The PS-3300 is a 3 layer synth with 49 voices where each voice has its own VCO/VCF/VCA. So you end up with 16 voices when you use 3 layers. It has microtunality and a reverb for each of the layers.
Patch cables will need to be stored externally, as with other semi-modular synths. I've seen little cable hangers but it would be unusual to have that as part of the main design.
They say that it comes with a custom hard case to hold both the main unit and the keyboard.
Korg worked previously with David Friend of Arp and the Alan R Pearlman Foundation to reissue the Arp 2600 and Arp Odyssey. The Arp 2600 Full Size design is somewhat similar to this, although smaller, in that it comes with its own flight cases.
I have Korg's smaller still Arp 2600M reisslue and that came with a suitcase and foam inserts to hold the main unit, keyboard, patch cables and sequencer.
I get the impression that the PS-3300 is meant to be set up permanently in one place like a studio rather than being gigged.
Not 100% exactly, but the whole point of these Korg reissues is to be very close to the originals. So in terms of general architecture, it will be the same.
Very little of lifestyle products is about need. Folks will open their wallets for some combination of personal wants, exclusivity (or the illusion of it), or even something as simple as a coffee table discussion piece.
These sorts of "collectible clones" are pretty popular at the moment. A big part of it is nostalgia.
That gives me the same feeling as a concert grand piano or installed pipe organ. I'll never get to own one or probably even touch one but I'm glad they exist for professional musicians to use.
Luckily cheap software and hardware synths can give us all a taste of what they're like.
This Korg seems more like something for museums or professional studios.
> That gives me the same feeling as a concert grand piano or installed pipe organ.
I think you might need to increase the number by an order of magnitude or more to get into the ballpark of [new] concert grand pianos and installed pipe organs.
It must be understood that, unlike grand pianos, the building containing an installed pipe organ is integral to its operation and sound, so their costs, construction and maintenance are inextricably linked for the lifetime of the instrument.
…though it was in fact maintenance costs that did in the I.T.O., may it rest in peace…
> “It travels in a 53-foot truck,” he says. “It has workshop and carpenter facilities that travel with the organ at all times. It has a massive accoutrement of spare parts. And it has two sound systems.”
> The system is controlled by a bank of computers running software built on Linux, the open-source operating system.
> Maintenance costs are not inconsiderable.
> “Big computer mainframes don’t like to be turned off,” Carpenter says.
I am sorry to burst your bubble here, but that electronic organ is most definitely not a pipe organ. These are two completely different types of instruments.
It is perfectly fine to take a gigantic electronic organ, its manual, its accessories, and box it up and drop it into whatever "enclosure" you have booked for a concert. Because an electronic organ is not intricately intertwined with its enclosing building/room. That's a key differentiator.
You could really never design a "portable pipe organ" because it's simply unheard of. Like a square circle. A pipe organ's pipes are custom-fitted and custom-tuned to the space. "Transplanting" a pipe organ to a different space would probably be more difficult and error-prone than just creating a new opus altogether.
Donald Knuth's pipe organ, on the other hand, is a bona fide pipe organ, and very much deserves to be installed in its own custom-built room.
A church where I used to sing had a very lovely choir loft, and one of the music directors had been an aficionado of "Early Music", and he had caused the parish to install a pipe organ in that choir loft. Sadly, the pipe organ was more of a "theatre" type than a "church" type, and it was also maddeningly difficult to maintain with the variations in humidity and temperature up there. There was a larger-than life stained-glass window in the western wall, and San Diego's setting Sun did a number on us every evening.
So eventually, they superseded it with an electronic organ, and they did this by just plopping the new manual in the midst of the loft, even before they were able to hire a crane with a crew to dislodge the deprecated pipe organ. The electronic organ was fantastic, though, because there were two directors who knew how to play it, and it had all kinds of MIDI/programming features that placed it head-and-shoulders above the pipe organ's best days.
The original 1977 price was around £5800, which according to the BoE inflation calculator is £35,000 in modern money.
