To me, I don't see any difference between a synthesizer and an acoustic instrument. It's what's done on it that counts.
Allan Holdsworth
It's been very hard for the guitar as a serious synthesizer to compete with keyboards.
Andy Summers
For me, the guitar synthesizer is a great writing instrument.
More recently, I used guitar synthesizer extensively on the two albums I did with Robert Fripp.
If you're a guitarist, you should not be intimidated by using your instrument as a synthesizer, but you shouldn't feel that you have to own one, either.
The most obvious thing you can't do with a guitar synthesizer is to really sound like a guitar.
If the guitar synthesizer is really going to stand as a synthesizer on its own, it needs to develop a more characteristic sound; I don' think it's gotten there yet.
I have the utmost respect for synthesizers - Soft Cell, early Depeche Mode. But that's become a cliche for the '80s.
Ariel Rechtshaid
If it's fast, no I don't have enough piano technique. In that case, it's probably been done on some kind of synthesizer or sequencer. Then the score can then be printed out and so forth.
Bill Bruford
Well, I'm known as a guitar-rock guy, you know? You're not supposed to play with synthesizers. This is not in the rulebook.
Billy Corgan
Synthesizers were looked at as stealing the soul of music, but then there were these new bands who used it to contradict that idea.
Brendon Urie
When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.
Brian Eno
But synthesizer music has been accepted as emotional for long enough that it isn't a huge reach, conceptually, to think of a fake voice as 'emotional', especially since there's a human composing it.
Caroline Polachek
A MIDI file contains coded instructions to play a particular series of notes on an electronic music synthesizer. A MIDI file is more like a piano roll in a player piano than any type of sound recording.
Charles Petzold
All modern MIDI synthesizers are capable of polyphony, which means they can play more than one note at a time and more than one instrument at a time.
If smart technology can transform 3-D from a crude novelty to a genuine visual enhancement, why shouldn't a sophisticated odor synthesizer follow a similar path?
Charles Platt
Some tracks are with quartet and some tracks are with synthesizer.
Charlie Haden
We were touring the States tied to a load of drum machines and sequencers and synthesizers, playing to hundreds of thousands of people and yet feeling strangely removed from the music.
Curt Smith
People shouldn't knock the synthesizer. It's an aid, and it depends on how you use it, just like any other instrument.
Dusty Hill
Some thought it strange that we incorporated synthesizers in our music but the equipment was there so we just figured out a way to use it.
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
I guess that I'm primarily thought of as a rocker, largely because of 'Frankenstein' being such a heavy song - you know, it was really hard rock, almost a precursor of heavy metal and just the image of the synthesizer. I happened to be the first guy to get the idea of putting a strap on the keyboard.
I'm not thinking about the next record really yet. I kind of want to do a bunch of stuff with Jonathan Zawada, the guy who did the album art. I'd like to do some crazy art installations and design some weird synthesizers and work with other people and make some fun stuff for a bit. Maybe tap into virtual reality stuff or maybe write another record.
I'd like to do some crazy art installations and design some weird synthesizers and work with other people and make some fun stuff for a bit. Maybe tap into virtual reality stuff or maybe write another record... We'll see.
I took to the synthesizer. My cousin had some synthesizers, and I'd always make stuff on those things.
Sometimes in Portland I'm like, 'Who is funding this city?' It's doing great - there's all these new shops; there's a synthesizer store. Where is this coming from?
That big hit 'Get Lucky' is a disco song - not only the melody and the whole concept, but we had one of the great disco guys and one of the best guitarists ever, Nile Rodgers, to play on it. So that's great disco, but a modern disco, because it has great vocoders and synthesizers.
Music has been taken over in this country by personalities and dominated by rock 'n' roll. There's been a synthesizer invasion and it's not going to go away.
I have an Otari with a Korg T2 Midi synthesizer, a drum machine and a few effects units.
I played a guitar with a file, and a synthesizer.
To me, the original VCS3 synthesizer is like a Stradivarius.
People don't realize enough how important and influentical John Carpenter has been in electronic music. He did his soundtracks by himself, using mostly electronic and analog synthesizers. He's a cult figure with DJs these days for good reasons.
My first synthesizer was the VCS3. I got it in Bristol in the late Sixties, long before Pink Floyd used them. I had to sell an acoustic guitar and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to raise the money. You can do fantastic things with modern computers, but you cannot use them in the same intuitive, spontaneous way you can a VCS3.
All those ethereal string sounds on 'Oxygene IV' come from the VCS3. It was the first European synthesizer, made in England by a guy called Peter Zinoviev. I got one of the first ones.
Synthesizers can be programmed with more imagination than a real, 'human' performance. It's a joyful thing.
In my solo work on my own albums, I have used voice synthesizers and vocoders quite a lot in connection with orchestral instruments.
From early on, when synthesizers were first introduced into music, I liked the idea that you could get a big sound with them, electronic, but like an orchestra. And I could play it all myself. That was exciting.
I think I was first to do live performances on a modern electronic sound synthesizer.
My music, my whole approach to the synthesizer has completely changed now.
I'm a synthesizer. We need to synthesize more the relationships between artists and scientists, and men and women.
I made an electronic record in the vein of Cluster. I was programming synthesizers and drum machines and that sort of thing.
For me it always comes down to what is a good song and I'm very old fashioned in the way that I like to make songs that have something classic about them whether you can play them with an orchestra or an electro synthesizer or an acoustic guitar.
A guitar being played by an actual person is never going to be as precise and perfect as a programmed synthesizer. But we maintain there is value in the potential for human error.
I've always been fascinated with sound, since I was a little kid when my mother Dorothy Dean took me to my first piano lesson. Later on, my guitar, bass guitar, and synthesizer were my secret weapons.
I was never worried that synthesizers would replace musicians. First of all, you have to be a musician in order to make music with a synthesizer.
By the time I got to building synthesizers, I had perhaps 20 years' experience building electronic musical instruments.
When I first heard the song 'Eruption,' which is Eddie Van Halen's most famous solo composition, I was confused because it sounded incredible, but I didn't know what it was. I didn't know if it was a guitar. I didn't know if it was a synthesizer or a keyboard. I couldn't figure it out.
I've worked with the same Prophet 5 Synthesizer by Sequential Circuit synthesiser for 40 years.
My main interest in synthesizers when I was an older teenager was to escape from the spell of the 12-tone system or, in a more broad sense, the spell of the European modern-music system. That led me to explore towards electronic music and ethnic music.
James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.
