worked on the original 909, Atsui Hoshiai.
https://articles.roland.com/atsushi-hoshiai-tr-909/

And 'old school' help was needed. In particular, the 'low-boost' Juno 106 was so difficult to understand that the developers explicitly stated their inability to grasp the complexity of previous developments (!) - 
Work on the ACB continued for some time. Firstly, ACB was CPU-hungry.
To quote: "ACB focuses on simulating the analogue circuitry found in vintage Roland synthesizers, and because of the intense computing power it requires, it is best suited for single monophonic or polyphonic sounds and simple layers". These are Junichi Miki's own words.
https://www.roland.com/us/promos/jupiter-x_story/

Secondly, first big ACB synthesizer like System 1 and System 8 was not a success... And mostly because of the price - $1499 in 2016 was a lot and one could buy analog synthesizer for that amount of money, not just digital recreation of one). System-8 doesn't even have a Wikipedia page - this is how low profile it was.

But technology had come a long way. By 2023, the ACB system could easily fit into small boxes (T-8, J-6 and S-1), which Roland called nothing less than a technical breakthrough - and the sound remained the same (unlike, for example, the failed - from our point of view! - Zencore, which didn't sound good anywhere but Fantom). It ended with the ACB technology being transferred to Roland's flagship, the aforementioned Fantom. I.e. even where the Zen-Core had maximum performance and seemed to need no improvement, the ACB engine proved itself one hundred percent and turned out to be necessary.
It was even given a name... "FANTOM EX and ACB: Making the Impossible Possible".

And there is nothing surprising about this. Everything new is the well-forgotten old; and when that new is made directly with the masters of the past, the results are not slow to show. Fantom, thanks to the infusion of ACB technology, has absorbed the best of the new (ZenCore), the recently forgotten (Super Natural) and the vintage resurrected in the form of ACB.

In 2023, the same 'mini' series on ACB showed the full power of the technology, creating a wonderful drum machine T-8 in miniature format (adding a bass synthesiser in the process!); and the equally miniature S-1 and J-6 proved once again that ACB technology is more alive than ever. It has survived childhood illnesses, all attempts to make it a plug-in or a plug-out, and has finally come into its own - and received the recognition it deserves.


9. JUNICHI MIKI AND THE ROLAND 'S LAST FAILURE.

The main and most important advantage of the Fantoms over the rest of the workstations is the fact that Roland has never been afraid to put overtly electronic sounds into their instruments - while Korg and Yamaha always tried to present their workstations as high-end pianos. Looking at the Big Three, it's easy to see that the Phantom is the one most suited to electronic music. Another thing is that the target audience for any workstation is far removed from techno, dance and similar genres (what do pianists who want a "hammer keyboard" and techno party music have in common?) But in recent years, Roland has been working hard to remove this stigma by making new versions of their products, and even their flagships, cheaper. Let's see if they succeed - because there's no hope for other manufacturers at the moment.
In fact, Roland is fighting the "lack of the right alloys in nature" problem alone, and they're not doing well - not because they're doing anything wrong, but because the Japanese company is fighting this problem on its own.
And by the way, they don't have much support in this fight. Junichi Miki, the president of Roland, did a lot, if not everything, in his time to restore the company - and the whole industry - to its former authority. But he didn't get any support from the so-called "community".

In 2013 Roland went through a difficult time: Ikaturo Kakehashi, the founder of the company, retired, and his place was taken by Junichi Miki and other people in 2014 (it was even called a management buyout).
And in 2015 Roland released two models of analog-digital synthesizers designed to show a new direction for the company: JDXi and JDXA. Let's start with the first one.

The JD-Xi was the best of both worlds: synthesiser and groovebox. It was a small synthesizer with mini-keys that had a set of ACB-based percussion sounds on board, along with a handy TR step sequencer, DSP with Super Natural engine support (apparently a slightly stripped-down version of the flagship series) and even an analogue (!) mono track with a sub-oscillator.
About the latter, a quote from Roland themselves:
"An analogue DCO oscillator (plus Sub Osc), an analogue TVF filter (LPF) and an analogue TVA amplifier (similar structure as Juno-60, 106, Alpha Juno/JX-3P/JX-8P/JX-10), while the envelopes and LFOs are digital".
All this was not only a synth, but also a four track sequencer, as a groovebox should be, with an arpeggiator and a set of effects. And all this for a mere $500 (prices ranged from $400 to $600, depending on date, region and retailer). It's hard to believe, but it's true.
However, the gravity of the situation was different. Despite the fact that the synthesizer was sold in America, Europe and Asia without any surcharges "for a fashionable brand", it still... failed miserably.
Surprisingly, it wasn't Roland's fault.

You can even find presentations and interviews in which CEO D. Miki himself presents it as a new philosophy and vision of the company. 

”At the beginning of the presentation, Mr Junichi Miki, President and CEO, took the stage and listed it as the company's new philosophy "Unleash", which means "break the shackles".
The JD-Xi would NEVER have been made IF IT HAD BEEN ROLAND. It's the first analogue synthesizer Roland has made in about 30 years, a product that really disrupted the company's usual ways. Since Junichi Miki, CEO, took over, we have been actively doing things we couldn't do before. The JD-Xi development project began with the idea of making a small (but feature-rich) synthesizer acceptable to young musicians.  The new designers are different from those who worked on JUNO and JUPITER. It's a relatively young design team, and some of the staff are young people in their early twenties. However, we are proud that the JD-Xi has inherited the Roland synthesizer sound of yesteryear”.
https://icon.jp/archives/9758
(crooked machine translation from Japanese)

But...
People complained about the weak keyboard, about the mono-analogue, about everything else - in general, they found every reason not to buy it...
But why?
It's simple... By that time, the landscape of the music market had changed catastrophically. All-in-one instruments were no longer needed, and musicians themselves were slowly turning into typical modern "youtube knob twisters", for whom the number of encoders on the instrument was the main and only requirement, and the musical genres they seemed to appreciate were drone, ambient and "experimental noise".
It turned out that this audience would rather collect a complete Volca-series kit with all sorts of coloured wires and power cords, and pay three times as much money for it, than get a handy unit that was in many ways superior to that very Volca-set.
Tatsuya Takashi of Korg, being a "knob-twister" himself (you can be sure of it by watching his instrument presentations), embodied in the Volca series a collective image of the synth market users of that time. As a result, ridiculous things like the Volca Kick and Volca Bass are very popular, and the JD-Xi, which has the same "kick" but much better, and the same analogue bass, is almost forgotten. At the same time, the MicroKorg was being sold, with only 4 (!) voices of polyphony on the same mini-keys and no analogue at a higher price...
The market was no longer the same (more on this later): an incredible number of home users with an irresistible desire to play five hours drone ambient did their job. These people later started collecting Euro rack sets...

Polyphonic hybrid analogue synthesiser JDXA, released under the direction of the same Junichi Miki, failed just as loudly (or rather, quietly and unnoticed).
Miki personally (!) presented this synthesizer (https://youtu.be/pN6ZCv9T5ZU) and made a bold move: it was not only a polyphonic analogue synthesizer, but also a digital synthesizer in one case.
The synthesiser could combine a digital engine with analogue polyphony, giving almost limitless possibilities for the "sound design" so loved by the Internet public - but nothing worked.

Since then, Roland has forgotten about making anything analogue and has only politely bowed to requests to "release something like this". Can you blame the company for that? I think not. Yes, they made a mistake with a weak keyboard and overall design - but these are not sufficient arguments for oblivion. Other companies have done worse.

Apparently the JD-Xi was made at a loss as the love child of Roland engineers, and Jinichi Miki was counting on success (which should have paid off in the end). When it didn't, all future plans were changed.
And when Roland itself changed its plans, the future of the whole industry changed.

The public openly sabotaged all the things they supposedly wanted (Roland analogue synths, new groove boxes, hybrid sound design and affordable prices). Jinichi Miki never seems to have recovered from this blow. He did what he could and had to do: and his ideas seemed to coincide with the demands of the "loyal fanbase". They asked for all of the above, but only on paper - as is often the case with the online community, whose words and indignation are usually not backed up by deeds - and so Roland's last attempt to bring analogue sound back into the mainstream was destroyed.

So if anyone is to blame for the disappearance of "analogue sound from Roland", it's the users of Roland products themselves...

But it was not all that simple. In fact, Roland's failure was aided by their eternal competitor Korg, who released their own - the same four-voice - Minilogue for a measly 500 dollars. The situation was as follows: for the $2500 Roland was asking, you could buy a Minilogue with the same four voices plus... any digital synthesizer (including Roland's "Systems", etc.); or you could buy JDXi as a module with digital sounds and add the analogue poly from Minilogue.
At the same time, JDXA was caught in another price trap - by their own Fantoms. That's right: their own Fantom series of synthesizers let the company down in the sense that it didn't cost much more than the JDXA and, although it didn't have an analogue circuit, it was a full-fledged workstation and contained all the best that Roland could give in "digital" realm. So people either bought cheaper machines from Korg and others, or paid a little bit more and purchase flagship machines.

