Things that one synth taught you translated to others

The Lounge General Discussion
#1

Is there a specific thing a synth, drum machine, plugin or whatever taught you, that you then applied to other hardware or software? If so, where there any interesting differences or new „aha“ moments?

A very simple thing for me is the pitch setting on Roland synths like the SH01a that are fixed to octaves. Makes it very playable, unlike the way DSI handles it for example. So while playing on SH for a while this weekend I started to use transpose mode on Digitone in a similar way, first setting up an interesting arp in the arp menu and then going from 0 to +3 to -2 and back in transpose mode at the right interval. It’s a bit cumbersome but produced a great melody. And I did it without any active thinking, so it definitely was playing with the SH that made this happen. The DN interface would not have invited me to do that.

Also touches a bit on something I‘ve recently posted here elsewhere: I‘ve learned that it helps a lot to learn on hardware that is streamlined instead of starting with a DAW. You get to know a set of options that you can then later use with VSTs and expand instead of being lost by endless possibilities.

#2

The Nordlead 2 was one of my earlier synths and I still own it. Thanks to it’s WYSIWYG front panel it taught me a lot about subtractive synthesis, which I’ve applied to all other synths I’ve owned afterwards.

One difference that I’ve found interesting with synths like the Nordlead vs real analog synths (such as my Moog Slim Phatty) are the way the filter attack sounds on certain bass sounds. One of my favourite analog bass programming tricks is to use a slower filter envelope attack (but with a fast VCA attack). Gives it a nice bounce. However this doesn’t really work out on the Nordlead. I don’t know that it’s to do with digital vs analog, probably more the slope of the attack EG on each machine.

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