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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

It depends. What sort of music are you into? If you like funk and want to play weedly weedly bass sounds, you buy a Moog monosynth and you're set. If you want to play trance or dance styles then you figure out arpeggiators and sequencers and get to know the synth architecture so well that you can program it on the fly, because many styles of music are about taking a simple repeating motif and redoing it in different tonal colors. If you want to play synths as backing instruments in a rock or pop combo buy a workstation keyboard from Korg or Yamaha.

Tell me what you like to listen to and I'll recommend you something.

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Thanks!

My first love is guitar, and I've been playing it (badly;) for decades. But I've just discovered synthesizers, got increasingly hyper excited, and it seems I can really really nerd out about them. Historically on the electronic side I've enjoyed Depeche Mode, some Daft Punk, and a mix & variety of other stuff; but I've just found synthwave, such as Kavinsky, and am somewhat in love:). I've been geeking out for a few weeks, love the deep warbles and hard tones of the bass monophonic analogues, piercing leads of some others, and the rich pads of some of the digital polyphonics.

To start with I bought a Roland Gaia; I know it doesn't get a lot of love, BUT... compared to UltraNovas and such, it has no menu diving - I have all these wonderful sliders and knobs to learn with and really understand what's going on. I've developed intuitive understanding of ADSR and other basic concepts like modulating LFO with it way better and faster than I imagine I would with a book - so if I outgrow it one day, it'll still have been a wortwhile purchase:).

Also played a bit with an old old USB Midi keyboard I had and Caustic software, and have access to Casio CTK-6250 regular electronic keyboard as needed.

Basically, I've discovered a fertile new ground and am looking to deep dive :).

But as I said - there's tons of reviews and suggestions on equipment out there; a fair amount of courses (good or bad) on how to create sound; but far less on how to learn to play synth in any kind of accelerated, non-traditional/classical way. As per my other post to fellow commenter - I find I can "play" piano/synth just from my guitar experience enough to have fun and run some chord progressions etc; and fear that first "two years" worth of classical piano would not substantially advance me in the direction I want to move. Perhaps I'm wrong... we'll see! :)

Regarding Depeche, people on Youtube have broken down exactly what each band member was playing during the 80s shows; you might find it interesting. The parts are simple. I don't say that to knock them at all, on the contrary it shows that pianistic excellence has little to do with great synthpop. Alan Wilder is a trained pianist and found little scope for his talents in those shows.

Of course the fast, repetitive bits were either on tape or sampled into the Emulator keyboards.

Yeah don't bother learning piano, you can just play chords with your right hand and modulate/bend with your left. So much of that synthpop sound depends on simple arpeggiators.

If you like hardware (and why wouldn't you, it's so much more fun than software) you might find a looping device really useful, you're probably familiar with the guitar pedal version. And you should definitely look into step sequencers, check out the Arturia beatstep for a low-cost and versatile one or the Korg Volca synths which are dirt cheap and super awesome.

Use a simple mixer (probably something cheap like a mackie or Tascam) from about the vintage of the music you like. Consider not doing full mixes and just recording your jams in stereo. If you get fussy over computer recording use tape instead, which is delightfully forgiving in a way that digital is not and will save you from gain control headaches and ugly dropouts if you record too hot. An old portastudio can be a ton of fun.

Learn about dub even if you don't like reggae music, dub producers know a lot of old school production techniques.

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