These are an unusual design, because they're an organ/synth hybrid. There's a tuneable oscillator for each pitch class, but they're divided down for the octaves. So it's more like a string synth/organ architecture than three full synth voices per key (which would be insanely expensive), but the dividers for each octave are driven by single VCOs which can be tuned manually and modulated together.
The sound is... interesting. Analog, but doesn't have the legendary reputation of other synths. Korg always made quirky little synths, and this is more of a quirky big synth. They didn't make many of the original.
The reissue is aimed at the usual Gen X/Boomer demographic who would have wanted one when they first appeared, couldn't afford one, but have the cash to burn now.
Yes. If we assume only 5-10% of musicians with a decent, self-supporting living from composing/playing/performing alone (most others work somewhere in the “music-sector”, e.g. as teacher or as clerc of a record label or collecting society), only 0.5–2.5% have a stable middle-class income from artistic music alone, and roughly 0.01–0.3% have a upper-class income from artistic music alone and can afford to spend 11k£ for such a synthesizer.
I saw that Pete Townsend has donated his synths to a school in West London.
That includes a Yamaha GX-1 and an EMS modular. That’s some of the rarest (and largest) synths ever made and would have cost the equivalent of hundreds of thousands at that time.
Not too many muscle in the 1970s would have been able to buy a GX-1.
Probably some of both, but 11k is extremely reasonable for this. If I understand correctly, it has 3x complete subtractive synths per key (not just 3 oscillators into 1 filter) x 49 keys. A typical analog polyphonic synth has maybe 8 voices.
The comparison is more like bulldozer vs. car than BMW vs. Toyota - entirely new capabilities are unlocked
I want to say I agree, but since this is 50 year old tech, wouldn't there be newer mass produced products that do the same thing at a fraction of the price? Even if purely analog it would benefit from economies of scale, miniaturization, etc.
I'm not a synth designer or analog IC engineer, but from my limited knowledge:
Most polyphonic synths use individual chips for the main building blocks such as voltage-controlled oscillators, filters, and amplifiers, such as https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3350-smt. Those are simple analog circuits, but the specific designs that work for synths are not really useful for anything else, so they are a boutique and expensive (relative to complexity) chip. Using those: N chips per voice x 49 keys x 3 voices per key = 147*N expensive chips.
There are also some "whole synth on a chip" available like https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3394-smt at ~$10 each. So best case is ~$1.5k in chips alone for the core of this synth. Some other support circuits are still needed. Then $$$ for big PCBs and a big, noise-free linear power supply.
But even if we could drive the electronics costs down, that doesn't affect the per-unit cost of front panel controls, keybed, or the wood cabinet. Nor the per-unit cost of manufacturing labor, packaging, logistics. Nor the per-project cost of R&D and manufacturing tooling. All of these scale with size and complexity.
So it's no different from other specialized goods - the price gap relative to the "good enough" baseline will always be more than the performance gap suggests because the specialized version inherently sells fewer #units and cannot activate the same economies of scale.
The 'current'? They sell out since Korg started this convoluted order "process", wbich isn't even one, since you hear conflicting things in different countries from the 'distributors".
Title could really use the synth-model (as it is on the site).. how about: One of the rarest and most coveted synthesizers in history, PS-3300, is back (it's still click-baity.. but then it just be PS-3300 - A legend, reborn)
over the last few years there was a huge demand for analog synthesizers again after them being mostly replaced by digital synths since the mid 90s for 2.5 decades with users demanding from the traditional companies to re-issue the classics
they are classics for a reason and subtractive synthesis is mostly "done", so it's more about bringing classic sound characters due to subtle differences in components / architecture back
I agree and even when they offer something new, they stick close to well established topologies generally just adding in more. I don't need 8 flavors of filter that I have to scroll through with a single button, just give me one or two good ones. Great that you are giving me four envelops but if they all trigger at the same time it is not that useful, provide some other way to trigger them or give us a trigger delay. Distortion after the filter? why? put it before so I can shape it, I can apply post filter distortion outside the box if I want it and there it can take advantage of the envelope's dynamics. But thanks for giving me a tincan reverb and a delay that can't be clocked by the LFOs or even synced.
