There's this really neat community of people who do live synthesizer jams at home and post the videos to YouTube and Reddit. I discovered this around late 2017 and it quickly became the main source of music I listen to.
For a while now I've been building a playlist/mixtape of the very very best songs from this community, the ones I come back and listen to again and again. It's been stable enough for long enough now I finally feel confident publishing it, so I made it public today:
Playlist: The best electronic music on YouTube
If you follow me on Mastodon, I do a daily "what I'm listening to today" post (usually a Synth YouTube jam), so for the next couple weeks I'll be instead using those posts to post thoughts on the tracks of the playlist one by one. (I'll come back here and post a digest of those when I'm done.)
EDIT: Did you find this post through tag search? The true post is here.
(1/13) "Follow Nina", Caspar Hesselager
This is a 15-minute, totally unearthly piece wherein a loop of Nina Simone singing, fed to an envelope follower, controls a swarm of oscillators "following" her voice. The piece builds incredibly slowly, from indecipherable bass rumbling to distorted singing to indecipherable chaos again as Nina's voice is drowned out by tones flying off on trajectories she merely suggested.
2. "Novation Peak | Ambient", r beny
I've linked r beny from here before; this is my favorite song of his. It's so simple but so powerful, a few chords run through steadily increasing distortion until they become a universe of sound. When I first heard it I just posted "Why did my heart just stop"
Used to when I felt like listening to this track I'd search YouTube for "Peak Ambient". That pretty much covers it.
3. "A Healthy Dose of Dope AF", Aidan Burns-Fulkerson
This one's fun.
This is a good showcase of the jam genre I think of as "misfit toys". It makes use of a drum machine, echo, and tiny keyboard (the last modded with a soldering iron and drill into a CV controller) literally designed as toys; all three used to hang in the checkout lane at Guitar Center. Combined with a high-end 0-coast, the sound is massive.
4. "201002 Moog DFAM, Subharmonicon, Lyra 8", Ryan Bocook
This has a strange vibe but is really catchy. The poster deploys the Lyra and Subharmonicon, two machines designed for ambient music, to create rhythmic pop, and in the background uses Moog's drum machine as a melodic element. Regardless nothing feels mismatched, it's all very cohesive. It feels like the soundtrack to something, but I can't identify what.
5. "Volca Tribal || Volca Drum & Volca Modular", User 173
This… this is the good drone. This piece is based around the two most advanced of Korg's Volca desktop synths (a patchwire modular unit that's basically a Buchla clone, and a physical modeling drum synth with some strange corners in its parameter space) and a LOT of echo. The result: Wwwwoooooooommmmmmmmmm weyyyyeyrrrerrwow
Also I like the little animations.
6. "I Learned A Cool Secret", Ivar Tryti
Elektron has this family of "Grooveboxes" that all have similar casing and interfaces. Their unchallenged master on YouTube is Ivar Tryti, who three years ago got a Digitakt and in time since has posted at least 3 albums' worth of trip-hop excellence. This track combines Elektron's FM synth box with their sampler to build an incredible, blissfully loopy, unnamable energy.
7. "Square (Volca Keys, Volca FM, OP-1, PO-32)", Leonid Zarubin
Mr. Zarubin has a bunch of videos that stand out to me for getting a ton of mileage out of simple, low-end synths and guitar pedals (its not in this one, but some of his best tracks make amazing use of the Casio SA-5 keyboard for children). This one track in particular sticks with me for just having a really great chill feeling to it.
8. "Sempervirens", r beny
Here beny uses a Roli Seaboard MPE controller (a kind of squishy keyboard that records how hard you press and how you slide your fingers around the keys) to play a violin sample synth with the expressiveness of real violins. Run thru chunky reverb, each note becomes a stuttery chorus of violins. Result is an intense feeling of floating in viscous air, slowly orbiting an indistinct point.
9. "Ambient jam with the Arturia PolyBrute", Jay Hosking
The Minibrute is my favorite monosynth, really full sounds. In this video Hosking sat down to do a product demo of the absurdly-expensive polyphonic Brute, but wound up just incidentally composing an independently gorgeous piece of music.
What originally fascinated me about this is it's the only song I can think of that has no drums yet still has a drop.
10. "Comfort Zone", Ivar Tryti
I made a rule for myself no more than two songs from a single artist on this list, so I had to pick just two r beny and now here's the second Ivar Tryti song.
I'm not sure what genre this is. Not quite trip hop. Whatever DJ Shadow and maybe early Four Tet were? A lot of Tryti songs have long piano samples in them; I think he might actually just have a piano somewhere off camera.
11. "AFX Station, Korg Wavestate, Elektron Digitone, Stutter Edit 2", Sinking Feeling
Some unusual synths involved here: Korg's modern wavetable synth and a variant of the Novation Bass Station coproduced with Aphex Twin. What sells it tho is MIDI and a stutter plugin generating quasi-random sequences and changing things up every few seconds to make something unpredictable, haunting and a little bit frightening.
12. "Oscillation", Jeanie
Modular synthesizers are usually about sculpting single finely tuned timbres, and YouTube synth videos are often just to show off one single sound or groove. It's kinda rare to see anything with conventional song structure. Which is fine! But then here's a complete, compelling pop song, with singing!— very good singing!— based around modular synths and a Buchla easel, and it's amazing.
13. "Futuresonus Parva analog poly-synth with LinnStrument demo", Geert Bevin
Another MPE controller, but plugged into a fancypants 24-saw oscillator, so you have a synth being controlled moment to moment with the expressive dimension of a violin. I worry these writeups overemphasize the technical so to be clear the piece performed is gutpunch stunning. This is the power of a human playing a musical instrument.
