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Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

For the electronic music geeks, JMJ presents the gear he used to make this album: https://youtu.be/ctOhwRGdVvo

About the "matrisequencer" and "digisequencer": the matrisequencer was conceived and built by Michel Geiss, an engineer who worked with Jarre for more than 20 years, from discreet components. It was horribly complex and expensive.

In the early 90s, Geiss rebuilt it anew as the "digisequencer", with a tactile interface driving an Atari ST and using MIDI instead of CV/gate.

The matrisequencer was only hand-built once; IIRC however the digisequencer software and design may have been publicly available at some point and several may have been built.

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Wow. What I never really understood is: how did those people finance the gear? OK, in '81 JMJ was already famous, and for the original Oxygene in '76 he probably only had a fraction of the stuff you see in this video, but still: those machines were crazy expensive. Even one of them would have put most musicians in debt.

He is the son of Maurice Jarre [1], and I heard before how this helped him financially quite a bit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Jarre

That says that Maurice moved to America leaving Jean-Michel with his mom when he was five years old.

Never underestimate the guilt of a distant divorced father.

I like to think he gets a small cut every time a crane game plays the melody from Oxygene Pt. 4.

He was backed by French government after the launch of its first album.

France, Italy, UK are places that values and market local culture very agressively since...who knows, centuries?

Thanks for that video - that was amazing. Makes you appreciate his music even more.

Wow, thank you for posting that video, incredible to see all that old gear still in perfect working condition, wired up and ready to go.

And today all of this fits inside a computer. Amazing

Kind of. As others have mentioned, the way you play an instrument is pretty important. It isn't hard to see the difference between playing a real harp and playing its software analog (no pun intended) on a keyboard. It may be a bit harder to understand how an actual modular synth is different if you have never spent any time playing one.

Of course, the software based synths are more practical and easy to deal with since you can automate everything easily, things are reliable, never go out of tune and you can fit an obscene amount of sound-generation into a small device. Not to mention that your DAW will give you a lot more flexibility than those old monster mixing desks gave you.

I also think the limitations are important. While Jarre's setup from way back when may have looked impressive, it is still extremely limited compared to what even amateurs have available to them today. So he had to make everything count.

(If you want an interesting counterpoint: Deadmau5 mostly makes music by editing MIDI on a computer -- still, he has 2-3 huge modular analog synths. Hans Zimmer actually plays keyboards and mostly composes orchestral works, but he still uses modulars from time to time)

Yes, using the actual device gives some artistic freedom that's hard to control with a mouse and keyboard.

Though you could try mapping some of it to a Midi instrument that allows for things like pitch bend (not sure if it's possible though)

You can get a lot of MIDI to CV/Gate interfaces today, and some modulars even let you manage presets so you can at least store parameter values. But I think the hands-on experience of playing the instrument is important. Of rewiring it as you go, of having happy accidents when you plug the wrong wire into the right socket.

Even something as seemingly inconsequential as the physical resistance in a knob can make a difference. For instance, I have one synth that has a very light filter cutoff knob and one that has a slow and heavy one. This tiny bit of tactile difference invites different kinds of uses. The light knob invites me to flick it rapidly -- the heavy one doesn't invite that kind of playing so you end up sweeping it more slowly.

I think the best example I've seen was a friend of mine playing a Doepfer Dark Energy synthesizer using a Dark Time sequencer. You can make the sequencer skip and jump by flipping switches to make it repeat a section or restart the sequence etc. So with without changing the pattern at all he made this entire performance just by creatively messing with the timing and playback.

This hadn't really occurred to me when playing similar instruments on a computer before. You would have had to make a very conscious decision to do exactly what he did in the software, but given the physical interface of the sequencer, this came naturally.

... and almost all of it is done and/or coordinated in a CPU which is smaller than a stamp and consumes about the same power as a light bulb. It's a bit dated now, but I still find the video "Indistinguishable from Magic"[1] to be quite amazing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4

You could probably run it (and other stuff!) on a CPU that consumes 1/30th the energy of a light bulb.

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~skadron/cs8535_s11/ARM_Cortex.p...

Similar music can be made purely by using computers, but what's inside computers today is digital, while all this gear was analog. Also, the physical interface of all those synths can not yet be reproduced inside a computer, that's still dependent on outboard gear or simulations such as graphical buttons/sliders, etc.

There's been a huge resurgence of modular synthesizers and analog gear in the last decade or so, as people appreciate their advantages over trying to do everything on a computer.

You can simulate the analog circuits with good precision on a computer.

However, how you interface with them might not be comparable to turning knobs on an actual circuit

Fits inside your phone, my friend. Phone... :)

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