There are so many simple things they could do to greatly increase what these synths are capable of, but they don't.
Oh, and give me a way to wipe the memory or at least a bank of empty patches so I don't have to delete a preset every single time or make an empty patch to save over the presets or make a file of empty patches on the computer that I can copy over through midi.
I could go on, 30 years of hitting my head against the same walls. I am almost at the point of building my own synth and a bela and a pi-zero would make it pretty easy to do, but I haven't quite gotten irritated enough to do it, would rather spend that time making music.
This is the oddest statement I've read in a while.
How is there "no musical value in a polyphonic analogue synthesizer"?
There's a lot of unique music written using polyphonic analogue synths. Enough that people clearly like the sounds of subtractive synthesis. If they were only used just to playback tracks written in the 70s, 80s and 90s then they would still have value.
The growth of cheap analogue synths proves it's not just collectors that appreciated the user interface and the sound. There's a legion of people buying Bass Stations, Korgs, Moogs, Behrigners and Eurorack.
If Yamaha could reproduce a modern analogue GX-1 or CS-80 recreation I bet they would get snapped up too.
"Polyphonic analogue synth" means several independent envelope generators and VCFs.
Doing this is pointless -- it increases your synth's costs by orders of magnitude and provides no musical benefit whatsoever except make it slightly easier for piano players with no synthesizer experience to play it.
> The growth of cheap analogue synths
Yes, but literally none of them are doing analogue polyphony. The entire idea is just massively stupid and makes no sense in the 21st century.
> Yes, but literally none of them are doing analogue polyphony.
That's simply not true.
Korg Minilogue, Mililogue XD, Prologue, Behringer Pro-800, Sequential Take 5, Prophet Rev2, Prophet-10, Arturia PolyBrute 12, Oberheim OB-X8, Moog One and many more.
Polyphonic analogue synths are popular and very useful actually.
On one hand, he's a bad example, because - at least as far as I know - he builds most of the stuff himself. So he's not showing off expensive synths he bought, which makes this kind of a category error.
On the other hand, he's a great example, because in terms of his musical output, he's a quite bland epigone of artists like Howard Jones or Thomas Dolby of the 80s. And in the playlist you linked of Wendy Carlos.
Now the thing is, I love Howard Jones, Thomas Dolby and Wendy Carlos. But they exist already. I don't need a copy. That's exactly the point I was trying to make.
I don't need yet another YouTuber recreating Axel F. on his freshly bought Jupiter-8. I want new Axel Fs!
He's a great DIYer and explorer of sounds, so that part is true.
However, he's not a sole YouTuber who imitates 80s music to put out videos. The videos are a mere side product.
He builds stuff, experiments and sets up museums[0], or even restores old cars[1]. When I first stumbled upon him, he was restoring old musical instruments in a warehouse and that place was a makeshift museum of sorts.
I believe he doesn't care if his musical output or taste doesn't meet someone's expectations, he's just being himself, and I like him being just that. Maybe he is not breaking new musical grounds, but he's thinking very outside the box while being a tonal copy of somebody else, and this is certainly something.
He would probably buy one of these, or clone it himself, just because he wants to, and this makes him the target audience of this squarely.
If it's purchased as an idle showpiece toy, then sure talent is optional.
There will be a few old school Brian Eno adjacent types who'll want one to make noise with ... and some talent will be requisite to avoid sounding like a bag of cats being poked with a stick.
There is a free emulator here:
https://www.fullbucket.de/music/fb3300.html
The PS-3300 is a 3 layer synth with 49 voices where each voice has its own VCO/VCF/VCA. So you end up with 16 voices when you use 3 layers. It has microtunality and a reverb for each of the layers.
