What if Yamaha and Access teamed up to make synths?

[Peter Korsten]

Gert van Santen schreef op 5-12-2014 13:13:

> random variate schreef op 5-12-2014 13:05:
>> I have an EX5R... And it's reasonable to say that it was the
>> pinnacle of Yam's workstation style synths. It is much more than
>> a simpler ROMpler. The synthesis engines are sophisticated and
>> deep. Plus you have sampling capability (import and native
>> sampling). Samples can then be mangled with the synthesis engine.
>>
>> There is a very active EX5 community. And very helpful.
>
> Perhaps there'll be a post from Peter K. on this ;-)

Perhaps... I'm very slowly recovering from 2014. It wasn't an easy year.

The EX5 (Romain and Joost have it, too; I've got the silver one, and 
used to have an EX5R) is a flawed gem. It's capable of some sonically 
seriously interesting sounds, and it just sounds *good*. Mine's loaded 
with four extra outputs, SCSI, 64 MB RAM and 16 MB Flash.

But it takes three quarters of an hour to load those 64 MB. The reason 
for this is known and there's nothing you can do about it: it's inherent 
in the design.

The EX5 has always struck me as a clash between the engineering and 
marketing departments of Yamaha. The engineers wanted to build the 
ultimate synth; marketing wanted a workstation. The result is something 
that is neither, although it pulls off the ultimate synth part to quite 
an extent.

It's also the last truly interesting synth from Yamaha. From then on, it 
was S&S synthesis and workstations. Good workstations, no question about 
that, but also neither particularly exciting nor ground-breaking.

On the other hand, things have changed. My phone has more computing 
power than my EX5 several times over, and can take a 64 GB (not MB) 
memory card. And it won't take three quarters of an hour to load. If you 
want something exotic, you need to look at small manufacturers, who may 
(Access) or may not (SoundArt) persevere.

Or they go all software. After all, you only really need a "real" synth 
on stage, and the audience won't give a hoot whether your lead sound is 
an accurate representation of a Minimoog. A small development team can 
churn out some wonderfully convoluted synth engine, and not have to 
bother about hardware.

To get back to the original subject: yes, it would be cool to have 
Yamaha's synth engines in a Virus form factor. And the rendering of 
these imaginary instruments is beautiful. But is it going to happen? 
Somehow, I doubt it. Yamaha probably knows how they make money, and it's 
not from exotic synths.

And an open hardware platform, such as Jay suggested? The problem is 
that you can't really make money from hardware, if there it isn't 
accompanied by vert good software. This is the success behind Apple's 
arguably massively overpriced products: they have really, really good 
software. Not just that the software does its work well, but that 
there's an ecosystem, a philosophy, a way of the software not getting in 
the way of what you want to do.

What I could see happening is a crowd-sourced product, which would be 
the aforementioned Virus form factor, but with a Raspberry Pi or 
something similar at its core. Having said that: SoundArt tried 
something of the sort, and failed. You would need to start with a decent 
software catalogue from the offset, otherwise it'll never take off.

But in the end, it doesn't even matter that much what kind of synth 
engine you have. What's important is how it sounds to your ears, and the 
ears of those who enjoy your music. Case in point, this performance by 
Clannad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-KWWBz1KIM

You can hear the Roland synth looping its samples, but it doesn't 
matter. It's still a beautiful performance.

(Incidentally: Gaelic is a seriously beautiful and poetic language.)

So, yeah. The EX5 is a (mostly) brilliant synth. The fact that there are 
at least four in such a relatively small group as the Music Bar is an 
indication of that.

- Peter