Dated synth? How come they are dated but not electric guitars?

I always thought the Pumpkins guitar sounds were like Queen. I think he really dug Brian May. Very similar tone.

 

Talk to any kids who's a hip hop fan today: electric guitars of almost all varieties are dated. What percentage of young kids grew up dreaming of playing electric guitar in 1985? And then the same question today? I'll be it's less than a third of what it used to be (in percentages).

 

Thanks Pretzel, if you prefer Kraftwerk to Led Zep then that is cool. I played Die Mensch Maschine last week, but it would be some time since I played Led Zep. But if you polled 100 random people then LZ would be cooler.

But you have made the mistake of thinking that your personal taste is the absolute measure of cool. I tried to give examples that would be broadly recognised outside this forum. Your opinion is all that matters. You think that the Blues are boring. Thats fine you dont have to listen to the blues and I would never try to change your mind. But to outright dismiss the blues because you personally find that genre boring is ignorant and arrogant.

Oh by the way Ziggy Stardust is not primarily synth based. It is not your favourite Bowie LP and that is fine. But the album you love most is not "his most loved work".

Anyway I am wasting my time here.

 

80s were about FM synths, and they didn't sound much like other instruments. I didn't like that sound all that much, though. Its the 90s when the sound library and sampling synths became more commonplace that synths really started sounding like the real instruments.

 

I know what you mean and agree with the point you make, but a third is a fraction not a percentage. Sorry to be pedantic.

 

The fake strings on "The Rain Song" didn't age well at all. The Moog solo at the end of "Lucky Man" did. Depends on the song, I guess.

 

Moog are analog and sound great.

The horrible solid state synths of the 70s and 80s that became de facto for bad Flashdance movies and karaoke make me want to puke.

 

My point was to compare one percentage to another (more recent) percentage with the newer one as the numerator and then make that the fraction.

 

"Dated" synths are back in. It's the guitar that's unquestionably out now. Which is sort of ironic.

Some of the objection to them comes from the usual suspects, and is simply tribalism. Synths were played by those acts - first Kraftwerk and the prog rockers, then R&B and disco acts - and those aren't part of the dimwitted branch of the greater rock tribe, so the usual suspects disliked the instruments because they disliked the acts producing the music.

You also have the too cool for school singer/songwriter fans, who thought synths weren't "real music", like some stoned hippy in a macrame vest plucking away at their guitar (the only "real music" for this crowd).

And then you've got the hard rockers and the metalheads, although ironically synths ultimately got folded in as part of the overall heavy sound. Still, if it's not a ***** with a guitar, it ain't rock! Darnit!

Now, synths did get dated, in that someone would buy a new synth, cook up some cool sound on it or use some killer preset, have a hit, and immediately get imitated by a thousand (typically) lesser acts on a million tracks. And pretty soon that synth or synth sound gets old and tired and abandoned, with that batch of hits that came out using it between '84-'86 (or whenever) sounding immediately dated a few years later.

But now that we're a good decade beyond any particular wave of new synth sounds, there's such a hodgepodge of synth sounds in play that a whole class of them (like the Yamaha DX7) simply couldn't end up sounding "dated" somewhere down the line.

One thing I'd like to note: the most "dated" crap from the '80s seldom came from synth-based acts of the time, like Human League or Eurythmics or any of that other blast of synth-pop acts from '82-'84. That stuff all sounds as vital as it did the day it was released - they were pioneering this stuff, and it shows, because most of what came after from others sounds like a sad imitation (and Eurythmics had sense enough to ditch it by '85 and Be Yourself Tonight and adopt a far less-electronic sound - you could release that record today and not raise an eyebrow - it would sound like a very clever modern attempt at being '80s retro).

No, the worst synth abuses came when '70s dinosaurs of the singer/songwriter or hard rock or god forbid just plain vanilla rock schools tried to adapt synths to their styles, most of them proving in the process they weren't anywhere near as talented as their press had said they were (at least not anymore). For every Fleetwood Mac that managed to successfully adapt to the environment (Tango In The Night makes pretty effective use of all that tech - thank Lindsey Buckingham for that), there's a Joni Mitchell hopelessly floundering in a tuneless misguided techno wonderland (Peter Gabriel finally showed her what to do on "My Secret Place", over halfway thru the decade).

Not everybody could be Kate Bush, after all.

 

YES!!! Exactly what I was going to post. Alan Vega and Martin Rev and Throbbing Gristle. Or early Cluster. That argument that a synth couldn't sound primitive or menacing or like it came straight from garage land is rubbish.

(Even though I'm not implying Martin Rev was technically lacking. Far from it.)

 

Don't be too sure of that. I love both so it's a bit unfortunate to put them up against each other.

 

Lucky man is a perfect example of a synth sound that never gets old....timeless. Also the blade runner soundtrack sounds fresh and futuristic and still transports me into a futurescape with eyes closed late at night.

 

It will be just the rare white kid who wants to get laid and tunes into the fact that girls like guys with guitars?