Unfortunately, at a price of $2500, the JDXA didn't stand a chance. Had it been priced at around $1500, it would have been a success. But only in the eyes of the public - for the company, of course, it would have meant even more colossal losses than the usual failure of the series.
As miraculous as the “return of analog synthesis from Roland themselves” seemed in those years, the financial side of things proved to be too harsh. It turned out that no fanaticism could resist the opportunity to save a thousand dollars and more.... In the end, the price tag of the XA model turned out to be uncomfortable for both buyers and developers.

From this point on, however, we enter the "dark ages".
The ones with endless plug-ins, a hundreds of"volka-kicks" and five hour ambient videos on YouTube. We, historians of the sound, still find it hard to look at this tragedy of truly Homeric proportions.

But enough of modernity and the recent past. We have already devoted too many pages to it - and we started with the history of the classic sound of the 90s. Isn't it time to talk about that period?

One of the main players in the synthesizer-groovebox scene is, of course, Korg.
They've created many classic instruments whose names are forever etched in the history of the music industry. And of course they're largely responsible for that "tight middle".


10. KORG'S GROOVEBOXES AND SYNTHESIZERS.

Korg and their synthesizers and grooveboxes of the golden years is a story in itself. And it doesn't start in Japan at all, and the main character in it is an American named Stephen Kay.
This citizen developed a certain system with patented (and mostly secret) algorithms - and this system was in development for seven long years. The Korg company, which was not particularly prosperous at the time, licensed these algorithms from Stephen and combined them with their own Triton synthesizers (which were quite mediocre, by the way, considering their cost) - and called it KARMA. It stood for Kay Algorhitmic Real Time Music Architechture.

Here is its description from the wonderful site muzoborudovanie: "KARMA is a kind of MIDI processor, capable of changing and creating MIDI data in real time depending on the incoming information. It controls about 400 musical elements (harmony, frets, tempo, rhythm, phrasing, timbre, panorama, effects, pitch, volume, dynamics, duration, MIDI controllers, chords, etc.). In practice, this means that complex melodic phrases and rhythmic patterns are automatically created and sound changes are made based on incoming notes and controllers".

However, something happened behind the scenes and Kay went to Yamaha (long-time rivals and friends of Korg) - but everything was done at the software level.
All this can be implemented in the Yamaha MOTIF, but the procedure is not the easiest.

So it was that this very Karma appeared not only in the synthesiser of the same name, but also in other models - and above all in the flagship of the mid-twenties, the Oasis.
When it came out, it included a second, final version of the same Karma (which we'll forget for now, because it's not the point - Karma was just the spark that started the fire), other engines and, of course, the most powerful DSPs. The Oasis was a wonder of its time, and it cost an absolute fortune - about eight thousand dollars (in today's money that's well over ten).

But that is only part of the story.

The father of the classic Korg sound of the time is the small three-octave Korg Prophecy model, released in the graying year of '95.

It was one of the first DSP-powered synthesizers (before that, it was mostly sampled and analog, if not romplers). You may ask - but why are we jumping from decade to decade? The answer is simple - at the moment of  Prophecy release, Oasys was just a project that could not get out of the laboratory walls of the company, and it was released as a retail model many years later, already in the middle of 2000's.

So, these very DSPs of “Prophecy” were accompanied by their own system (engine) - called MOSS (Multi-Oscillator Synthesis System). And this very MOSS  is a descendant of the yet-to-be-released Oasis. This kind of time paradox - Oasis (with Karma, Moss and everything else) as a model for the market will appear only in ten years time, and models based on its engine were released... ten years before.
By the way, another engine called MMT was born on the basis of the not yet released Oasis (more about it later).

So, the not yet released flagship was already leading a fleet of messengers carrying the future gospel about the coming of a certain digital Messiah. Let's talk about them.

So, our simplified timeline (we don't touch all kinds of Tritons and Korg EXB-MOSSes).

*Stephen Kay and his algorithms worked on in various old Korg models.
*The Oasis project is born from a symbiosis of Kay's ideas and a strange technology called "Moss".
*The Korg Prophecy synthesiser is released on the same MOSS.
*Korg Z1 (polyphonic MOSS) (1997)
*Finally, the Korg Karma itself (2001)
*Oasis' long-time mastodon enters the scene (2005)
*The Korg Radias on the MMT (Multiple Modelling Technology) system and its junior version R3.

(The most interesting thing aboutMOSS is that this engine is not new, and again leads us down winding paths to .... you won't believe it - Yamaha. The Korg EXB-MOSS manual states in black and white that the "MOSS engine" uses a certain Sondius-XG technology, patented by Yamaha, of course).

1995. KORG PROPHECY.
We're not going to talk about how great it sounds - instead of dancing about its architecture, we'll just say that its arrival gave birth to that recognisably hard, yet rich (and soft at the same time) sound.
Yes, it was a small three-octave synthesiser with no polyphony - but it was used exclusively for soloing and creating bass lines as the times demanded. And it was used by very serious bands: Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, The Chemical Brothers, Orbital and, of course, Prodigy (The Fat of the Land on every track).
It is written in the manual that this synth uses the latest and greatest DSP. What is most interesting here is how the effects give a new sound, quote: "the Profecy uses a DSP chip that was
previously used EXCLUSIVELY FOR WORKING WITH EFFECTS". https://www.korg.com/us/products/software/kc_prophecy/

(If you'll recall, we talked about this not too long ago in the thread above!)

People expected a continuation of the "rave theme" with polyphony, but what came out was... Korg Z-1, in the most ordinary case, with the most ordinary "synth" design ("Prophecy" was just such a unique-looking, modern device)... and with the addition of violins, pianos and everything else, where all the "rave power" was buried deep inside a hundred or two presets and settings. The price went up to over two thousand dollars. And the sound itself, with all the power of polyphony and a great variety of functions, has dropped a lot (as, for example, the Minilogue XD models have dropped compared to the originals).... Perhaps it was the limitation of voices that allowed the engine to "go wild", because it is well known that the polyphonic sound of a synthesizer is far from being "a layer of six mono voices of the same synthesizer" (just try to make a polychain model of the Roland 303 and listen to what you get).

By the way, we know exactly what chip was in the Prophecy\Z1 - the Texas Instruments TMS57002 (single-chip DSP with 32-bit RISC architecture). Surprisingly, these chips are still in production, but it is possible that they are not of the same quality as Texas Instruments was for a long time.

2001. KARMA.
The Korg Karma synthesiser itself was released in 2001 on the basis of old Korg Tritons (using the "HI (Hyper Integrated) Synthesis" technology - in which there was the possibility of expansion with MOSS add-on cards and... quietly failed.
(Karma's presentation on YouTube https://youtu.be/bvvq4kbdfLA)

2005. OASIS.
Oasis (Open Architecture SYnthesis System) was good, but it cost too much. In fact, it was a very powerful computer based on a custom Linux build with a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 processor (and a 10" touch screen). It looks naive now - at the time it was the state of the art. But due to the weight of the aforementioned price, the synthesiser failed to take off and was soon forgotten.

This is basically where the story of MOSS (and Karma) ends. The Oasis, having become a old story, is only important to us because, together with the Karma, it gave birth to the very technologies on which the real story - for us - (and not the one postulated in the press) of Korg's golden years is based.

RADIAS, ELECTRIBE and MMT. 2006.
As we know, another engine, MMT, was already maturing in the womb of the future Oasis. On its basis, the original MicroKorg was created (in 2002, but not yet as legendary as it is today), which, due to its availability and compactness, became the "road" and the first real home synthesizer.

At that time (2004) another Electribe was released, the EMX. It's hard to describe the sound of this machine - the most powerful techno kicks, rich basses, "fat leads" .... All this was adorned with a real tube, the kind found in guitar amplifiers (by the way, at that time Korg was trying to enter the guitar world under the ToneWorks label). Together with analogue vacuum compressio, the MMT engine blossomed and showed its absolute maximum.
Everything that came before and after pales in comparison. Yes, MMT is not the best technology, and it is inferior to the MOSS and KARMA models, but in a situation where it is not necessary to have 20 voice polyphony and other six-octave complexities, all the best qualities of the technology merge together.

Then MMT was put on the base of serious hardware, the most powerful Korg Radias (in the form of a module with a detachable keyboard) was born. This futuristic monster had two chips from Texas Instruments called TMS320VC5502, which were said to be able to do some homeric calculations of algorithms/data.
Even the press  was buzzing about the Korg/TI deal.

However, the price let them down again - apparently they even made it at a loss (because it cost no more than the Z-1), and not many people bought it anyway. That's why Korg was forced to release cheaper and simpler models with less features (Korg R3).

In 2013, when MMT technology was born, one of the best synthesizers in history was released under the ridiculous name of King Korg (2013), which included both MMT (its modern version called XMT) and tube compression. It's hard to talk about what kind of sound this machine produces - it's a unique thing, there's practically nothing like it. Nowadays, to find "tube synthesizers" is something very niche and almost impossible to find... Yes, the revival of tube technology (which was almost forgotten by then) warmed not only the sound, but also the soul of the end user.

