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My Synth Dreams

It was 1988 and my album collection was very heavy; heavy metal that is. Iron Maiden, DIO, Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth, Helloween, Queensryche, AC/DC all classic metal bands (and bands that I still find myself listening to these days). However on the 7th March 1988, my music taste was to take a dramatic turn. Blue Monday by New Order.

To give it’s correct title, it was “Blue Monday 88” as this was a remix (by Quincy Jones and John Potoker) of the original record by New Order which was released in 1983. The hypnotic and capturing semi-quaver quantised bass drum beat from the Oberheim DMX lifted me like a modern day Pied Piper into the amazing world of British Synth Pop along with some new clothes and a much more tended hairdo.

Within the week there were copies of Substance ’87 being passed around the school corridors on TDK C90 tapes and black t-shirts and tight jeans were being replaced by baggy white shirts and bleached baggy jeans. The following consecutive years saw trips to Woolworths to stock up on Maxell’s and TDK’s for Depeche Mode’s Violator on 19th March 1990, and OMD’s Sugar Tax on 7th May 1991.

Listening to and appreciating the stylistic tendencies of the genre may have been enough for some people however for me, I needed to know more. Those clinically sequenced beats and eerie pads led me to my love of the synthesizer. Names like Roland, Korg and Yamaha  became common place in conversation, and TB303, Moog and Prophet became objects of desire.

The Roland D20 was my first synth. Well, it actually belonged to the school however there were only a couple of us that used it so it basically became ours. We would go to school an hour early and stay an hour late in order to crank up the volume on the D20 and unleash the weird and wonderful sounds made possible with “Linear Arithmetic Synthesis”. Even although it has a built in 8 track sequencer, the “geek” part of our brain needed to progress and “midi it up” to an original Macintosh for sequencing (for the life of me however, I can’t remember what program we used to sequence with, was it an early cubase?).

After badgering my parents endlessly, in late 1991 i acquired my very own Roland D10 (the D20 without the sequencer) from the “for sale” section of the paper (no eBay back then) which was dully “midi’d-up” to my Amiga 500 (upgraded to 1Mb) running a copy of Software Technology's Sequencer One Plus which was free on the cover of Amiga Format. And due to the Amiga’s fantastic on board sound, I was then able to add samples to my tracks. Cue drum loops and vocals.

Unfortunately after leaving school in 1992 and starting university I seemed to have less and less time to devote to writing electronic music however tried my best to keep an interest. The next few years saw me spend hard earned cash on:

• Alesis MMT8
• Yamaha TG100
• Yamaha QY10
• Roland MC303
• Roland M-DC1

And finally, the incredible Yamaha SY85 workstation, however by that point my job was consuming all my time and a new (and quite small) flat with my girlfriend which then graduated to a house and a fiancé and then on to a wife and 2 kids, my opportunity to belch out those string and vocal pads had withered to nothing.

So what's the point of this story? Well I have decided to keep the synths safe and well in the attic (as I can't bring myself to sell them) and brush off some modern(ish) kit and get those synth sounds of the 80's pulsating through my veins again. So if you have enjoyed my nostalgic trip through my synth dreams then I'll be continuing the story in my next blog with some reviews of the kit that I have decided to do some much needed music making with.

I've moved to Blogger

The title says it all really, The Magicflag Blog has moved to Blogger.

Why? Well, up until now I have hosted a custom blog, coded by yours truly on some webspace that I bought. The only problem with this is that in order to get my email, it was effectively a "catch all" meaning that 95% of the worlds spam ended up in my inbox! Well today I had enough and decided to simply point my domain at Blogger effectively getting rid of the catch all problem.

This left me with a bit of a dilemma, should I manually move my posts over to the new blog or should I start fresh. The latter was the option as I couldn't face a few hours (that I don't have right now) of copy and paste action as well as saving and uploading pictures from one place to the other. 

So here I am, all fresh and ready to start again. All I have got to do now is think about something interesting to write about.