Why I Bought a Hydrasynth Deluxe

2024-02-06T10:32:00-05:00

Last week I bought my first hardware synthesizer. This is the story of how I came to that instrument. I have entertained the idea of buying a hw synth for many years, but it never seemed like the right time. For one thing, I am wary of becoming a collector of musical equipment rather than a composer of musical music. Of course my music has always been entwined with technology and I already have a largish collection of software instruments. If you've ever embarked on longterm creative hobby, you have probably visited gearland, which lies adjacent to the place where the magic happens. I won't spend too long philosophizing about gear. I've already alluded to how it can be a trap, but I also have first-hand experience with the importance of gear. In some ways my history of making music is also a history of gear.

My early music was marred by lack of decent monitoring equipment. My earliest albums weren't mixed at all. I simply exported a song once I reached the end of it. I used Garageband on a family iMac, listening on the built-in speakers, a cheap stereo that I hooked up to the headphone output, or a pair of American Audio HP-550 headphones. I heard about those headphones from this review on a YouTube channel. I was never directly interested in DJing, but I had followed the channel for a few years, most likely because he reviewed lots of lights, which I thought were very cool. As a child I think I imagined one day living in a house with DJ lights instead of normal lights. About half-a-year before posting the headphone review, the DJ, Brian, had a stroke. I think this was the first piece of YouTube trauma I had ever experienced (of course this kind of thing is common now). In some odd way I think I felt I was helping Brian when I asked my Grandmother to get me these headphones for Hanukkah. I haven't listened to the headphones for a long time, but I doubt they sound very good. I will likely write another post about the headphones I have had over the years. The short version is that I struggled to make any decent-sounding music before I had spent money on headphones. This isn't to say that good headhpones are required for making music, but for me going on the journey of acquiring headphones was essential to the development of my ears. I think this is a pretty good example of if/how gear matters.

I'll try to get to the point soon, but first a few other examples of where bad gear held me back. My first MIDI controllers were very basic and made it hard to play expressively. This hindered my development as a piano player. When I moved to New York after graduated I bought a used Korg SV-1 on eBay. I sort-of got scammed by a pawn shop that sent a damaged product, but I fixed it myself without too much expense. These days I would handle the situation differently. Although I was disappointed by the internal sounds of the keyboard, it opened tons of musical doors for me. For a long time I didn't want to play anything else. When I returned to my parents' house, my old keyboard there felt likea toy. More recently, however, I have opened up to playing all kinds of keybeds. In fact the last time that I played my old keyboard I found that the smaller keys led me to new musical ideas. I suspect that it's common for musicians to go through a similar evolution. First, you don't care about the instrument you play because you have no idea what the differences are. Then you go through an intermediate phase of discovery where you become attached to the quirks of one particular, higher quality instrument. Finally, your technique is developed enough that you can adjust to more instruments, or at least you can still have fun while playing them. One reason I had always hesitated to get another keyboard is that I felt like I needed to invest all my energy in playing the keyboard that I had. I didn't want to waste bandwidth adjusting to a different instrument. This is a classic mistake. Trying to learn more things almost always has a positive benefit across the board and people tend to hugely underestimate their bandwidth. Being inspired by the cheap keyboard at my parents' house told me that it might be time to get another keyboard, particularly one that wasn't very similar to my Korg SV-1.

I can't talk about gear without returning briefly to the subject of computers. For me the computer has always been the most important part of my setup. I made 12 albums on the MacBook Pro that I used during college (from Willets Blend to Nightfall, inclusive). That computer was underpowered for all but my earliest projects with it. In the end I had to constantly freeze tracks to be able to play a song at all. Worst of all, there was crippling latency when I played virtual instruments with MIDI. I didn't immediately understand it, but this was one of the reasons why I was so dependent on quantizing my music. Obviously this had a huge effect on my creative output. When I built my current computer many of these limitations were lifted although choosing to run Linux on the machine caused some other problems.

For many years one of my central battles in composition was against the sterility of quantization and virtual instruments. This is the main thing that led me to buy a guitar. I had long been inspired by mathrock, a genre defined by guitars. My first mathrock love was Chon, who I was fortunate enough to see live. I caught the now-defunct act headlining the Super Chon Bros 3 tour, which included Tricot (in a rare US appearance), TTNG, and Polyphia. At the time Polyphia struggled to play their music. They have grown tremendously. This music seemed basically impossible to replicate due to its virtuosity. I was also smitten by the Japanese band Toe. They were equally untouchable but for very different reasons. Toe has always struck me as a deconstructionist band. I have no idea how they come up with their music.

It wasn't until I found the band Delta Sleep that mathrock seemed like something I could potentially make. This isn't to imply that Delta Sleep have simple music, rather that I had grown enormously as a composer. Delta Sleep are an enormous influence on my recent music, especially the album The Mirror, but I decided to buy a guitar because of the artist Nilufer Yanya. Her music showed me just how much depth a guitar could add to a song. I got a Jazzmaster, actually cheap Jazzmaster Clone called Tagima TW61, because of her. I saw Yanya a few months later at Webster Hall, where I happened to be standing next to film director Julianne Fox. She brought a strat on tour.

In this case I deliberately bought a cheap guitar so that I could get started with it without a long period of research and indecision. I regret getting a guitar with a whammy bar, but otherwise I think I made the right choice. That guitar punched well above its weight as long as you tuned it every five minutes. A year later I got a much nicer guitar that I intend to use for many years. I ended up giving my first guitar to my super.

All of this sets the stage for the Hydrasynth, or at least for again broadening my palette with another instrument. In searching for the right synthesizer, I had a few concrete requirements. First, I wanted something that presented alternatives to my existing keyboard in terms of playing surfaces. The Hydrasynth has polyphonic aftertouch and a ribbon controller a la the CS-80 that checked these boxes. In fact my existing keyboard doesn't have a pitch or mod wheel so even that is a huge improvement.

I was also considering getting an osmose by Expressive E. This keyboard it one of the most innovative playing surfaces in existence, but I was worried that the product was not as mature. It turns out that operation of this synth depends heavily on a desktop interface, which is not available for Linux. This helped me sidestep a potentially difficult decision.

I don't have room in my apartment for another large synth, so I knew whatever I got would need to be versatile. The most notable features missing from the Hydrasynth are sequencing and sampling. Fortunately I never use either one of these techniques. In fact I am somewhat disdainful of them. Obviously these are popular ideas, but personally I think that sequencing should be decoupled from synthesis and I am suspicous at least of certain types of sampling.

Looking at the Hydrasynth, I had a good feeling about the company behind it. I watched a handful of interviews with the synth's designer Glen Darcey. He reminds me of one of my professional colleagues, who I deeply respect. Both have had remarkably circuitous careers before settling in as true veterans of their fields. It's possible that my positive experiences collaborating professionally with engineers living in China also endeared me to the team at ASM.

The final decision was which Hydrasynth to buy. Out of four models, two seemed lke good options; the original 49-key or the newer Hydrasynth Deluxe with 73 keys. Both synths have similar engines, so I was suspicious of paying more just for a few more keys. A few years ago I would have decided solely based on cost, but today I am more open to the idea of investing not just enormous amount of time, but also moderate sums of money, in my music.

In my next post I will share my first impressions with the Hydrasynth including some unfortunate problems.

toblog - Music

Why I Bought a Hydrasynth Deluxe