Talking synthesizers

A strange attraction ...

My modular synth journey began in around 2014 when I first saw one and had been wondering how you play that thing without a keyboard. I'm not sure why these attracted me so much but I had a thing for synthesizers for a long time already. I remember the first time a synth fascinated me has already been in 2000 when I first saw a 19" sampler and such rack things but never really got deeper into it until 2005 when I got Reasons from a friend and made a few shy excursions with a sequencer and their emulators.

A good example for early days synth exploration would be SBE's "Midnight Boogie" from 2012, in the second part the Moog Little Phatty is just all over the place, while I still had no clue about anything tbh ...

In 2008 while recording the first Samsara-demo I've been introduced to the wondrous world of VST, bought Native Instruments Absynth in the same year, and shortly after a Moog Little Phatty that had been used quite much on SBE-records like "Revelation & Mystery", "Midnight Boogie" and "Waiting For The Flood". I had also stumbled upon the synthesizers.com website but that was completely out of reach until I saw the first Doepfer-stuff in stores in Berlin in around 2014.

Modular craze came to its first peak with 2020 Modular Synth Jams EP. I also played a short live set in Berlin @Tief Ostkreuz, was an interesting experience yet very much improvised ...

After that it took a long time to really find out what I want/need as one can see throughout recent years. It's easy to develop an addiction and I owned a lot of modules throughout 2015-21. Long story short, there's still synthesizer stuff on the coming music. I'm really excited about the long track which is really kind of a modern Pink Floyd or sth I guess, but I still gotta finish with the lyrics and mixing. Guess the album comes out around February 2021. Until then, I'm anxiously waiting for VCV RACK 2.0. And btw if I learned one thing it's also that sometimes less is more ;).

Modular craze reached it's peak in 2019 ;)

This is awesome!

Well, the truth is that I have been searching for a good distorted guitar sound throughout most of the last twenty years. I haven't been happy until just very recently. And I guess some of the purists now say "ah it's a f**in' program, it's not real" and I will not try to convince you if you are happy. Fact is that on four out of the five Samsara-Albums I have never been happy with the guitar sound and there it was all analog, expensive tube amps, microphones etc. And then this little program came along ... just maybe add a Tube Screamer up front and BAM - That's the sound! By the way in these two decades I now have been checking out various tube amps, the Helix (not completely bad), the Kemper (awful handling), Amplitube (it's okay, until you want to play a solo), Neural DSP (Nolly is not bad) - but - none of them comes even close to Scuffham. Instant happiness for me. Thank you: https://www.scuffhamamps.com