 

The one thing that I think has a slight amount of merit in this is that keyboards don't have the "inherent variability" that instruments like guitars, trumpets, etc. have. With instruments like guitars, trumpets, drums, etc., the slightest differences in how someone plays the instrument--just how they fret notes on a guitar for example, or the slightest differences of embouchure (basically the mechanics of your mouth on the mouthpiece) on a trumpet, or hitting a drumhead at different strengths, on different parts of the head, etc., make a difference. With keyboards, though--and this includes ALL keyboards, including pianos, harpsichords, organs, etc., there has traditionally not been that same variability factor. You press a key and it more or less produces a set sound, no matter how you press the key. (That's a simplification in a way, because on a piano, for example, you do actually get different timbres based on how hard you push the key, with the damper pedal, etc.--but it's a pretty limited range of variation.)

This has long been realized, though, and keyboard manufacturers have tried to introduce stronger variability elements into their instruments. Thus we've gotten touch-sensitive keys, after-touch keys, analog knobs that can affect various timbral parameters, ribbon controllers, pitch bend devices, breath controllers, etc. Those things have helped, but it turns out that it's really difficult to emulate the sort of variability that's inherent in the mechanics of an instrument like a guitar, and the vast majority of the variability that we've built into keyboards requires an intentional effort--a lot of variability of other instruments does not. On those other instruments, people will unintentionally/naturally have different timbres because of the different ways that they tend to move their fingers etc.

I think this is a lot of what people are intuitively responding to when they have a problem with keyboards, when they think they sound "soulless" etc. (although really people should feel the same way about pianos then). It's a challenge as a keyboard player, but I think a lot of players are very skilled at overcoming those limitations--Keith Emerson, Chick Corea, etc.

 

The fake strings in "The Rain Song" (at least the studio version) are only half-fake, so to speak.

Jones did not used a synthesizer but a mellotron, which is an instrument which uses pre-recorded tapes of a string quartet (or trio, I'm not sure).

 

Mellotron is so touching
One of the most beautiful- sounding instruments ever

To these days is used for a good reason. Nearly ALL major acts have used it

 

many guitar sounds are terribly dated. all the shoegaze, goth style guitars sound like the 80s. the muffled 70s glam guitars no one uses anymore.

 

I think Fleetwood Mac-Family Man sounds like Gloria Estefan, Rush-Lock and Key sounds like ABC, etc. lot of weird and unusual soundscapes on those 80s albums.

 

You are correct so far as when dated is used to describe something that "has become unfashionable...", if by that one means in some sort of objective sense, as in that there is some general sense in the culture that something previously in is now out. Fine as far as that goes.

But in practice it more usually is used to identify a personal opinion of the one asserting something has become dated. Here it is more a case of "I am into some thing or approach that differs from some approach taken previously, and beyond that I don't like that previous approach, and so I use the label "dated" as a pejorative to describe it."

I suppose we can differ on what use is more usual, but I assume you will at least agree that some do use the term to effectively support a personal opinion rather than identify a general sense held by others in the culture.

 

I don't care if something is dated, it just means it comes from a time I loved.

 

While the focus on trends in guitar tech tied to different periods and the genres that are associated with those periods is helpful, I think the OP's question is really about something else.

Let me start with the history of keyboard instruments. Like many I started out my own involvement with same with the ubiquitous piano. At some point I recall hearing the harpsichord in music, and finding it fascinating. It was and largely still is evocative of a sort of cerebral connection to the Baroque music it tends to be used in, obviously because as a matter of technology it was ascendant at the time.

But over time and to make a long story short the piano replaced the harpsichord. Why?

Quite simply it was because as the technology of the modern piano developed, it became obvious that it could be used more expressively. The string plucking mechanism of the harpsichord allowed for a certain amount of expressiveness in playing the instrument, but the hammer on string mechanism of the piano allowed for much more, such as in both volume and the duration of the sound produced. That is why it "won" over the harpsichord, and became the most widely used instrument.

As jazz developed the piano remained widely used. But mostly horned instruments, such as the trumpet, were also used and became common. This was a matter of how loud they could be played in public performance.

Where was the guitar in all this development? It certainly had a presence going back centuries. But in public performance it was held back compared to pianos and horns because it was quite simply too quiet.

The guitar did not begin its ascent in jazz as a major instrument until such people as Charlie Christian began employing amplification to compete with the loudness of the other instruments.

As time went on it became evident that now that amplification could overcome the principle drawback of the guitar in public performance, did the guitar in fact have virtues that could overcome the former advantages of pianos on one hand and horns on the other? Well, unlike horns guitars can play chords - an obvious advantage. Guitars have an obvious advantage over pianos in that they are far more compact, light and moveable.

But I also think the mechanism employed in playing guitar has some added advantages over pianos in terms of expressiveness. The guitarist literally feels and directly plucks at the string, with no piano hammer mechanism in between. I think this makes it a more expressive instrument than the piano.

Synthesizers substitute an electronic element for the hammer on string mechanism of the piano. In fact I would argue this substitution makes for a less direct involvement between the musician and the sound produced than even for the piano.

In short the guitar is the superior instrument at least when it comes to the ability to be expressive in playing music, and in terms of the physical connection between the musician and the sound produced. Synthesizers are well suited to providing sort of atmospheric, background elements in music. But they are inherently at a disadvantage in music that contains at least some element of the expressive dynamic of the musician's performance.

 

Many of them (pre-1969 anyway) still sound cooler than contemporary gear-head attempts at finding a 'unique voice'...

 

That's why we're falling behind in everything...including birth rates.