Here is a sound demo:
https://soundcloud.com/full-bucket/fr33ze?utm_source=clipboa...
wow - that site has lots of emulators. very nice. thanks
Very curious about the design, wish they’d show more photos and say more about it.
Where are all those cables stored? Is the keyboard supposed to fold into the main case somehow?
Reminds me a bit of the C100 “developer terminal”: https://caligra.com/c100/ (which I just noticed is now shipping)
Patch cables will need to be stored externally, as with other semi-modular synths. I've seen little cable hangers but it would be unusual to have that as part of the main design.
They say that it comes with a custom hard case to hold both the main unit and the keyboard.
Korg worked previously with David Friend of Arp and the Alan R Pearlman Foundation to reissue the Arp 2600 and Arp Odyssey. The Arp 2600 Full Size design is somewhat similar to this, although smaller, in that it comes with its own flight cases.
I have Korg's smaller still Arp 2600M reisslue and that came with a suitcase and foam inserts to hold the main unit, keyboard, patch cables and sequencer.
I get the impression that the PS-3300 is meant to be set up permanently in one place like a studio rather than being gigged.
Well it's remake of an old synthesizer, there's plenty of information and pictures about the original.
The remake isn't going to be exactly the same as the original. It is sensible to want more photos of the new units.
Not 100% exactly, but the whole point of these Korg reissues is to be very close to the originals. So in terms of general architecture, it will be the same.
Zero clue who would find the need to pay $2700 for that.
Very little of lifestyle products is about need. Folks will open their wallets for some combination of personal wants, exclusivity (or the illusion of it), or even something as simple as a coffee table discussion piece.
These sorts of "collectible clones" are pretty popular at the moment. A big part of it is nostalgia.
Nostalgia and also specifically catering to people who are affluent enough now to afford things they couldn't afford as kids or teens.
Oh dud, is it so hard to find out that is is an updated revision?
I'll wait for the Behringer clone!
Nice, but I guess it's pretty expensive.
Likely around £11,000 I heard.
That gives me the same feeling as a concert grand piano or installed pipe organ. I'll never get to own one or probably even touch one but I'm glad they exist for professional musicians to use.
Luckily cheap software and hardware synths can give us all a taste of what they're like.
This Korg seems more like something for museums or professional studios.
> £11,000
> That gives me the same feeling as a concert grand piano or installed pipe organ.
I think you might need to increase the number by an order of magnitude or more to get into the ballpark of [new] concert grand pianos and installed pipe organs.
A new Steinway spirio grand piano is around $650k usd
It must be understood that, unlike grand pianos, the building containing an installed pipe organ is integral to its operation and sound, so their costs, construction and maintenance are inextricably linked for the lifetime of the instrument.
Unless, of course, Cameron Carpenter is involved:
https://archive.is/DQQq0
https://www.marshallandogletree.com/opus8
…though it was in fact maintenance costs that did in the I.T.O., may it rest in peace…
> “It travels in a 53-foot truck,” he says. “It has workshop and carpenter facilities that travel with the organ at all times. It has a massive accoutrement of spare parts. And it has two sound systems.”
> The system is controlled by a bank of computers running software built on Linux, the open-source operating system.
> Maintenance costs are not inconsiderable.
> “Big computer mainframes don’t like to be turned off,” Carpenter says.
No, no no.
I am sorry to burst your bubble here, but that electronic organ is most definitely not a pipe organ. These are two completely different types of instruments.
It is perfectly fine to take a gigantic electronic organ, its manual, its accessories, and box it up and drop it into whatever "enclosure" you have booked for a concert. Because an electronic organ is not intricately intertwined with its enclosing building/room. That's a key differentiator.
You could really never design a "portable pipe organ" because it's simply unheard of. Like a square circle. A pipe organ's pipes are custom-fitted and custom-tuned to the space. "Transplanting" a pipe organ to a different space would probably be more difficult and error-prone than just creating a new opus altogether.
Donald Knuth's pipe organ, on the other hand, is a bona fide pipe organ, and very much deserves to be installed in its own custom-built room.
