Top 40 Synth Quotes & Sayings

Oftentimes the most produced and synth-tastic songs are the ones that end up sounding the best acoustic.

The synth helped us in that it meant you didn't have to be a traditional four-piece band and basically, you didn't have to work too hard.

I'm just a sucker for new-agey synth sounds and instrumentation. I wasn't really thinking of soft rock, but I know that kind of quiet-storm format uses a lot of these sounds.

I'm more of a whiz on the guitar and drums. I hear certain sounds in my head, and I find it easy to translate them into synth sounds, but I'm not really technically-minded.

If you make it sound too much like a synth, it will just sound like a guitar part played on a synth.

In the past, I used to rely on the randomness of working with samples, which was a good way because it threw you in a completely different direction. You just thought, 'What if I take this samba drum and combined it with an '80s synth line or something from this record?'

We're all about exploring new sounds, so we don't have any limits whatsoever about how we go about finding them. We do tend to sample human vocals or sample sounds, which allows you to create your own sound. That's not our only way obviously, but that's a way you can use a sound no one's used before; it's not a sound in the synth. There's a lot of that going on in our songs in general.

I discovered lots of music; electronic synth bands from the mid-'80s like Depeche Mode, Soft Cell and Cabaret Voltaire. My friends and I used to take two-hour trips to the record store in Newcastle and we started buying copies of The Face and i-D. And then I went to art school and as time progressed, I ended up where I am now.

I love power ballads and the earnest lack of irony and emotion that exists in '80s music, along with synth guitars, of course.

I consider my music to be Progressive Synth Pop, which says nothing about what it sounds like, but does describe my basic approach.

I was given a lot of homework: I had to practise ironing as a synth, practise washing up as a synth, cooking a meal as a synth. It's definitely the most prep I've had to do for a role.

OPN is completely off the grid. Its like the slime underneath techno and other synth-oriented music.

I bought this Oxygen midi synth from a flea market in Boston for $10. And then I found a cord in my house that fit it, and so I just started using that to do synth stuff in GarageBand.

In New Order, I played about 95% of the synths. It's not much fun for the other guys in the band when I'm playing my synth parts.

Everyone's [ me, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty] equally involved in all the writing. Normally we'll start with a sample or a drumbeat, or a synth sound or something like that, and that will spark the initial idea. And then we'll write an instrumental sketch of a song, and then we put on a nonsense vocal melody, which is always my favourite bit because it obviously sounds amazing.

My whole life, I've loved '80s synth and goth rock like The Sisters of Mercy and Depeche Mode.

My two young producers, Fernando Perdomo and Chris Price, had to explain to me that there's a division right now between the two sides. They took three living, breathing percussionists to do the beats on the song "Intensity". We've got all kinds of layers, because I kept saying we didn't get all the beats. If you hear a synth, it's because I put my foot down. But I had to fight for it because they wanted it all totally organic.

I think people forget even though we were labelled a synth band because of 'The Hurting,' but keyboards are not our native instruments. Roland's a guitar player and I'm a bass player.

I was really into what is called "minimal synth" - music made strictly on analog synths, and also cold wave, basically a more synth-based version of European post-punk, at that point. So, I decided my own show Minimal Wave was a good way to combine the minimal electronics aspect with the "wave," where guitars come into play.

Legs' wouldn't be 'Legs' unless it had that driving synth bass.

Just moving one keyboard or synth is a pain in the ass.

Nearly all the synth work on Heathen is mine and some of the piano.

I have learned that collaboration are everything to me. Music is a social thing. If there are no ears to hear it, it has no value. I have really loved getting input from other great musicians- like recording strings with my family or making weird synth sounds with tore nissen.

I was making more electronic and synth-based music, and when I changed my name, it helped me grow and liberate myself a little bit.

I definitely see the voice as an instrument: It makes great drums, great synth pads, great everything. Vocals can be so many things, like, "Hey, I'm Michael Jackson, and this is my iconic voice," or a choir of people sounding like Mozart's Requiem. Mariah Carey is my favorite singer because her voice sounds utterly groundless. It's not even a human voice; it almost sounds mechanical.

I started buying records in the 80s. I listened to everything new wave, disco, funk synth-pop, rock, but in my house we were listening to bossa nova, tango, and folk.

If reggae comes from another country, you can have the relationship to reggae that I have to rock. But it's something I grew up with. It's probably something I appreciate more now. In the '80s, I was all about New Wave and synth pop - New Order and Depeche Mode and Eurythmics and Michael Jackson and tons and tons and tons of Prince.

Orchestras are not used to playing the kind of stuff jazz musicians like to play. It requires a lot of rehearsal and recording time, so it's much easier to do on a synth or sampler. So, we came up with that idea.

The reason I like Steve Aoki is because I can trace my love of electronic music all the way back to when I was listening to not just new wave but to YMO [Yellow Magic Orchestra] which, to me, was the ultimate Japanese band and launched synth electronic music.

Brian Eno and Robert Fripp's foray into some artful excursions into some ethereal electric experiments. There was a lot curious activities emerging in London, Amsterdam, and Berlin back then developing some fiercely fuzzy of synth-like effects way outside the norm which really blew the lid off things.

I released that side of things really as kind of an introduction to where I came from musically, back in the day when all I had was a keyboard, a drum machine, and a four-track. So I was doing these little synth-pop ditties, and it's how I learned to write.

The 'Hey Monday' songs were always glammed up to be this big production, and I definitely want there to be some bells and whistles like synth or drum loops, but for the most part, I want a simple yet powerful production.

It's just not an image I had ever put out about myself - the bedroom synth guy. The whole thing seemed ridiculous.

I think an analogue synth is an extension of the natural world.

I definitely see the voice as an instrument: It makes great drums, great synth pads, great everything.

Sometimes I can sit at my computer and find a cool sound, or a new synth patch, and get super-inspired by that and make a track based on that sound. But the piano is where I find the inspiration and come up with the melody.

I have some rhythms on my computers, that are actually called "trance", they go from 1-30 or 40. They're grooves that come on the synth. If I could somehow use them, I would.

I could definitely rock out to Kraftwerk's "Tour De France," Tubeway Army, or Gary Numan. All of that stuff has an infectious beat, but with "Oh Yeah," I can't even identify what's going on. It sounds like typewriter keys, a couple of synth notes and then this really deep "Oh yeah," which I always picture as Andre The Giant on vocals.

I'm pretty much fully digital. I've basically spent a few painstaking days putting sounds into my laptop, just banking them, because I love playing, and I love visually seeing it on my screen and being able to change the sounds more, with different plug-ins. I've created my own synth sounds.

When I was playing with synth players, I was still within a conceptual framework of playing music. When I started playing solo, I became much more aware of the acoustic phenomena that the instruments were producing.