The Neve Synthesiser
About The Neve Synthesiser
Re-Imagining The Old Analog Recording Console As A Synthesizer
Throughout history engineers all over the world have put endless effort into creating noise-free recording consoles in order to capture the true nature of the sound source. But what if these recording consoles were the sound source? Could the recording studio ever be seen as an instrument? Artists like Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, and Conny Plank amongst others, used technological limitations and noise as key tools in their creative process. Throughout this project I will analyse a particular noise, the Larsen Effect, best known as Feedback.
The idea is to organise and understand a behaviour as unpredictable as a Feedback and make it predictable, usable. Any instrument played for the first time might seem intimidating and unpredictable, yet as we spend time with it and start to understand its patterns we are able to control these sounds. In order to deliver a usable product I have decided to organise this instrument by and adhere to the common western musical scale.
Do the sounds resulting from the process relate perceptually and in a musically useful manner? What I am searching for is a way to transform feedback generated sound into a sampled performable instrument In order to achieve this I will have to unlearn what I have learned about sound processing and sound design and keep an open mind to new concepts that might sound ‘wrong’ or ‘impossible’. The success of our efforts will be judged by what we hear. This paper documents the developments of The Neve Synth inspired from Skweeel (Philippe Chambin, 2014) and The Studio as a Compositional Tool (Brian Eno, 1979) through to its public presentation.
