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Originally Posted by Swingin' Ryan
With synth programming and such like, surely you are just, at best, manipulating pre-recorded sounds. With something like an acoustic guitar, you are creating them at the source.
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Nah, samplers and wavetable based synths do use prerecorded sounds, which you can record yourself in the first place. Subtractive, FM and modelling synths are very much about creating the original sound from absolutely basic components generated by oscillators, for example you can make a huge range of different sounds starting with simply a pair of pulse waves. Some synths do use sampled waveforms, but these are generally only 1 cycle. I don't see much difference between a tuned digital oscillator and a tuned "physical" analogue oscillator such as a guitar string.
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Originally Posted by Swingin' Ryan
I like quite a lot of electronic based music, but I always think there's something slightly soulless about sounds that aren't being generated by the source instrument. I'd rather hear a grand-piano than some kind of synth-generated sample of one. I think over-reliance on electronic production and musicianship is at the very core of the 'Teletubby' musical culture you speak about. A culture where we homogenize plastic, electronic intepretations of an instrument than to hear the real thing.
Bob Dylan with an acoustic guitar and a microphone communicates more to me than anything a man with a computer could ever generate. If that makes me an inadequate conformist then so be it.
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Synths in electronic music generally aren't about trying to imitate existing instruments. The great thing about them is being able to create new timbres. A lot of people, if they want a guitar or piano sound or any other "real" instrument will just simply play and record a real one to use in the composition.
The term "real" is a little incongruous anyway, since the software synths I use are as real as any piano or guitar, only without a physical manifestation. They still use a physical interface to play them, i.e midi keyboard and they create real sound.