Thanks to a new addition to my gear collection I was no longer playing with headphones, but rather I had propped up my small speaker amp nearby, set it to a reasonable volume, and was filling the local air with a bit of my chaotic noodling.

It was not intended to be a performance.

The reality of being outdoors in a park making art, taking photos, or playing music is that it is public. Eyes will connect. Heads will turn.

We travelled to Europe a few years ago and did a lot of plein air sketching in very public places and it’s a whole other thing, let me tell you, to sit near a few thousands of wandering tourists and do your craft.

Back in my little park a man on bike with his dog stopped to look, eyes connected, head turned. He stood in the grass a respectful distance away as if he expected me to crack out a banger and was getting ready for the show. I tapped out the first few bars of a Bach Prelude I had been practicing earlier that week and which was still stuck in my fingertips.

He lingered for another couple minutes then cycled away.

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?