A church where I used to sing had a very lovely choir loft, and one of the music directors had been an aficionado of "Early Music", and he had caused the parish to install a pipe organ in that choir loft. Sadly, the pipe organ was more of a "theatre" type than a "church" type, and it was also maddeningly difficult to maintain with the variations in humidity and temperature up there. There was a larger-than life stained-glass window in the western wall, and San Diego's setting Sun did a number on us every evening.
So eventually, they superseded it with an electronic organ, and they did this by just plopping the new manual in the midst of the loft, even before they were able to hire a crane with a crew to dislodge the deprecated pipe organ. The electronic organ was fantastic, though, because there were two directors who knew how to play it, and it had all kinds of MIDI/programming features that placed it head-and-shoulders above the pipe organ's best days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_station_organ
For the computing connection, Knuth reportedly built his house around his organ.
£11,000 is a lot of money, but in the context of instruments is pretty reasonable.
The original 1977 price was around £5800, which according to the BoE inflation calculator is £35,000 in modern money.
These are an unusual design, because they're an organ/synth hybrid. There's a tuneable oscillator for each pitch class, but they're divided down for the octaves. So it's more like a string synth/organ architecture than three full synth voices per key (which would be insanely expensive), but the dividers for each octave are driven by single VCOs which can be tuned manually and modulated together.
The sound is... interesting. Analog, but doesn't have the legendary reputation of other synths. Korg always made quirky little synths, and this is more of a quirky big synth. They didn't make many of the original.
The reissue is aimed at the usual Gen X/Boomer demographic who would have wanted one when they first appeared, couldn't afford one, but have the cash to burn now.
> but I'm glad they exist for professional musicians to use
The irony is that a professional musician in most cases has less budget to buy those expensive things than someone working e.g. as a teacher or clerc.
Musicians who landed a successful sync licensing deal, have that kind of money. Likewise producers who got points on something that took off.
Anyway, $11,000 for a musical instrument is not that much for a musical instrument even when it is a lot of hamburgers for a given musician.
what is "sync licensing deal"?
Music you made which is now used for adverts or tv or films
Very true especially in this day and age. I think by “professional” I mean someone already successful rather than an up and comer.
Yes. If we assume only 5-10% of musicians with a decent, self-supporting living from composing/playing/performing alone (most others work somewhere in the “music-sector”, e.g. as teacher or as clerc of a record label or collecting society), only 0.5–2.5% have a stable middle-class income from artistic music alone, and roughly 0.01–0.3% have a upper-class income from artistic music alone and can afford to spend 11k£ for such a synthesizer.
In someways this isn’t that unlike the past.
I saw that Pete Townsend has donated his synths to a school in West London.
That includes a Yamaha GX-1 and an EMS modular. That’s some of the rarest (and largest) synths ever made and would have cost the equivalent of hundreds of thousands at that time.
Not too many muscle in the 1970s would have been able to buy a GX-1.
FYI the current run of Korg PS-3300 sold out in minutes even at £11,000.
Unbelievable. I guess because of a lot of bored software people rather than trained musicians.
Probably some of both, but 11k is extremely reasonable for this. If I understand correctly, it has 3x complete subtractive synths per key (not just 3 oscillators into 1 filter) x 49 keys. A typical analog polyphonic synth has maybe 8 voices.
The comparison is more like bulldozer vs. car than BMW vs. Toyota - entirely new capabilities are unlocked
I want to say I agree, but since this is 50 year old tech, wouldn't there be newer mass produced products that do the same thing at a fraction of the price? Even if purely analog it would benefit from economies of scale, miniaturization, etc.
I'm not a synth designer or analog IC engineer, but from my limited knowledge:
Most polyphonic synths use individual chips for the main building blocks such as voltage-controlled oscillators, filters, and amplifiers, such as https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3350-smt. Those are simple analog circuits, but the specific designs that work for synths are not really useful for anything else, so they are a boutique and expensive (relative to complexity) chip. Using those: N chips per voice x 49 keys x 3 voices per key = 147*N expensive chips.
