Synthesizer cycles

History repeats itself - but with variations. Long ago, the first analogue monosynth was constructed. Soon there were others, and then many others. Then the analogue polysynth arrived and soon there were lots of them too (and almost all of them were ever so slightly out of tune!). Then MIDI ushered in the digital age and with it came FM, and soon there were lots of digital synths, and many FM synths too. Some digital synthesizers acquired a sequencer and became workstations, and soon there were many of them, all the same but all slightly different. (and if they were out of tune, it was now deliberate!)

Then the sequencer swallowed the mixer, the effects unit, and even the synthesizer and the Digital Audio Workstation was born: 'DAW', as Homer Simpson seems to be always saying, although his pioneering work in electronic music has never featured in any of the episodes that I've seen. DAWs had little bits of flexibility called plug-ins, and soon, there were lots of them too, and they did lots of things, and one of them was synthesis...

The result of this 'history of synthesis in about 100 words' is that we have a hi-tech world where there are many software synthesizer plug-ins: some are recreations of classic noteworthy instruments, some are improved variations on ideas that didn't work very well in an analogue world, and some are relatively new and reasonably novel. Whenever there are many examples of something, things seem to conspire to remove them, and this seems to be happening now. Some manufacturers/programmers are now making 'players' that combine several synthesis techniques together so that instead of selling you several different synthesizers, they sell you just one player that can use any of the techniques, thus gaining flexibility AND locking you into their player for playing their sound sets.

History says that this approach will work for a while, but them someone will have the idea of making a player that has several synthesis techniques built in, and which can read the sound sets from several manufacturers. Someone may even produce a standard that formalizes this inter-working, and we jump back to a single player but lots of sound sets. And so on, saw-toothing our way from one to some to many and back to one, over and over again.

But whereas people tend not to learn the lessons of history, hi-tech seems to be different. One thing which has marked out all of the digital generations of synthesizers has been that the previous generations have been included, which is why, for example, virtual analogue is now used in many non-analogue purist applications, or why FM keeps coming back into fashion. So the future would seem to be one where the classic sounds will not fade away because the instruments that made them no longer exist, but instead, they will keep being re-incorporated into the latest technology. So here's my prediction:

"The equipment may falter, but the sounds will live on."

Remember me in 30 years time and see if this is still true.