Unfortunately, King Korg did not stay in the company's favour for long (along with Electribe), and as soon as Korg finished its adventure in guitar world, the story of tube devices ended (only once repeated with a farewell in the form of the Volca NuBass).

So all the children of Oasis sailed off into the sunset, resting in the hands of collectors and half-abandoned, dusty studios. Korg themselves were busy with digital handicrafts, models of the Volca series, the Minilogue and replaced the Electribe and King Korg with remake models that at best deserve a sneer and at worst deserve the title "the last nail in the coffin".

But who knows? Once upon a time, out of nowhere, unexpectedly, we got Prophecy, EMX and King Korg - because somewhere in the bowels of the labs, someone was developing something unusual, but never managed to finish their project... and maybe somewhere in one of Korg's offices, something like this is being developed?

Unique synthesizers, like all other products of art and technology, are often created not "thanks to" but "in spite of" - sometimes by chance; many of them - just as a cheap experiment (let's remember the success of the Volca FM) - let's hope for another miscalculation of the Japanese company...?

Well, judging by what they are releasing now, there is no great hope for that.... Will history repeat itself or will we see another colossal collapse similar to that of Yamaha and Casio? Only time will tell. But let's hope for the best  - Korg is a legend in the music market and we wouldn't want to see that happen.


11. ROLAND GROOVEBOXES AND SYNTHESIZERS.

Roland arrived just in time for the synth fever of the 90s. At the time of the release of their legendary JP-8000, Clavia Nord Lead, Korg Prophecy and Access Virus were already on the market (Yamaha and their AN1x were late to the party). The waters had already been tested for pitfalls and it was possible to take a swim....
And Roland did.
First of all, unlike the Korg Prophecy, they didn't make a single-voice synthesizer and immediately launched a model with polyphony. Let's not forget that Korg's polyphonic Prophecy in the form of the Z-1 never made it.
Secondly, this synthesizer was designed with the legendary status of the analogue Jupiter in mind (of the public).
And thirdly, JP invented the 'Super Saw' (a slight detuning of many waves, sounding very powerful and at the same time not straining the ear thanks to the digital essence). This sound was achieved, of course, using DSP oscillators (according to Roland's website).
What the sound itself was, we won't say - those reading this chapter should know what it is; and if not, it's worth listening to Darude - Sandstorm (where the standard JP preset was used without any special modifications - on a par with Roland's 909 drum machine). Of course, the JP sound was not limited to 'trance and rave' - the machine was capable of many things. A little later, its rack-modular version, the JP-8080, was released.

By the way, it was not cheap - more than two thousand dollars in the mid-nineties; but that did not stop studios from buying them on a regular basis.

Let's add that Roland were the absolute kings of drum machines at the time - the 707, 909 and the legendary 808 were the strongest backbone of electronic music. Even if they were not sold by the company itself - the sound itself bore the name 'Roland'. And even today, when we say 'drum machines for electronic music', we don't think of, say, Korg's EM series or something from Yamaha, but only of products from Roland. In general, historically, this company has been close to electronic music - even without saying so directly - and has always understood the importance of the electronic component of (then) modern culture. Just take a look at their drum machines: these are not devices that are suitable for rock music - they are 100% electronic stuff, created for electronic music, where a simple 'kick' is ten times more important to the author than, say, to the author of a rock or even pop composition.
That's why Roland had a serious reputation in the field of equipment for such genres - and that's why their Grooveboxes and Workstations were so eagerly awaited.

Having taken the lead, Roland realised that it was time to work on grooveboxes for this type of music.
They were born slowly: first there were drum machines, then there were synthesizers, and then someone thought it would be a good idea to put them all in one box. Let's remember the old Rhythm Ace, the CR-78, and of course the 707 and 808, which have become classics; in the synthesiser field, how can we not think of the Junos and Jupiters, 303 delivered acid sound.
The Groovebox was the next step, (with some intermediate steps like the MC-202).

With the arrival of the MC-303 Groovebox (with a sound generator based on the Roland JV-80) in '96, everything changed. Synthesizers were difficult to master (you had to go to music school to play them well and with both hands), drum machines were too simple, the 303 was too limited; and everything in one box, with carefully selected sounds and workflow, sharpened directly for groove music, allowed you to create music immediately, on the spot, 'without leaving the cash register' and without learning solfeggio. Of course, almost all grooveboxes allowed you to record your music track by track directly on the device (something that a lot of expensive synthesizers could not do). And that was a very serious selling point.

The next model, the MC-505, was an even bigger success, cementing the groovebox as a phenomenon.

It's worth noting that electronic music in the 90s wasn't just about motors and VAs.
In particular, top-of-the-range Roland grooveboxes - MS 303, 505 and others - were in fact banal 16-bit rompers. Nowadays it's ridiculous - but it's not about the technology, it's about how everything is made, how it's presented, how the sounds are chosen - and how they fit together. And in the 505 they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle: the creators have carefully selected each sound, just as a composer chooses the sound for a film or soundtrack.

After listening to the presets, you realise that this is, in fact, a hardware appendix to the PS1 game soundtrack, all the tracks written one to one by serious composers.
And that's not an assumption, that's a fact.

Roland itself claimed: "Our dance music patterns were developed by the world's top sound designers".
And the MC505 manual, for example, had a huge list of music authors, including Heigo Tani and others, many of whom even worked with Koichi Sakamoto.
(For a show about Heigo Tani, see: https://youtu.be/Eo4N4Oq6K_4)
The 505 was not created as a groovebox FOR musicians - on the contrary, it was created as a groovebox BY musicians, who did not even write the music for the instrument, but... they created the instrument for the music. In principle, such a step allowed these authors to go down in history - good for them!

It should be remembered that Korg had not yet entered the market with their Electribes (and when they did, they lost in all respects and were in the position of a latecomer until the legendary EMX was released).
And then Roland flooded the market with sequels - MC808, MC909 and so on and so forth (some even included serious motorised faders; there were products of the Verslab series; some included 303 emulators on a separate chip (MC-09) and of course the sampler component was improved (which gave the world the super popular SP-404 model). There were also curiosities like the DJ-70 and of course failures like the EG-101.
There was even an attempt to create a groove synth (JX-305 in '98)... but let's not list them all.
Roland made a lot of Grooveboxes in its time.

Most of them didn't have synthesiser engines, DSPs were mostly used to work with samples- but most of these Grooveboxes had a characteristic sound that defined an entire era. If you switch on these machines today and play simple presets/demo songs, you can feel the 'nostalgia' of the 90s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYz326rax4g), because all the sounds were of very high quality, even if they were recorded in 16-bit format - today's grooveboxes can't do that, no matter how much they cost and how powerful they are.

And it was not about the physical quality of the samples, their bitrate and so on - the difference was that the sources written into those grooveboxes were very good. Basically, it was the hardware version of Kontakt with the best libraries selected at the factory. But Kontakt itself was\is an eternal hassle with memory, with the size of the libraries themselves, painful installation and other delights of computer life; Roland's Grooveboxes were 'Kontakt in a box' where all these problems had been eliminated by the caring hands of factory engineers. All you had to do was... play the music. Of course, even today you can find a sound library from the 90s and load it into Kontakt, but it will be long, complicated process and all the problems described above will come back to haunt you. Not to mention that it would require a very, very powerful PC (which would cost more than any of the Roland grooveboxes of the time).

But any Roland Groove machine of that time is a direct emanation of the spirit of 'that time'. And what do many people look for and expect from a musical instrument? Not something 'unique' but, on the contrary, something 'recognisable'. So that a single note elicits an immediate response from the listener - and most importantly, from the performer. Just as an FM chip with its characteristic 'Sega' crackle immediately evokes pleasant associations, so Roland's Grooveboxes immediately bring back memories of 'the best days of our lives'.

It all ended with the release of the beautiful Roland SH-201 in 2006 (a kind of ideological successor to the JP series), and grooveboxes stopped coming out for a while (which Korg took advantage of, by the way). Despite its name, the SH-201 has nothing in common with the SH series and sounds completely different; in fact, it should have been something like the JP-201... It was positioned as a 'resurrection of the old sound' and it was. To quote the officical site: 'With two powerful built-in analogue modelling oscillators, complemented by the famous Supersaw waveform and Roland resonance filter, this little synth can blow doors down'.

Later, however, it became clear that Roland was 'going the wrong way'. There was a lot of talk about 'Roland not chasing the ghosts of the past' - but for some reason the equally ghostly cranes in the sky occupied the company far more. So much so that at the beginning of the tenth decade the SH-201 was taken off the market and replaced by... Roland SH-01 Gaia, at the 2010 NAMM show. Gaia is an infamous series of synthesizers that marked the complete confusion of theRoland corporation in front of the unclear market of the future - nobody knew what would get big in the future... And Roland found nothing better to do than to produce an average quality romper that was no match for the old classics.