There are also some "whole synth on a chip" available like https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3394-smt at ~$10 each. So best case is ~$1.5k in chips alone for the core of this synth. Some other support circuits are still needed. Then $$$ for big PCBs and a big, noise-free linear power supply.
But even if we could drive the electronics costs down, that doesn't affect the per-unit cost of front panel controls, keybed, or the wood cabinet. Nor the per-unit cost of manufacturing labor, packaging, logistics. Nor the per-project cost of R&D and manufacturing tooling. All of these scale with size and complexity.
So it's no different from other specialized goods - the price gap relative to the "good enough" baseline will always be more than the performance gap suggests because the specialized version inherently sells fewer #units and cannot activate the same economies of scale.
> entirely new capabilities are unlocked
But unfortunately, it will primarily be used by rich YouTube "creators" to recreate some old Jean-Michel Jarre tracks.
The 'current'? They sell out since Korg started this convoluted order "process", wbich isn't even one, since you hear conflicting things in different countries from the 'distributors".
The price of a new Yamaha GX-1 in 1975 was around $60,000, or about $385,000 in today's money.
> If the hardware price tag (over $17,000) is out of reach, Cherry Audio offers an exacting virtual analog emulation for just $49.
:)
Yeah, you can enter the market of (physical) synthesizers for around £100, or for free via the myriad of online/digital ones.
Things like this aren't for making music (anymore), but for collecting.
Title could really use the synth-model (as it is on the site).. how about: One of the rarest and most coveted synthesizers in history, PS-3300, is back (it's still click-baity.. but then it just be PS-3300 - A legend, reborn)
Good point. The full title was too long so I edited it down. Hopefully this is clearer.
Am I the only one who takes these “legends returns“ for a lack of innovation?
Noticed that for a while in triple A gaming. I get it, companies are playing safe, but I don’t want to be sold the same thing over and once again..
Edit: typo
I think it's a bit different in this case. There are plenty of modern synthesisers, from Korg and others
This is intended to be a faithful recreation of a classic synth, for collectors / rich enthusiasts
over the last few years there was a huge demand for analog synthesizers again after them being mostly replaced by digital synths since the mid 90s for 2.5 decades with users demanding from the traditional companies to re-issue the classics
they are classics for a reason and subtractive synthesis is mostly "done", so it's more about bringing classic sound characters due to subtle differences in components / architecture back
I agree and even when they offer something new, they stick close to well established topologies generally just adding in more. I don't need 8 flavors of filter that I have to scroll through with a single button, just give me one or two good ones. Great that you are giving me four envelops but if they all trigger at the same time it is not that useful, provide some other way to trigger them or give us a trigger delay. Distortion after the filter? why? put it before so I can shape it, I can apply post filter distortion outside the box if I want it and there it can take advantage of the envelope's dynamics. But thanks for giving me a tincan reverb and a delay that can't be clocked by the LFOs or even synced.
There are so many simple things they could do to greatly increase what these synths are capable of, but they don't.
Oh, and give me a way to wipe the memory or at least a bank of empty patches so I don't have to delete a preset every single time or make an empty patch to save over the presets or make a file of empty patches on the computer that I can copy over through midi.
I could go on, 30 years of hitting my head against the same walls. I am almost at the point of building my own synth and a bela and a pi-zero would make it pretty easy to do, but I haven't quite gotten irritated enough to do it, would rather spend that time making music.
There's been a lot of innovation in music tech with synths like the MicroFreak.
Korg have made a series of original synths (and VSTs) that are nods to old tech with a lot of updated features.
The VST market in general is a bubbling mix of clonery and originality.
The reissues and clones are for people who want a specific vintage sound but can't afford the insane prices of vintage originals.
> I don’t want to be sold the same thing over and once again.
I don't want to be sold the same music, algorithmically recreated again and again to maximise profit while circumventing copyright law.
