5/20 gurgles and farts
I havent posted for a while…oops. I could give a million excuses. But I haven’t been feeling the creative juice lately. But that changed with me buying a sweet new toy: A Korg Polysix. I’ve been repairing it for a month, cleaning the circuitry, trying to figure out why the voltage is screwed up, etc. I ended up getting lucky and buying a “parts” Polysix from a store in Portland for 30 bucks. But now that its together, it has a few problems: two of the voice sections are screwed up, the resonator is also off, and makes an absolutely hideous screeching noise in some patches. And the lfo that regulates the arpeggiator vacillates wildly. It’s unsteady and temper-mental, and its better that way. David Bowie said that one of the reasons he liked synths so much was because they weren’t made by musicians; They’re made by engineers who are trying to solve a problem. Synths are capable of being tweaked to do things they’re not supposed to do, to make all sorts of gurgles and farts, when all you were looking for was a pretty organ tone. A person who plays guitar and decides to make a guitar, would end up making a fine guitar, but it would only make normal guitar sounds. Engineers who made old synths were trying to approximate what it is that a piano player would want, without being piano players. The chasm between what you think people want, what you end up giving them, and what they actually wanted. The inbetween is the beauty of it, and its also the thing that causes wars. But not in the case of synths: most of the happy accidents were happy. And people who play synths are usually total pussies.
