One thing that's particularly cool about a lot of these earlier recordings is the amount of automation that's used. Obviously you can use MIDI in realtime for a

One thing that's particularly cool about a lot of these earlier recordings is the amount of automation that's used. Obviously you can use MIDI in realtime for automation, but a lot of the studio use of these early synths didn't take advantage of it very often. Probably why you're way more used to hearing filter sweeps and the like in analog synthesis. Chowning's "Sabelithe" (on Spotify and Youtube) makes really cool use of synthesis to transform percussion elements into melodic elements over the progression of the piece.