I’m currently watching a really great documentary on synthesizers in Britain that is an incredible look at the early days of synth-pop. As a kid I was hugely into Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, New Order, The Cure, and plenty of other UK bands that were using synths in their music, so this video is pretty much taking me down memory lane.

From the BBC web site:
In the late Seventies small pockets of electronic artists such as The Human League, Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle were inspired by Kraftwerk and J G Ballard to dream of the sound of the future against the backdrop of bleak, high-rise Britain.

Gary Numan’s 1979 appearance on Top Of The Pops heralded the invention of synthpop, which would provide the soundtrack as Britain entered a new, ruthless era in the Eighties.

Depeche Mode, four lads from Basildon, came to embody the new sound, while post-punk bands such as Ultravox, Soft Cell, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and Yazoo took the synth from the pages of the NME and onto the front cover of Smash Hits.

By 1983 the Pet Shop Boys and New Order were pointing to where the future of electronic music lay – in dance.

Contributors to Synth Britannia include Philip Oakey, Vince Clarke, Martin Gore, Bernard Sumner, Gary Numan and Neil Tennant.

For more information visit the BBC web site here.

Electronic music and synthesizers are two things I’ve been slowly getting into as a musician lately. While I’ve always been a fan of electronic music, I’ve never made any real effort to use the only synth I’ve had for a while, the Alesis Micron. We’ve used it in my band but it’s been more than a year since it’s been used in a live setting.

With my recent upgrade to Logic Studio, my access to software synths has greatly increased and I’ve been using an M-Audio Oxygen 49 MIDI keyboard at home. I really enjoy the variety of tones in Logic but feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what is available. Slowly but surely, as they say…

The Museum of Soviet Synthesizers Web site is an interesting look at a somewhat bygone era of analog synths. Browsing the directory, there are a wide variety of sound clips from most of these synths, and, for someone who is rather new to making electronic music, it’s rather ear-catching to hear some of the similarities between these relics and the tones available in a software recording program. What I find most interesting is that there are bound to be plenty of electronic music fans and musicians who have no idea that such hardware was being made in Russia at probably the same time the European or American equivalent was being made. No doubt that most of the featured synths on this site are ones that many musicians would kill for these days based on nostalgia and rarity alone.

Altair 1

Polivoks 11