"Synthesizer" is a rather loose term and I'm as guilty as anyone of using it without clarification. In one aspect, everything I do is via a synthesizer - that is, every note you hear has been through some kind of digital manipulation on my computers and audio gear.
My stalwart grand piano is a huge file on the "big computer" of digitally recorded sounds from a real concert grand Steinway. When I press a key, rather than setting strings to vibrating on a cast iron sound board, I'm actually sending a digital signal to my arrayed computers to direct a particular snippet of digital audio via a circuitous route to my monitor speakers. In short, via digital recordings, I'm "synthesizing" the sound.
When you hear a string section passage, it may have come from similar digital recordings, or it might be totally created mathematically on the fly. A synthesized instrument sound starts off as a Pure Tone at an exact frequency. Pure tones such as from a smoke alarm leave a little to be desired musically, so a synthesizer uses a set of rules for each instrument to create Overtones, add Filtering, shape the Attack and Decay, even to add Distortion until the much modified pure tone mimics the sound of the real instrument.
In these first two instances, the idea is not to "sound" like a "synthesizer" but like a real instrument.
Some songs do use a "real" synthesizer. The signature sound of Van Halen'sJump on my fifth album is from a sawtooth waveform generator. A synthesizer can not only shape a waveform to mimic a real instrument, it can shape it to anything that can be described mathematically - it can create sounds that are impossible to create from a real world mechanical instrument.
The reason I bring this up is that almost every song on this album uses some form of "real" synthesizer sounds. It wasn't by intent and I didn't even realize it until I had the album assembled and was previewing it to adjust recording levels. Serendipity strikes again!
Reeves
PS The album photograph was taken in British Columbia. I used it because it's a pretty picture and it ties stylistically into the photo I used on my first album.
Click on the song description below to go to the song's page for more details
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