Unfortunately, by then computers, DAWs and VSTs had arrived. You can read about how much the VST culture damaged (or helped) the development of electronic music in the appropriate section, but for now let's just say that people, happy that computer plug-ins were free (only the USA and the biggest countries in Europe and Asia had heard of licensing at the time), put this sound on a pedestal. Plastic and empty plug-in sounds have since become the absolute norm in home production.

Apparently, Roland and Co. fell victim to the same approach - and their new systems, including Zen. produced more and more plastic and less and less groove. Even their latest grooveboxes, the 101 and 707, sound absolutely 'grooveless', despite all the technology inside...

It's a good thing that the arrival of ACB  technology didn't slow down, and that Roland, like Baron Munchausen, pulled itself out of this quagmire by the hair of its head.


12. YAMAHA GROOVEBOXES AND SYNTHESIZERS.

At the same time, Yamaha, which today is known as a manufacturer of models with the conventional names of 'wedding restaurant synthesiser' or 'my first synthesiser that my mother gave me for my birthday', was not lagging behind the steamroller of progress.  In fact, it was sometimes ahead of it. Their DX7, which single-handedly destroyed the analogue synthesizer market (forgive the crude and simplistic statement, but it seemed that way to a lot of people at the time)! And not only did this DX7 reach such heights - it also gave birth to the whole world of 'FM synthesis'.
Yamaha, however, began to experiment, producing alternative, cheaper, sampler-hybrid and other synths....

Models like the SY77\TG77\SY99 had the typical 'substractive' filters on board, and even the usual PCM romper sounds (which Yamaha proudly called AWM) - at the end of the chain was a DSP with effects. Yamaha did not rest on its laurels and tried to introduce another type of sound called 'Formant Shaping Synthesis' in the FS1R, but this 'trend' died out and was retired.
Yamaha itself finally waved goodbye to the grown-up child, wiped its eyes with a handkerchief and started selling licences for it (which, by the way, led to the appearance of Korg's Volca FM and Opsix).

Nowadays, of course, nobody can be surprised by such synthesis and sound, and "the sound of a solo from Michael Bolton's songs" attracts few people in the modern music industry - neither sellers nor buyers. Nowadays it's not hard to find FM sound - in Yamaha workstations, in their SeqTrack groove boxes, in Korg models, and Electron is not far behind with their models.., except that not many people need it.
The 'five-year trend' has run its course.

But things did not end there - it continued the adventurous life of FM synthesis through a mysterious rebirth in the realm of world culture. Let's talk about computer games again.

These very 'Yamaha' FM chips became the basis for the sound of the 16-bit Sega console called Mega Drive, which used them in its games - not for a big time cause, but just to save money. The sound system in the Mega Drive console was weak compared to its rival from Nintendo, and everyone knew it - Nintendo itself used to 'troll' Sega about it (at least in the post-Soviet press). But it was Sega's limitations in sound department  that forced developers to use these 'synth' chips directly (whereas on the mighty SNES it was possible to load samples). Yes, at the time of release, Super Nintendo was ahead of its rival console, but .... low-quality samples of real instruments have aged very poorly, while real synthesis, however crude and simple, has gone down in history as a unique type of sound. It's ironic: entire synthesizers are being made to replicate the sound of the Mega Drive - forty years later; composers of distinctive 'Sega music' are making history... while SNES music is considered 'shabby retro'.

Of course, the Sega chip (or rather the sound it produced) was more reminiscent of the DX-100 than the DX-7, but that was the 'trick' - it was the coarseness that added colour and is now appreciated as 'nostalgia'. Nowadays, SonicWare has released a dedicated Liven Mega-synth model (even the composer responsible for the music of the legendary Streets of Rage was brought in to work with its presets). Special mention should be made of a man called Jesper Kydd, known for his brilliant work with the Yamaha YM2612 FM chip in games such as Adventures of Batman and Robin and many others.

We won't go into game music now, because the black hole of trackers, Amiga, the demo scene, the first assembler composers and other things can suck anyone dry - it's a separate and very big topic.

Back to Yamaha and their 'grooveboxes'.

Their analogue and VA synthesizers sounded great and in no way inferior to Roland or Korg. Yamaha's AN-1 synthesiser was a technical monster - take your time to read the specifications of this monster! One mention of the matrix with 16 sources and almost a hundred modulations will suffice.
Naturally, after such a success, the grooveboxes of the same series appeared: AN200, DX200 and others. From their names it is easy to guess what sounds were inside these boxes...
By the way, they were not that expensive - only $600 for 2001.
There were also 'rompler' versions - RM1, RM1X, the mighty U700 and, of course, a leviathan called RS7000 (which allowed you to work with 16-bit and 44.1 kHz samples in 2001!) The latter cost a lot - $1,500 - but the sound was worth it.

Well, after that, Yamaha came out of the 'nineties phase' and... to quote:
"At the Yamaha Corporation, we focus on one thing and one thing only - quality sound chips, ceiling mounts, editing software, go-kart engines, powerboats, flugelhorns, ATVs, sequencers, outboard motors, conference systems, golf clubs, projectors, MIDI controllers, valve cartridges, portable recorders, subwoofers, component systems and motorcycles".

We don't know much about the turmoil within the company, but their 'tops' have gone into something quite far from 'groove music'. Apparently there are still some 'passionate engineers' around, but we know they don't stay in the serious business for long. And usually what goes down in history as a result of their efforts is always a loss of money for the company. And if anyone was interested in these 'toys' in the past, they are no longer.

Well, after Yamaha piled up its legacy with mountains of 'wedding' synths, it was very difficult to dig out what was underneath... It was perhaps the most conspicuous case of self-effacement on the music scene: at times it even seemed as if Yamaha wanted to forget this period as a vulgar story from its youth. Which is nothing new, by the way: just remember how in the early 2000s, with Time Warner, they angrily divested themselves of professional wrestling in the form of WCW, and how popular TV shows were unceremoniously shut down just because they 'didn't fit the vision of the new management'; just think of Fender, whose epic change of management and attempt to play in the synth market followed the same path... All in all, a kind of Damnation Memorae.


13. HOME SCENE.

It should be understood, however, that the synthesizers of the time were by no means home synthesizers; they were always studio or concert instruments, bought by serious studios or popular musicians. There was no question of an ordinary person being able to afford such a thing. Yamaha DX7 came out in 1983 at a price of two thousand dollars... which in 2024 money is about six or seven grands.

Because of this misunderstanding, there is a problem in the market: people are making expensive synthesizers, but this 'expensiveness' is only apparent. Today, a synth that costs three thousand dollars is considered expensive, but it's only two-thirds the price of an average Roland synth from the '90s, let alone a DX7 or classic Jupiters.
And it turns out that people complain about the price while seeing quality that doesn't even reach the average synths of the past - but it couldn't be otherwise. For a synth to be elite by the standards of the 90s in 2024, it has to cost at least six grand, good at four and very average at three. Anything below that, in the two-thousand-dollar range, used to be considered the cheapest equipment for the amateur studio, like a low-tier roovebox or simplified versions of stronger models (like the DX100). And it is highly doubtful that Roland will release a digital instrument like the JP-8000 reissue for five thousand dollars (the original cost about 2,500 in nineties money) for the home market.

Yes, today's synths and grooveboxes are not even close to the classic models - but they are more or less affordable for the average person. Almost anyone can buy a midi keyboard and a Volca.

By the way, the success of the Volca and Aira series is no coincidence - on the contrary, it is directly due to the HIGH price of these machines. You heard it right - the cheap models from Korg and Roland are not cheap at all. To realise this, just add up the cost of the instruments that could fit into one case. Take the miniature Rolands of the Aira series - the J6, S1 and T-8 - pads, leads and bass line drums. They cost $200 each; all three together are $600. Yes, that's not much, but... Let's not forget Roland's JDXi, which costs the same $600: drums, basses, lids, pads.... everything like the Volca, but in a case, with a single power supply, with a keyboard, plus on board there's a real (albeit mono) analogue circuit and a full-blown sequencer for all four tracks, which works without sync cables and stuff - and there's a vocoder with a microphone.
It turns out that for $600 we only get part of the full-blown JDXi, but we also lose the analogue, the vocoder, the sequencer and even the keyboard; and to 'catch up' with the little Xi we need to seriously splash out on a midi keyboard, a mini-mono synth (like the bass 'Volca' for $200) and a vocoder (from the same Aira range for $200).

And that's why the Aira babies don't sound bad - they're part of some pretty serious gear. The thing is... you can buy it all in parts without having to take out a loan for a whole synth - and that's the secret of the Aira's and Volca's success.


14. THE EMERGENCE OF PLUG-INS AND THE PC

We are not going to talk for a long time about how digital recording and playback equipment for the PC came about. Progress was moving forward, and it was in the digital domain. The speed of this movement was so great that in 2008 the first software for recording music did not cost more than 200 dollars, and home sound cards were rapidly becoming cheaper. I still remember how my brother and I recorded our first demos on a PC in 2009 using a Creative sound card at 24-bit\48kHz - it was so cheap then!

