What's the greatest synth piece you've ever heard?

What’s the greatest synth piece you’ve ever heard?
Links to sources so people can hear it please…
Rules: You can only post ONE piece. It’s not your top five, it’s the ONE greatest you ever heard!

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Not a pure synth piece, but the solo from ELP’s “From the Beginning” was the first thing that came to mind.

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minimal yet meaningful in my head…this piece repeatably haunts me

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I do not have a favourite song per se (there are many good fish in the sea) but one of the songs I like alot is this one…

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(I meant to go first but had video/audio/picture conversion troubles…)

This should probably be titled: “The greatest synth artist you’ve never heard about”.

I came across Serge Leroy on last.fm, before they had to close down shop in Denmark. In other places in the world you still might be able to hear his work on last.fm.

To me, this is nothing short of pure genius! It’s a long piece, so strap yourself in for half an hour un-interrupted, and promise yourself a special experience. It starts slow’ish and then works itself up to quite some crescendos. It’s got many movements and phases to it.

Serge is a special destiny. I’m in email contact with him, and have a secret desire to lure him once more on to the stage, because I believe he has so much to offer to the world.

I really hope you’ll enjoy this!

(sorry this is not HIFI but it’s a video made from an MP3, so…)

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Well, it’s incredibly hard to pick just one, so might as well make it a long one! :slight_smile:


My second one would have been the Barbieri Boileroom set, but I won’t put the link so as to comply with the rules :wink:
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Please do! Rules need to be broken, and Lars also posted two links :slight_smile:

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Oh no I didn’t! I only helped out the previous fella who forgot to post his link :smile:

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:slight_smile:

Well, I can’t whittle it down to one ultimate best-ever favourite, so I’ll go with something that seems underappreciated, a bit minimalist, Richard Lainhart: White Night.

From the description on yt:

The piece consists of a dense, continuous four-note chord, each note in the chord recorded in a separate pass to one track on a Scully 4-track studio recorder. Each track consists of a single sine wave oscillator which is frequency modulated by a group of eight additional sine wave oscillators. Those oscillators are all tuned to different tones, each harmonically related to the fundamental chord tone. The amplitude of each harmonic oscillator is continuously varied under the control of an individual sequencer, and each sequencer is free-running - that is, the sequencers are not synchronized to each other, but rather running in their own independent timebases.The result is a continuously-changing complex harmonic waveform which modulates the frequency of the chord tone oscillator, generating a continuously-changing complex timbre based on the fundamental pitch of the note.

Without wanting to buck the system, I’ll just add that my sms notification is Klaus Schulz’s “Xylotones” from Mirage :slight_smile:

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Wow, that’s interesting, I really like it!

I just love this piece:

I love its minimalism and simplicity, I love the fact that it is just one monosynth and some delay, not a huge rack of synths. Granted, it is a MiniMoog, and some very niece effects pedals, but it is still simplistic in its setup.

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Such a classic maybe doesn’t need to be said, but the OG Subotnick Buchla jam - Silver Apples of the Moon < 3

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I thought about one thing ,and then thought longer and I had 50 (eliane radigue, JMJ, ELP, …), so I’ll come back to the one I had in mind. Maybe I’ll find the perfect one with more reflexion but my first answer would be this synth solo. Incredibely well written, structured and performed:

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The bass sound in this one is full of lust.

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Nice! Make me thing about this fat one

Reminds me of one of the best game soundtracks (in my opinion at least!):

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Yeah that soundtrack is great! Made by NIN as well.

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In that Jamiroquai song I’m not totally sure if it’s synthesised or it’s a guitar with an octaver. I could get that sound with Nopskate and Flame… it sounds quite cool.