I’ve been playing synths since 1983 but it wasn’t until maybe 6 years ago that I didn’t really understand how synths worked, but really, if being truthful, what they actually were. Growing up playing the piano, using samplers, hardware synths, I always thought that synths drew a direct relation. The keyboard acted like a switch and the synth responded by making a sound electronically. What I never considered in all those years was that the synth is always making the sound. Hitting a key doesn’t turn some voltage on. Its always there. In fact a synth doesn’t make any sound whatsoever, Its just current fluctuating, oscillating, using frequency as pitch and waveform, or the shape of those voltage fluctuations as timbre. But only when used in conjunction with a speaker. All other forms of analogue instruments respond somehow to the fluctuations in air pressure. Converts them into some form of current which then hopefully gives you some form of reproduction of those pressure variants when plugged into a speaker. Synths don’t interract with the air, they’re just sitting there, controlling your speakers more directly.
So it was with great surprise, after countless gigs, countless visits to shops, countless scores, recordings, twiddles of the cutoff knob. To find out that what they keyboard is doing is two very independent things at different ends of a synth circuit to give me, a piano player, the impression that some form of kinetic interaction has taken place. When, in fact the keyboard doubles up as a gate that opens and closes a circuit allowing it to pass into an amplifier (maybe via an envelope, filters etc. But also as a controller of oscillation speed (pitch).
I can’t say there is any blessing of direct ROI (return on investment) on my short but expensive venture into modular synthesis. But what I can say is it has been a welcome late-stage education about the synths I have gathered (and have gathered dust) over the many years feeding this interest.