Seven electronic songs, two rough and challenging, three easy and melodic, two more rough and challenging.
- "Lessness", Tom Djll
A mesmerizing abstract journey. If you're used to "music" this track might be a good intro to ambient sound collages. Let it guide you from point to point, a soundtrack for images in your mind maybe.
The parts this is made from are kind of interesting: An honest to goodness VCS-3— the closest thing 1971 had to desktop eurorack, famously used by Pink Floyd— mixed in with a modern desktop eurorack, mixed with an ordinary trumpet.
- "LOST SOULS - MODBAP", leonardoworx
This is a fun, single-minute hip hop jam with an MPC drum machine, Make Noise's desktop modular synths and some Nas samples.
90s west coast hip hop always had a thing for 70s east coast synthesizers, so there's something that feels like a natural extension to try to do that style of hip hop¹ with the west-coast synth methods² used here.
¹ Except Nas is east coast.
² And Make Noise is in North Carolina.
- "Ambient then heavy with Moog One, Subsequent 37, Hologram Microcosm, and eurorack drums", Jay Hosking
Jay runs a Patreon; the deal seems to be people crowdfund him to buy the most expensive synthesizers in existence, in exchange he makes music with them and posts it. I imagine a sort of community synth collection, with Jay as the sort of high priest who Plays With The Gear on behalf of the crowd. As such his videos have a heavy focus on process even by Synth YouTube standards, with floating captions often explaining what he's using to make the music and why he's doing what he's doing.
The captions in this song explain it as "I wanted to create something that starts dreamy and goes heavy", and he does deliver on that, using a pair of Moog keyboards for huge padscapes then dropping in dense IDM beats from a purpose-built modular skiff box.
- "Live Techno Jam #6 - Roland TR6S - Quadrantid Swarm - Minitaur - BlueBox - Blofeld - NTS1", Spadehead
This is just a good, thoughtfully-composed basic four-on-the-floor techno track with a table of 2010s-2020s desktop synths and a really nice 90s feeling. Good background/focus music. I like the obviously-synthesized-strings voice.
One detail maybe worth going into for a moment is the "Minitaur", the little black box in the upper left. This is a 2012 desktop recreation of the gorgeous-sounding bass voice from an ancient and very weird looking Moog synth meant to be played with your feet like organ pedals (for example because your hands are occupied doing a guitar solo). Search YouTube for "Moog Taurus Rush" if you want to see what this looks like.
Jon, like Jay Hosking, is constantly pushing highly-developed synth music to his YouTube, but rather than the community/"let me show you how I made this" focus it all seems very personal. A lot of his video titles use words like "meditation".
About a year ago there was a short period Jon posted a bunch of absolute bangers all in quick succession and this was my favorite from that block, a futuristic synth-rock track based around the Moog Grandmother and the synth "trio" from Make Noise.