Hier een sukje uit een interview met Vangelis uit de jaren 80 wat mooi aansluit op dit onderwerp.
Kijk, ik ben zelf maar een na-prater hoor maar dit is wat ik nou eigenlijk bedoel.
Vangelis describes the electronic instrument market during the early and mid-seventies as a 'low-key situation: synthesizers were still quite basic, but they weren't really all that expensive, either'. Nowadays, he views the hardware scheme of things in a detached and philosophical manner rarely found amongst the synthesizer world's elite.
'One half of the market is now completely oriented towards domestic users, with the Lowrey and Hammond organs and little Casio keyboards, while the other side embraces the Fairlights and Emulators of this world. Those instruments are very sophisticated and - I think - unnecessarily expensive. You could say there's also a kind of middle-ground made up of the programmable polysynths from the likes of Roland and Korg, which I think is going through a bit of a crisis at the moment.
Well, perhaps crisis is too strong a word, but those polysynths haven't offered anything really new for quite a while.' Nothing really new? What about MIDI? What about the DX7? Vangelis has sensed my disagreement.
'The DX7 is a nice, commercial little toy, at a reasonable price. But it's a little bit noisy, and I think the main reason so many people have bought it is that it has such a clever library of sounds. I don't want to criticize it too much it's good for studio work and nice to have around. I've used one myself quite a bit, but to me it's the equivalent of what the Korg 700 was ten years ago. A popular instrument, it is to the synth world what the Renault 5 is to cars. The Renault 5 was a hit because it was very versatile and you could park it anywhere . . . What I really don't like about it is that, for Yamaha, it's a step back from the CS80.' It transpires that there is no instrument Vangelis admires more than Yamaha's late seventies synthesizer flagship.
In the couple of hours I spoke with him, his individual command of English was used to describe his feelings on the CS80 more than any other subject.
'The most important synthesizer in my career - and for me the best analogue synthesizer design there has ever been. It was a brilliant instrument, though unfortunately not a very successful one. It needs a lot of practice if you want to be able to play it properly, but that's because it's the only synthesizer I could describe as being a real instrument, mainly because of the keyboard - the way it's built and what you can do with it.'
'Today, the only thing that matters to synth makers and synth players is the supply of different sounds - nothing else. I think the manufacturers have a responsibility to fit synthesizers with better keyboards so that people get some encouragement to play better, because if all you do is use synths as a source of sounds, you'll never be a complete performer. You'll never be a player in the practical sense, you won't acquire fast reactions.'
But if the likes of the DX7 are enough for most players, what's wrong with the manufacturers giving them what they want ?Nothing, really. I can understand why manufacturers do what they do for the middle ground, but that should only be one part of the market. Take Yamaha, which is an enormous company: they can go ahead and sell DX7s, but there's no reason why they can't also build an extraordinary instrument. There's the DX1, but to me that's a disappointment - awkward to use, and really quite inflexible. When Yamaha created the CS80, I expected them to refine it and improve it, make it lighter, put new sounds on it, but they didn't. 'I think what I'm saying will make more sense in 10 or 15 years' time. By then, someone somewhere should have created The Instrument - the ultimate synthesizer. I don't mean in terms of sound, because we can create anything we want these days, but in terms of being an extension of the performer a true performance instrument.
"To explain, if you look at the piano today, it's the result of about 2OO years' continuous development, but there's not one synthesizer that's been developed over anything like that length of time. When a synthesizer comes out it's Top of the Pops for two years, then it's scrapped and replaced by another one with more memories or whatever. When manufacturers stop adopting that attitude, that's when they'll get closer to creating the sort of instrument I'm after - a tune performance synthesizer. "
So we're still quite a long way from that?
'Well, nothing since the CS80 that I've used can act as a natural extension of a player's ability. Nothing can be as immediate. The situation is even worse now with the arrival of computers.'
) of bv. een multitimbrale MS20 clone met dus routings geheugen etc. , dat je echt wel scoort!!
, anders zou ik geen uitvlucht meer hebben om op het forum rond te hangen.