And when you could get the functionality of a whole workstation for pennies, the question of what was better became moot. Yes, workstations were powerful in terms of sound - but they also cost a fortune, and every schoolboy had a PC at home, bought by his caring mother 'for work' .... And so, using a mouse, anyone could create a cheap but complete work. It looks ridiculous now, knowing the quality of those works - but for those years it was a breakthrough. At that time, a 'song' was something 'unassembled', and creating it at home on your PC was something out of science fiction book... So the excitement was huge.

However, as users, we should thank these first programs - they were the ones that basically gave birth to the phenomenon of semi-professional music-making at home. Without them, we might not have seen the rise of DAWless, which we will talk about later.

These home recording studios came with a lot of plug-ins (VSTs) - both paid and free - so the range of "unique sounds" was very wide, and ordinary synthesizers could not keep up with this express. Yes, the synth sounded better - but the plug-in was free, weighed 5 megabytes and was released every month. Now, in 2025, they sound ridiculous - in 2007 they were a miracle: a new and unusual sound every day!

The world of synthesizers tried to keep up with the fast moving rocket of computer technology - but it could not. Moreover, it was losing on all fronts, simply because it is impossible to build a new synthesiser and put it on the market at the same speed as writing a page of code that takes up 20 megabytes and runs on any hardware in the world, distributed over the Internet.

Basically, the late 2000s and early 1990s were dark times for synthesizers. They were practically forgotten because they were too expensive, and they were lagging behind the steamroller of progress. Companies had only one option - to lower their prices to catch up with the market, but they didn't, preferring to let synthesizers rot in their warehouses rather than give them away for free.

In fact, the arrival of digital was to them what internet piracy was to the record industry. After all, what is a plug-in? A musical mini-software with which you can build any drum machine, any synthesiser or even an orchestra if you want to - and in fact any kid with a bunch of plug-ins was robbing Roland or Korg of a lot of money, because he could get a poor version of almost any synthesiser, Korg or Roland, for free. Yes, the sound quality was much worse - but does MP3 sound better than vinyl? That's a rhetorical question, of course.

So the world of synthesizers was knocked down hard and had to admit defeat. And there was a rematch, which hardware won. But it won this rematch not so much thanks to its RnD skills, but thanks to the inherent flaws of the computer industry, where, contrary to our pathos paragraphs above, not everything was so smooth.



15. PEAK OF PLUGIN DEVELOPMENT AND GRADUAL DECLINE OF INTEREST.

Plugins didn't develop as fast as we would have liked - their 'development in line with progress slowed down considerably. Expectations were high - after all, we changed a dozen computers and graphics cards between 2005 and 2015! ..... - but the result was disappointing. Today, when a plug-in 'sounds like a real instrument', it's not synthesis .... it's a 'library of WAV files' - just samples of live instruments.
Developers have embraced the fashion of making plug-ins that are hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes in size; a virtual synth that is ten gigabytes in size is now the absolute norm (even though the plug-in does not position itself as an analogue of Kontakt), and the simplest reverb effect can take up more space on a disc than the entire DAW (unfortunately, this is no joke).

Also, for unknown reasons, these plug-ins have become extremely demanding on the computer. Thinking that an old computer is enough to work with modern music software is a serious mistake. In 2024, it makes no sense to think of anything lower than at least a Core i7 to work with modern plug-ins, and such models are quite expensive.
And this leap in megabytes and useless CPU load happened quite recently. Back in 2010-2015, VSTs were one to ten megabytes (!)in size, and sounded exactly the same - or even better (there were unique things from H.G. Fortune, for example); and if a plugin 'weighed' more than a hundred Mb (ridiculous by today's standards), it was a multimedia combine. And if it had stayed that way, plug-ins would have had a distinct advantage - but unfortunately that is no longer the case.
Incidentally, most of today's plug-ins require you to register on the official site, create a login and password, enter your email address, confirm it, then log in, enter your details again - and sometimes ask for your phone number, without which you will not even be able to access your own personal account (again, sadly, no joke).

Secondly, the problem with the digital workstations themselves was the same abyss of 'menu diving'. It seemed that if we had a PC with powerful software and any interface customisation, there would be no problems...?

Let's make a lyrical digression....

There are legends about how difficult it is to program even the simplest eight-step sequences on a Roland 303 synthesiser.
And these legends have every reason to be true: it's almost impossible to figure out how to do it from scratch without some step-by-step instructions.
It's very easy to make a mistake or screw up the whole job, there's no screen with data, you can only rely on muscle memory... it's an ordeal. The problem is solved in a way similar to the introduction of cheat codes in computer games: if you know the correct order of actions (prescribed, of course, in the manual that comes with the device), everything becomes quite simple and clear. As a result, it takes less than a minute to program a sequence.
To be fair, other devices such as the Moog synthesizers were no easier to program: moreover, by the standards of the time, the 303.... was one of the most "intuitively" customisable musical devices....

In fact, all this is reminiscent of the adventures of that funny science called 'solfeggio', where complexities such as circle of fiths (let's just avoid this topic) were once necessary to train instrumental musicians. Solfeggio is a child of its time, now disastrously outdated and used only in music schools and colleges; programming instruments like the 303.... is exactly the same 'flow'. Both are even praiseworthy - at the time of their creation. How can we blame the people who started making beeping electronic boxes in the seventies? They didn't know any better, and the technical progress of our days was only a dream to them; they worked with what they had on their hands. That's why everything turned out to be complicated and confusing, because they programmed '303s' and Moogs in the same way as they worked with the first music computers. The same ones where, instead of a sequencer, there was an ordinary keyboard and a set of commands not good enough to be a  DOS operating system... And there is no need to talk about the technical specifications of those machines - they were really 'Tetris hardware'.

By the way, if you open those manuals, you'll see that the two systems have the same approach: the manuals for Roland machines are covered with solfeggio signs: musical notation, bass clefs and whole exercises straight out of music school textbooks. The manual for the MS505, for example, even suggests creating a 'simple' pattern of eight tracks, three of which are in the bass clef - and all the tracks are covered with musical signs that are only learnt at music school (including percussion, by the way). There is nothing surprising about this: people who only knew music school music decided not to reinvent the wheel and crammed all this into electronic instruments. Another thing is that this very 'whell' was invented later (by the same Roland with their TR-REC).

But to come back to the hero of our digression: there are some things in the 303 that are unbelievably irritating, because they do not even remind us of the limitations of the technology of that time, but rather of a strange joke, an 'Easter egg' of the creators.
Take, for example, the 'three hundred and third' song-mod....
What could be simpler? Switch to 'write' mode, press the pattern numbers you want, press play and that's it. Right?
It's nothing like that.

Firstly, you can't select the pattern you want because nothing happens. It can ONLY be selected when the sequence is playing. This cheat code must be known. If the pattern is not playing, no button will react (just as the game won't react to a wrongly entered cheat code).
(Characteristically, if you want to edit a playing note 'on the fly' in individual pattern creation mode, you are not allowed to do so.  You get used to this restriction, then you go to another prefecture and there is another Samurai Chief.... and in his dojo things are completely different).

Second.
So, dazed confused, you finally created a 'song' for yourself. Turned the lever to 'PLAY' and... Nothing happens.
Because first you have to give the machine a command to register the sequence in memory - simply switching from pattern to pattern is only half the job.
And to give this command, you have to press a certain key, of course. Logically, it should be something as close as possible to 'save' or 'store' or 'memo' - oh, here it is! - the WRITE button.
Right?
Wrong!
Because the developers have assigned the saving of  'song' to the .... CLEAR button.

Isn't that a joke and an Easter egg? Putting the save command on the button with opposite meaning, which every user (who has just learnt to break through sequencing) avoids like the plague.... It's a joke. Yes, it is. We're sure of it. Or is it all the fault of the technology?
Or is there something we don't know...?

However, if we look at the music industry as a whole, we can see that ergonomic problems have never gone away and are still with us. This is because no matter how much the quality of the hardware has increased, the number of functions that have been tried to cram into instrument cases has increased along with the power. Not to mention the amount of stuff that goes into boxes the size of a 303 or 606: they contain a whole studio that people in the eighties could only dream of.... No wonder the ergonomic problems are still with us today. 

But if in the world of hardware there are direct and understandable limitations (what if the same arpeggiator didn't have enough memory and an undocumented function was simply added at the last moment before the gear was put on the shelves?), then in the world of 'software' such things should be long gone?
Alas!
Because even there we are plagued by ... the same problems of ergonomics, design and logic. It's like a curse! It gets to the point where users of, say, FL Studio are afraid to touch Ableton, and they in turn are afraid of the mere sight of Bitwig and the like - not out of superstitious fear, of course, but simply because each of these programs has a crazy learning curve. And not just because of the 'new interface', but because of objective shortcomings, 'bugs that have become features'.

