What does summer sound like?
Oh sure, it seems obvious—ice cream trucks, and birds chirping in the trees, Vivaldi symphonies and sunshine bouncing off the asphalt—but I was sitting in the park recently and I had brought along my synth.
Remember my synth? About a year and a half ago I bought an Arturia Microfreak digital synthesizer (not a sponsored mention, by the way) which at about the size of a laptop computer has twenty-five solid state keys and about thirty knobs & buttons for tweaking and tuning the sound envelope. It is not a keyboard or a piano, but rather a proper (albeit budget) synthesizer with powerful shaping tools, a matrix-based sound design engine, an LFO, arpeggiator, sequencer and—oh, the list goes on. It’s also pretty portable, so I can pop it in a backpack with a battery pack and some headphones and—yeah—go sit in the park and play music.
I have about four hundred patches loaded into the memory banks, presets for interesting sound patterns and pads and leads and bass effects and even all variety of cosmic sound effects.
I thought it would be easy to find a summery sound.
Because I was, as mentioned, sitting there in the park with my synth and my headphones and making music for no one but myself and I wanted a summery vibe.
Synths, and perhaps this was merely a factor of my synth and how I had it configured, seem very wintery: echoey and airy wisps of noise, hulking bass tones, crackling shivers, and creaking sine waves. I tuned through my options, scrolling the knob and seeking something with mood that matched the sun and the grass and the mosquitos flitting about in the same and I struggled.
A tinkling piano sound, a ringing lead that evoked a steel drum, or the croaking higher octaves of a patch named after a frog—I was close.
Summer was all around, but I couldn’t put my finger on something that fit. What does summer sound like, after all?
Terms FROm this POSt
- keyboard
- Maybe it’s for typing. Maybe it’s for coding. Maybe it’s for making music. A bed of buttons arrayed for digital input is my favourite user interface and I’ll write about them often in their many varieties.
- synth
- Often mistaken for a piano, especially in my house where my spouse reminds me that we already have two pianos and I don’t need a third, synths are electronic sound engines that shape primitive audio waveforms through a various processes either analog or digital for which the result is a unique pitched “note” often “discovered” by the artist, and a form of musical instrument that has become the basis of many modern forms of music.
- vibe
- There are many words that try to encapsulate the ineffable feeling or aura of a thing or an idea. Vibe is yet another comfortable and trendy stab at trying to pin down a definition for something that is hard to define about those very things. It often implies an alignment, positive or negative, with the feeling given off by the subject of the vibe.
