Sawtooth is similar to violins and other bowed instruments. (For convincing plucking, you kinda need Karpluss-Strong, though I’m still partial to very short de

Sawtooth is similar to violins and other bowed instruments. (For convincing plucking, you kinda need Karpluss-Strong, though I’m still partial to very short decay times.) FM synthesis with enharmonic tones is bell-like. I’d argue that Don Buchla pushed synthesizers further than Bob Moog did when it comes to being their own instrument vs imitating something else, but he was also pushing for a radical departure from 500 years of western music in general. (Read: “what is this godawful noise, and why are you subjecting me to it??”) Why include a piano keyboard at all? Why think of “playing measures in a score” when you can wire up and interact with something that feels like a living system and see what happens? It’s the musical equivalent of “what is THAT thing!? What if I try to pet it, or poke it with a stick?” You might get bitten. This gets close to the heart of the East Coast (Moog) vs West Coast (Buchla) styles of synthesis. I’m not dissing Bob Moog in the slightest here: I’d rather listen to more conventional western music the vast majority of the time, and he was integral in carving out synths as a legitimate instrument. You’re not wrong. Sometimes I just gotta let go and let something like Silver Apples of the Moon [x] roll through my head. Not often, maybe not even all the way through, and I almost always skip the first two minutes. I love being reminded that synths have had this wild streak running through them since basically the beginning though. One of the cool things that’s happened with the rise of Eurorack and the splintering of musical genres is that you can find much more music that ignores the East/West coast divide, taking elements of each and using them wisely to serve the purpose of song. Silver Apples around 23:00 could easily fit in a Nine Inch Nails track, for example. This has been going on for decades; the Eurorack standard just makes it more likely to continue, for which I am thankful. [x] https://youtu.be/3G1hRNLlYpg https://youtu.be/3G1hRNLlYpg