For example, when you load a plug-in into Ableton, it is extremely difficult to simply find it on the screen.
Out of the abyss of icons of different sizes and colours, the plug-in window with the settings is opened by... clicking on a tiny button next to the plug-in name in a small box at the bottom left. When you first get to know it, it's quite confusing. It would seem that the way to get to 'plugin settings' would be to simply click on its name in the 'rack' - but no. No way. 12 versions, decades of development - and everything logical, ergonomic and understandable has been rejected with a broad, indignant gesture.
It's hard to put into words what happens when one try to add new plug-ins to new versions of FL Studio... To get a rough idea, imagine if the 'copy', 'cut' and 'paste' options in Windows were not in one menu, but in three different places.
And let's not even touch Bitwig... just to not start the epic rant.

The worst bug is one that is not considered a bug. This means that the developer considers a logical bug to be a 'feature', and will breed that bug like a virus in all future iterations of that program. To the applause of the fans, by the way! Because when something that turns an obvious bug into a feature sells in the millions, the fans of that perversion become the same as the authors.

So... was it all about the limitations of the hardware? Maybe it was - at first. Later, many of the hardware limitations were removed or reduced to a minimum, but unfortunately the psyche of the followers was already formatted. If we teach generations according to the dictionaries and textbooks of the 11th century, these generations, even in the 20th century, will have the vocabulary and concepts of an 11th-century person - and even if they learn new words, they will use them to further the ideas of the Middle Ages.

Such mental stagnation has become the plague of our time: people who have been brought up for generations with the logic shaped by the limitations of past, do not know how to use the logic of the future. Thus, a person who has grown up with television will always have a circle of interests defined by television broadcast, and will be sceptical about, say, the Internet - and even if he or she is forced into the digital world by social progress, everything he or she will create and put into practice will, in one way or another, revolve around the 'television format'.

The same thing happened with DAWs - it is a very difficult task to teach the workflow 'from scratch'. The barrier to entry into some of them is so high that it is comparable to teaching complex accounting packages. Of course, this is all trivial compared to, say, programming in C or Python, but still, music is not technical documentation, and should not be compared to such (unless it is something from the field of conservatory education, where even experienced programmers weep).

Unfortunately, it is not possible to say that a home recording studio is something simple and straightforward. In fact, it is much easier to connect two or three modules via midi, and these modules can be understood by a simple method of 'semi-scientific poking' (in fact, they are designed for such a level of understanding). That's what put a lot of people off studying computers: it's easier to record a sequence in let's say Roland S-1 via midi than to browse through dozens of screens in any Ableton - and God forbid with the help of a laptop touchpad....

Back to the plug-ins.
It turns out that they're financially disadvantageous!
VSTs are now almost all paid (and the production of free ones has been strangled by corporations) - and their prices are in line with their electronic counterparts (Arturia sells an ordinary bass clone of 303 for ... 200 dollars, while for the same money Beringer offers the same clone, but in hardware - or Donner offers analogue model B-1 even cheaper). The V Collection X plug-in collection is sold for - you won't believe it - $600. That's $200 more than a Korg Opsix or Minilogue, and it sounds... like a plug-in.

They are also disadvantageous for another reason.
For the plugin to work you need a PC or laptop. You might say 'but I already have a computer! - but using a home computer with internet, office work, social networking, video editing and live streaming to work with music is not much fun. That's why you need a separate laptop for real work, to deal with the latency that has long since become a cliche, to connect midi keyboards, sound cards and so on and so forth. ....
Controlling hardware devices is often much easier, because that's what they're made for, to work without mouse, monitors and other stuff. Yes, at first it seems that a six-octave synthesiser takes up more space than a folded laptop, but when you start working directly with the equipment, it turns out that things are not so clear-cut. As soon as you put the Roland Fantom on the table, for example, you realise that you don't need anything else but the synthesiser - no mouse, no monitor and, by the way, no additional external sound card for sound processing. It's all neatly soldered onto the board and hidden under a plastic cover.

The unreliability of software and programs has also played its part. Of course, hardware can have problems too, but when software won't start or 'crashes', whether it's a DAW or a plug-in, it's always the user's fault, not the manufacturer's. Try telling that to an angry customer who returns $5,000 non-working synthesiser for  to the shop ...

These days, the VST market is in slow decline after the near collapse of Roland's and Korg's 'collections' - in fact, VST as an industry phenomenon has not progressed beyond 32-bit versions since 2010. Look at the standard plug-ins in FLstudio and Ableton - still terrible. And that's after decades of rapid development. In general, the whole industry has been abandoned, leaving only a bunch of 'hardcore audience' (the fan base that will never go away and will always buy any VST or DAW).

Thanks to all this, the 'home studio' hype has died down. None of the disadvantages of computer technology were critical and did not lead to its demise - but they were enough (in combination) to create a critical mass of people who wanted nothing to do with computers...


16. THE BIRTH OF DAWLESS AND THE RETURN OF SYNTH TECHNOLOGY.

The waning of the 'plug-in' wave seems to have served, far from indirectly, the emergence of the DAWless movement... The transition from one to the other can be attributed to several factors.

1. The inability of most amateur home musicians to play a full keyboard instrument - and even the loss of the need to do so, as technology has moved quite decently towards automation.
2. The cheapening of synthesizers and grooveboxes to the point of universal availability - nowadays it is not a big problem to buy a more or less bearable groovebox.
3. The increasing number of people who spend all their time in front of a computer.

Let's start with the latter. In the 2000s, the computer was a technological marvel available to a small number of users. It was fashionable at the time to 'make music on the PC', linking every computer owner to the aura of Hollywood composers, all as one, photographed against the backdrop of computer systems. By the twenties, the computer had gone from being a technological marvel to a dull everyday object. And a person who had worked full-time in front of a screen was not very keen on sitting in front of another screen to make music.

This is evidenced by the many comments on the thread. Here's a link from Reddit, just to name a few
We have already talked about the cheapening of home equipment, and the third question is the most difficult.

Firstly, the instrument itself - after all, the basis for electronic musical instruments was the piano - is surprisingly unsuitable for playing, say, techno. The ability to play with two hands, for example, is not at all necessary here - and it can also spoil the raw primitiveness of electronic styles.
Secondly, most people have no problem playing an A minor solo on a home Moog. The problem is remembering it. After the age of 40, your head is too busy with other things .... you know, life. And the last thing your brain wants to remember is a fifty-note solo. A fresh child's brain can remember a lot of things and form long-term muscle memory - that's why it's mostly children and teenagers who go to music school. And if you start to learn after the age of forty.... it's not going to be easy. We're not saying it's impossible, just that it will take up your energy and time, and our busy adult brains will always resist biologically ridiculous ideas like playing a house concert for non-existent friends over the internet.
But.

Has the inability to play really spawned a whole genre? In principle, it's possible. After all, rock'n'roll was created by those who could not play the classical guitar, and the genre called "metal" created a new "riff" culture. And what is a riff? Basically, it's three backyard chords played in a 'tricky' way.
It seems that what good could come out of such an underculture?
But it did.
History repeated itself in the form of the DAWless movement.

It's been around for just over a decade.
The term itself, by the way, is much older - the first mentions can be found in the mid-2000s - but it's been in widespread use since about 2015. And the beauty of modern machines is that the author of the music doesn't have to be the performer. People started putting the performance on sequencers - that's progress! - and playing the 16-step 'thirty-second' sequence yourself is out of the question. Not to mention that electronic and techno music is so difficult to play live that only a very serious pianist with many years of experience and talent can play these parts live. Nowadays, the need to 'play well' has disappeared - there are machines for this, and not expensive studio ones, but home boxes for 200-400$, available to almost all sections of the population.

In fact, these three factors - computer fatigue, the cheapening of equipment and the arrival of home sequencers to help the masses who have no musical training - have given rise to a whole phenomenon. A phenomenon, by the way, that the so-called mainstream prefers to ignore. At the time of writing (2024\2025), the ubiquitous Wikipedia does not even have an article describing this phenomenon. And considering that millions of people around the world are engaged in dawless music-making, is a disgrace.

And the developers of the synthesizers haven't failed to notice the popularity and increase in sales. The success of the first Volca told Korg a lot when they opened the financial reports for, say, 2014... Since then, various synth modules have been released, no less than in the late 90s. They may not be of the same quality and level - but they are being developed and sold. After all, if even Yamaha released a groovebox in 2024, that's saying something. It seems that Korg and Roland's sales have also taken off - and they're not thinking of stopping. By the end of 2024, there will be a lot of grooveboxes, modules and other devices that either don't have a keyboard or have one just for show. Most likely, 2025 will see a continuation of what has been started. The so-called 'hype' of the DAWless-movement will not subside..

In fact, it is not a hype at all, and it is not a trend - it is simply... the life of a modern man. Modules and grooveboxes have become what a guitar is to a young man going to a party - not something fashionable or 'hip'... but just 'everyday norm'. Today's electronic musician without a DAW is like a house without electric lights. Is electricity fashionable? Is it a fashionable trend to have it in every building or institution? Not at all. It's just... is.

In fact, the backyard guitar or groovebox has long been the anti-hype. The days when the sight of a guitar or synthesiser made girls throw themselves at its owner are long gone. Nowadays, a person with an electric guitar or synthesiser is most likely just another home musician writing for twenty friends on the internet, and is hardly an extrovert. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a moot point. The fact is that DAWless has become an integral part of a musician's life today.

