Patches That Sounded Cheesy Back Then, Sound The Same Today
And, for better or worse, they recreate the faults of the original patches they're based on as well. Not every patch sounds great, but you can't fault Nostalgia for being honest: the patches that were cool sounding back then, are still cool sounding today. And the patches that were cheesy back then, are, well, still cheesy today.
And speaking of cheesy, beyond the thousands of samples of the expensive synths from the days of yore, there's a whole category in Nostalgia called "Cheap and Cheesy", filled with, you guessed it, the low cost funky synths that many of us started out on. And, just for fun, a complete Speak & Spell vocabulary to work into a song, ala Kraftwerk. Or to call in sick to work, ala, Homer Simpson in a memorable Simpsons episode.
The Kompakt interface (developed by Germany's Native Instruments) that the Nostalgia patches load into is DXi-compliant, so it can be loaded and played as a MIDI track in any DXi-compatible recording program. Or played via a DXi-compliant synth program that has a built-in arpeggiator patch, such as Cakewalk's Project-5. (Jan Hammer would have killed for this drag-and-drop level of flexibility when he was scoring Vice.)
Earlier this week, Glenn Reynolds wrote:
We've become so accustomed to rapid technological progress that we may notice the signposts in passing, but we tend to miss just how quickly they're zipping by.Part of that is because we keep redefining progress. The Web, WiFi, and Google would have seemed incomprehensibly revolutionary not much more than a decade ago. Now we take them all for granted. They're just part of the furniture.
And in the past, the furniture of a well-equipped home studio included banks and banks of synthesizers and drum machines. Now they're inside your computer, along with the recording deck.
Hey, nothing wrong in having a little Nostalgia for the past, while we're making music for the future.
Article comments