A lot of people like analogue music. I certainly do, and I wonder if Korg are anticipating a reaction to the slop.
i am the other one.
Maybe not. But you are clearly not the audience.
It's for collectors. There's no musical value in a polyphonic analogue synthesizer.
This is the oddest statement I've read in a while.
How is there "no musical value in a polyphonic analogue synthesizer"?
There's a lot of unique music written using polyphonic analogue synths. Enough that people clearly like the sounds of subtractive synthesis. If they were only used just to playback tracks written in the 70s, 80s and 90s then they would still have value.
The growth of cheap analogue synths proves it's not just collectors that appreciated the user interface and the sound. There's a legion of people buying Bass Stations, Korgs, Moogs, Behrigners and Eurorack.
If Yamaha could reproduce a modern analogue GX-1 or CS-80 recreation I bet they would get snapped up too.
Sorry, I can't make any sense of your comment.
"Polyphonic analogue synth" means several independent envelope generators and VCFs.
Doing this is pointless -- it increases your synth's costs by orders of magnitude and provides no musical benefit whatsoever except make it slightly easier for piano players with no synthesizer experience to play it.
> The growth of cheap analogue synths
Yes, but literally none of them are doing analogue polyphony. The entire idea is just massively stupid and makes no sense in the 21st century.
What is it that you don't understand?
> Yes, but literally none of them are doing analogue polyphony.
That's simply not true.
Korg Minilogue, Mililogue XD, Prologue, Behringer Pro-800, Sequential Take 5, Prophet Rev2, Prophet-10, Arturia PolyBrute 12, Oberheim OB-X8, Moog One and many more.
Polyphonic analogue synths are popular and very useful actually.
Toys for rich kids with a lack of talent basically.
I'd argue if they had a lack of talent they would prefer modern and digital alternatives - same/more/better sound and tools to churn out stuff with.
They don't need to churn out stuff. They just want to show off what they possess.
You're exactly right. Let me support you by adding some examples:
- Look Mum No Computer: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLluPQLh1xzlLcJd9CbAxE...
- Caught in Joy: https://www.youtube.com/@CaughtInJoy
They just show their stuff, and what they can do with these. No talent, just show. /s
Look Mum No Computer is interesting.
On one hand, he's a bad example, because - at least as far as I know - he builds most of the stuff himself. So he's not showing off expensive synths he bought, which makes this kind of a category error.
On the other hand, he's a great example, because in terms of his musical output, he's a quite bland epigone of artists like Howard Jones or Thomas Dolby of the 80s. And in the playlist you linked of Wendy Carlos.
Now the thing is, I love Howard Jones, Thomas Dolby and Wendy Carlos. But they exist already. I don't need a copy. That's exactly the point I was trying to make.
I don't need yet another YouTuber recreating Axel F. on his freshly bought Jupiter-8. I want new Axel Fs!
He's a great DIYer and explorer of sounds, so that part is true.
However, he's not a sole YouTuber who imitates 80s music to put out videos. The videos are a mere side product.
He builds stuff, experiments and sets up museums[0], or even restores old cars[1]. When I first stumbled upon him, he was restoring old musical instruments in a warehouse and that place was a makeshift museum of sorts.
I believe he doesn't care if his musical output or taste doesn't meet someone's expectations, he's just being himself, and I like him being just that. Maybe he is not breaking new musical grounds, but he's thinking very outside the box while being a tonal copy of somebody else, and this is certainly something.
He would probably buy one of these, or clone it himself, just because he wants to, and this makes him the target audience of this squarely.
[0]: https://www.lookmumnocomputer.com/projects#/this-museum-is-n...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@lookmumnoengine
If it's purchased as an idle showpiece toy, then sure talent is optional.
There will be a few old school Brian Eno adjacent types who'll want one to make noise with ... and some talent will be requisite to avoid sounding like a bag of cats being poked with a stick.
I, for one, specialize my sonic practice in immersive cat-yowl soundscapes…
What are things Ronald Erle Grainer demanded of Delia Derbyshire?