Of course, computers with DAWs haven't gone anywhere - the problem with the DAWless movement is that there are virtually no serious recorders on the market.... They exist, of course, but in expensive digital stations like Fantom or Montage - it's much easier to buy a PC and install a dedicated program on it. That's why DAWless still has a lot of room to grow - as we've already mentioned, this movement is still young, and apparently hasn't even reached its peak yet.


17. GOLDEN RASPBERRY AWARD GOES TO...

Raspberry PI-based synthesizers are becoming increasingly popular these days.
What are they?
Well, basically a small computer that plays computer VST plug-ins. Often real ones, like the Dtronics DT-DX, which is... the hardware version of the Dexed plug-in (DX7 emulator, by the way). They put a couple of encoders in a box with the plug-in, added a simple screen and voila. The developers studied the Dexed source code and then adapted it to run on a Raspberry Pi single board computer.

Mostly RPI synts have a bad reputation. They're unpopular for a simple reason - their content is simple, and they cost the same as a 'real' synthesiser. Basically, it's a plug-in sewn onto a chip. Not a bad idea, but ..... the price tag.
If such synthesizers were a lot cheaper, there'd be no questions asked. But this is not the case. On the contrary, today it's cheaper to buy a genuine Roland ACB than it is to buy another Multi\Poli...

But... Does the Raspberry sound worse than a normal synth?
Actually, there is no 'unbelievable' difference between a real JP8000 and its 'zencore' or plug-in copy - there are only small differences, but they are critical for specialists. It's the same with microphones - values like SPL, SNR and so on don't matter to the average person, but a specialist will immediately feel the cheaper version....

Most people don't care what kind of filter - ladder or not - is in a synth. But those of us in the know will always hear the difference. Yes, it's a battle against windmills - but isn't it the little things like this that make music-related questions so much fun? And aren't those little things what famous musicians pay for, buying a vintage Gibson for ten grand when they can buy a copy for two hundred? Yes, Steve Vai's personal guitar differs from a good stock guitar by 20 percent - but where have you seen Steve play a single decent concert with a "Chinese no-name plank"? Exactly.

The number of such critical people grew exponentially, good equipment became available to many people (at least on the second hand market), and knowledge about it spreaded all over the world on the internet..... And today, anyone can distinguish something 'suspiciously similar to a plug-in' from a 'real' one by ear.

And even the manufacturers are kind of ashamed of PRI technology! Normally, if there's a powerful DSP or new technology inside, the manufacturer is proud of it and mentions it everywhere. With RPI... they try not to talk about it. Why did you make it then?...

The answer is simple.

Selling RPI synthesizers is not even a music business per se. It's an attempt to move things into the realm of a kind of fashion, status - where people pay for a brand. And where there's fashion and trends, high prices don't scare people away. Unfortunately - or fortunately - these attempts by modern developers are not very successful. As far as we can recall, the only company that has succeeded to date is the Swedish company Electron, which sells its soy smoothie machines at homeric prices... The Scandinavians have already made a name for themselves, and their products are in demand even among people who don't know much about electronic instruments... simply because their customers are good at smelling out the hierarchical discourse of 'I can afford it, but citizen N can't'.

Obviously this has encouraged others to do the same. On the one hand, this is commendable - if people who are very far from the DAWless world know about Elektroniks products, it is great for the industry.  On the other hand, if everyone else follows suit, it's the consumer who suffers. What will happen if everyone only makes status products?

In general, the appearance of raspberry synthesizers is not a new phenomenon. There has always been a desire to profit from the simplest things at triple the price.  In addition to selling Golden Raspberry and other 'PC-based synthesizers', the purpose of making many machines was often... to sell spare parts.

"We (Roland) are also introducing more affordable parts and components into new products for 2023-2024, but some OLD PRODUCTS have been taken out of production to free up valuable parts".

There's nothing wrong with that, really - Volcas are essentially 'a successful reorganisation of unnecessary parts of more serious synths'.

Many people say that the high prices are due to a shortage of chips. Is this the case?
There are reasons.
In March, Behringer released a statement on Facebook (in a post that has since been deleted) that said the following: '50% of the world's production of neon gas, which is needed to make all chips, comes from Ukrainian factories that are now shut down'.

Many synthesiser parts were also made in the former USSR:
‘...Next came the joint work of Erica Synths from Latvia and Alfa Rpar, a local chip manufacturer based in Riga. Currently Alfa is the only company that can provide a complete set of synthesiser chips (VCO, VCF, VCA and ADSR)’.
https://electricdruid.net/analog-renaissance/

In fact, it's not about chips at all. Finding opportunities for development is much easier than it seems. If there will be no chips, an analogue synthesizer will be made of tubes (which, characteristically, will be a great way out of the situation - see the comparison of Korg on a tube circuit and Oberheim for 5000$ - https://youtu.be/zTOTzhVG8sw).

It is impossible to say that today's factories and manufacturers are in a hopeless situation, as Beringer proved by flooding the market with synthesizers in 2024. Isn't it the manufacturers themselves who, when they release yet another piece of junk with reduced functionality at triple the price, say that "limitations give birth to creativity"?

But let's assume that's the case - chips are scarce, they're expensive, etc... Then the 'Raspberry' synths may well serve as an alternative way out of such a semi-fantastic situation. 

Another thing is that this 'VST in the box' option is going down a strange road.  For some reason, 'plug-ins in the box' doesn't go beyond the boring standards. It sounds good... but nothing more.
But there are many great VST plug-ins on the market that sound much better. There are the technically simple but unique sounding ones, as well as the world famous grands like Serum and Massive. Unfortunately, none of these plug-ins have been included in the new 'Raspberry' synthesizers.
Even manufacturers like Arturia, who have a long history of developing synthesizers, drum machines and plug-ins, stubbornly refuse to release hardware versions of their own VSTs. They've limited themselves to the basic Astrolab synthesiser, although their Acid V deserves to be a standalone.

The problem could be solved by creating a universal (rather than proprietary) micro-interface for working with plug-ins, which would eliminate the need for a PC and feed the sound directly into your audio system. However, it seems that such steps are no longer being taken. Which is not surprising, given the generally counter-productive dynamics of the industry.


18. WHO ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE?

Back to the DAWless people who have taken up residence on YouTube (basically, the DAWless genre is almost exclusively inhabited there).

Every morning I (doom)scroll through my YouTube feed, watching other people trying to make music and, most importantly, being excited about it. It's not hard to find people who are happy to spend time and money on booze, hype, trends and cheap thrills. But to see genuine joy in the creative process is a remarkable phenomenon. Perhaps this is the main value of the DAWless community.  This is special feeling... "talent IS among us". Very special.

And that's fine, but it's not without sin. There are a lot of people who can be called - um... - knob twisters, because their main task in this life is to turn the knobs on the synthesiser and listen to what happens. You shouldn't expect any music from them -what can you expect from the people that are ready to listen to fart sounds all day long....

Back then - let's say in early 10's, synthesiser owners were expected to actually play the instrument.... A lot has changed since then, and the trend of tweaking the oscillator to the point of complete detuning has become the new norm and is now called 'sound design'. Or even Euro-rack - we haven't touched on it in this chapter. It's worth noting that a decent amount of good music has been written there too (especially if you're an ambient genre fanatic).

The concept of modular, granular and other eclecticism is not so much about the creation of music as it is about the replacement of the conventional process of musical production with an alternative, more experimental approach. The appeal of the synthesiser lies not in the music it produces, but in the process of seeing the wires and lights come to life and the sound emerge from the cables. For modular crowd, the machine itself is the work of art, a creation that represents the fusion of passion and technology.

It's just that the Euro-rack movement is too eclectic and trivially expensive for the average person - complete Euro-rack sets can cost tens of thousands of dollars, making it the entertainment of the rich (by the way, that's why we didn't dwell on the discussion of workstations, which usually cost three to four thousand dollars each - and studio equipment of our days, where a compressor can cost up to a millions of soviet credits).

And God be with them, the knob twisters! The problem is that more than half of today's synthesiser reviews are about the unrestrained spinning of LFOs in different directions.... This means that it is often impossible to form an opinion about the unit because... no one has actually played it, limiting themselves to hypertrophied excerpts from the modulation section.

The other problem, of course, is the equally hypertrophied salesman campaign, where most of the 'professional reviewers' are mere salesmen on the payroll - while stubbornly pretending to be independent. But why feel the need to fake a smile while pretending not to be a salesman? After all, there is nothing wrong with it (selling the product of the company you personally work for is a healthy and honest way to make money) - unfortunately, nowadays companies try to play the unfortunate game of 'only independent users review our products' when everyone knows there is nothing independent about it.

The way it works is ridiculously simple - the youtuber is sent a product and a company waits for a review. If the review is positive, the youtuber can get a synthesiser as a gift or just new equipment every month - and if the review is negative, the youtuber can get new equipment. And if it's negative... Well, it's clear to everyone that this author is not going to get a gift or new equipment. And he (the author) understands this very well, so the amount of humiliating subservience of such reviewers is off the charts. Quite profitable! No one will praise a product as much as the one who hopes for a pleasant present in the future.

