Golden Age of Synths as told by OMD

There have been many times over the last one hundred years where technology has changed the way we make music…

Take the microphone, for example…before it came along, singers had to be naturally louder than the orchestra…they needed to have a voice that could reach the back rows of the theatre…but when the microphone came along, certain singers like Bing Crosby, realized that you could use it to create a whole new mood for singing by getting up close and personal…

Amplification was another game-changer…at one point, you needed a dozen or more people in a band to fill the room with music…with amps, you needed fewer people to make as much noise…

Magnetic tape and multitrack recording made it possible to create entirely new soundscapes, the kind you could never get in the real world…the studio became an instrument for new sonic frontiers…

And then we had developments like the electric guitar—and I don’t need to tell you how much that changed everything…

This is how things were for the late 50s, all through the 60s, and into the 1970s…amps and mics and electric guitars and multi-track recording gear…those were the tools for making music…

But then there was another change in that started to really be felt in the mid-70s…a new era featuring electronic machines that made sounds that had never been imagined anywhere in the universe…

So many new possibilities opened up during an era that’s become known as “the golden age of synthesizers”…everything changed—and changed fast…

If you’re into any flavour of today’s electronic music, you will find this fascinating…