| Keyboard music synthesizer |
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Synthesizers were created as electronic instruments that have piano like keyboards and which produce a multitude of sounds through various combinations of generated and manipulated signals featuring a variety of frequencies. The signals created are of electrical or digital nature, not directly originated acoustic and mechanically created sounds, like a piano or church organ. There is usually an originating point, like an oscillator or a waveform or similar, that provides the signal that is then being manipulated through a multitude of sections or modules and finally being output to an amplifier, mixer, loudspeaker or the headphones. While most of the music synthesizers are outfitted and can be played by means of a keyboard, there were other solutions as well, like the Theremin, or the rack module was fed notes through a MIDI connection from a sequencer or computer. Keyboard music synthesizers entered the music world sometimes in the late sixties of the twentieth century, when Robert Moog and Don Buchla completely independently released the first modular synthesizers targeted at musicians and music artists. While previous synthesizers were huge, immovable machines, these modular behemoths were big, but nevertheless movable and possible to control by a savvy musician. The older synthesizers required
a room full of white lab coat clad scientists, in order to get a single sound out. The newly developed synthesizers were workable with only one man, usually the keyboard player him- or herself. While the keyboard music synthesizers went a long way since the time of modular analogue synthesizers, the sound that was created by the early legends became the hallmark of electronic music, leading to many movements within the electronica itself. Nowadays thousands of artists are featuring mostly electronic music for the electronica aficionados and nothing is more pleasing to the ears of the fans than a sound out of the legendary modular synth. In modern times, computers have made conventional keyboard music synthesizers almost obsolete, whereby there is still the necessity to play the singular notes by means of a keyboard. The synthesizer may be a program or a plug-in that runs in the computer, but the musician is still hitting the piano like structure, in order to generate sound. While there are computer programs that are capable of generating sounds by themselves, like Band In A Box, or other programs that can playback music directly off from sheet music scanned into the computer, the keyboard players still remain faithful to the white and black of the keyboard. In recent years, there has been a movement towards bringing back the hardware synthesizers, even the former Sequential Circuits owner Dave Smith and the other legend, the late Robert Moog, started releasing full analog or virtual analog hardware, with success. |
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