But - to repeat ourselves - what's wrong with a manufacturer's employees reviewing a manufacturer's equipment? Is there anything wrong with that? We, as a community, have accepted the idea of a manufacturer directly paying 'independent' reviewers to make videos about their product as the norm... and it's funny rather than scary. Simply because everyone knows what's going on and doesn't say anything out of a sense of tact.

Not that it is a 'dishonourable practice' and our criticism is a call to fight it - business is business. But somehow the ludicrous mimicry of independent opinion, read by everyone, continues. Apparently, everyone has just accepted it as commonplace, a 'business quirk', and moved on. Well... anyway.

There are other things, of course - the abundance of 'lipsync', when someone doesn't hesitate to spin a studio mix and pretend to turn the knobs of a synthesiser; there are also fans of 'cooking crazy beats', fanatics of three hours of 'sound design in DAW', and of course endless mixing professionals. All this, of course, is the minutiae of life, the minutiae of business.

The biggest problem at the moment is that we don't have any good music. The blatant emptiness asks us one - and the most important - question....
Where are the stars to look up to in electronic music? Who is the grandee of modern electronic music today? Exactly - nobody. There is nothing. The industry is silent. Not in the sense that there is no music - it's released every day - but in the sense that we don't have a mainstream anymore (old guys like Jean Michel Jarre don't count, because everyone listens to their old hits, not new albums). The situation is the same in other genres, to be fair. We don't have new Prodigy, Juno Reactor, Depeche Mode and Robert Miles... and if there is no one to follow, who will lead the masses? The same exact masses who have been deprived of the opportunity to become the new Depeche Mode?

In general, the situation in electronic music - both at the top and the bottom - is a complete wreck. The loss of "top of the pops" hits, lack of groove, soy Spotify content, smoothie synths, the abundance of 'knob twisters' and five-hour ambient videos is not only a strain on the human ear, but also on the psyche. Nowadays, tiny channels with thirty-twenty views are much more pleasing.

But I guess the latter is why these people are not on Wikipedia - they threaten to crash the market and destroy the reputation of the big labels. So what do you mean, the general masses of the mainstream will find out that Johnny from Virginia with his 20 views makes better music than a billion dollar label...? Of course, such citizens went straight to the Shadowban Land (which doesn't officially exist, and those who talk about it are just envious mediocrities in tinfoil hats, remember?) and that was that.... all went quiet.

And why not be quiet, considering that the 'tops' in the form of elderly Prodigy and so on have long been cover bands of themselves, and the 'bottoms' are locked in the 'algo-jail' of YouTube and have no promotion and no distribution...? That's the way we live. In the age of the Internet and the so-called YOU-Tube.


19. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

By the way, this is where the big question arises: what if this whole scene, which has suddenly become talentless (for whatever reason, natural or artificial), takes advantage of the turmoil to be replaced by AI (Artificial Intelligence)?
From our point of view, the question is not who will replace whom and with what. The only question is the end result. If AI produces better music than humans, is that a bad thing? If the same AI can finally revive the dead art of songwriting - there is nothing terrible about that. On the contrary. If humans can't do it themselves, it's worth handing over such a complex task to computers, just as we've given them the task of synthesising, sequencing and recording. After all, what do we as humans want? To listen to good music or to write mediocre one? Creativity is fine. But should we sacrifice a tech that can produce the result for the sake of creative flows that don't have a proper result?

The future seems to lie in the fact that music 'by the author' will soon become obsolete and we will have music on demand. I.e. the musical works will not be selected from what the author\label\market has put out, but will be created on the fly with the help of various GPTs. "I want 90s techno with a trance hit vocal and a Robert Miles melody"... - and it all comes true. Oh, brave new world!

However, judging by the state of technology, this kind of AI is a very distant prospect. While they require a Homeric scale in terms of logistics, and even require a whole nuclear power plant (this is not a joke, by the way) for their correct work...
I think we should not expect any serious breakthroughs before the 50s. What we have experienced over the years will be enough for our century. We have had enough of what we have seen - and will see again. And, of course, we will hear.


20. APPENDIX

You сriticised, you suggest! - you say.
We will do so. Moreover, we would not have started this mutual process of writing/reading this book together with you, dear readers, without a dozen or two suggestions. These will be outlined below - and it will be up to you to decide whether this is enough to justify the stream of (un)justified criticism of the current state of affairs in the industry.

Shall we begin?

1. It's time to make a universal midi keyboard with a built-in computer or module where you can load any VST. I think it's a real alternative to the 'raspberry' synthesizers. Obviously such a solution is extremely unprofitable for all RPI synthesiser manufacturers.
2. In terms of computer-like technology, isn't it time for devices like the Push 3 to have larger screens? Why do laptops have folding screens and music gear does not?
3. It is quite possible to introduce a standard Sync-Midi port instead of the usual USB port as a norm for any laptop.....
4. Isn't it time - since we've touched on the subject of PC technology for music - to make laptops with keyboards.... but with a musical keyboard instead of an alphabetical one? Such kickstarter ideas already exist.
5. From our point of view, the future of DAWs and hardware synthesizers could be tablets. Why not? They combine small size with large touch screens. Akai, for example, has been using touchscreens for a decade, and the Roland Cloud fits into a tablet and doesn't need any DSP other than what's available in a tablet computer.
6. It is also possible to reduce sound modules with presets to the size of a 'flash drive' that will work with any MIDI keyboard.
7. Of course, a good recorder is essential for DAWless. Jamming is cool, but when it comes to recording a mix or doing some home mastering, we go to a PC.... PC is nice, but working with a mouse instead of real faders is not the brightest prospect... But we already have fully functional technology. And it's been with us forever. Remember all those workstations? The ones like Fantom, Nautilus, etc.? That's right. They all have perfect multitrack recorders inside, with big screens and fader knobs, specifically designed to work without a PC. What about similar recorders as modules?
8. As for small modules like Volca and others..., why not be able to combine them in a single case using a cartridge system rather than wires, so that 4 mini modules make one big one, as has long been the case in Euro-rack culture? How about... a case with a handle for easy carrying that would hold all these modules?
9. For synthesizers, it is worth proposing to bring back 'animation' buttons, as Novation did in the MiniNova synthesiser - one hand plays in mono mode, the other controls the prepared modulation presets. What is not the future?
10. How about reviving the 'read midi files from a USB stick' function that was available on the old Yamahas? Why are only PCs or expensive workstations suitable for this now?
11. Why not add a scratching function to the grooveboxes, not with the turntables, but with the encoders? All these 'vinyls' have been samples for a long time - so why not transfer the modulation to knobs with certain functions?
12. It's high time to revive small analogue synthesizers with drum machines - for some reason this is a rarity these days. Only Roland did something similar with the 'cursed and forgotten' JDXi.
13. It would be worth trying to create a dedicated loop player (along the lines of Novation's Launchpad and PC workflow) that works with these loops in the same way as Ableton or FL Studio in Performance Mode - and not like today's Grooveboxes, which trigger each loop not by beat measure, but by pressing a button.... Such models are available today, but they usually cost too much for such primitive functionality. The market is empty.
14. When you think of sound synthesis... it is worth considering a synthesiser model that is not only based on basic DSP, but also on an ultra-multiband EQ (24 or more frequency faders). By emphasising certain (and usually barely audible) timbre frequencies, amazing results can be achieved.
15. By the way, where is the vocal (vowel) synthesiser? Will human voice synthesis be limited to samplers, vocoders and cheap speech synthesis?
16. It would be interesting to see a synthesiser that has not only the basic encoders on the body - cutoff\depth\eg\env - but dozens of others, such as reverb effects, delays and their combinations. Why buy separate pedals like Strymon for that? You can go one step further: you can create something unimaginable with the effects and EQ unit mentioned above.
17. Drum machines have long suffered from a lack of layers: no matter which one you choose, there is no multi-timbral one - whereas any serious beat consists of several layers of drum parts (full parts of all percussion instruments, not kick-snare and others separately).
18. There's already a drum machine with a digital bass synth - the Roland T-8. But what about the weak point of today's grooveboxes - rich lush pads for this drum machine? Bass is great, but drum machines and bass synths don't surprise anyone. But they - drum machines and acid mono instruments - could use a built-in module with pads and textures.
19. If you have an analogue synthesizer that requires manual tuning, it is worth adding a tuner to it. A tuner costs no more than a dozen dollars to manufacture, and it is not difficult to build such a module into a synthesiser. For samplers, such a function is absolutely necessary (because some samples are not always in tune, or even recorded in a different key).
20. Speaking of samplers - where is the Amiga Tracker Groovebox sampler with the classic sounds of this classic computer? We should clarify that we don't mean the tracker or anything like that, but the samples in the box.

And so on and so on.

Anyway, there are a lot of possibilities. There is room to grow. Let's wait and hope!

Thanks for reading.

2022-2024