Talk:Surfing on Sine Waves

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There is a fair amount of bollocks in this write-up ;-)

For example, that stuff about Richard D James having "built his own synths" is now generally acknowledged to just be another of his little fibs he told to journalists.

As to the instruments used on the album, there is certainly no "piano" (there's lots of yucky digital late80s fake-piano-presets, yes). And there's no "early synthesizers" (which would mean instruments from the 1960s or before!) - rather, there's tons of cheap 80s digital stuff (sounds like a Yamaha DX100 or similar), usually smothered in cheap digital reverb.--feline1 21:26, 30 July 2005 (UTC)


  • Watch your tone, you could have phrased your comments in a more subtle way >:(. First off, he may or may not have built his own synthesizers, but he's certenly customized a few of his own (source image). Secondly, we cannot confirm that actual pianos were used on the album, but the piano "sound" is there, wheather or not it was digital. I agree that "early synthesizers" is a misleading term, but calling these "cheep 80's digital stuff" is an insult to the music and the musician. The Roland TB-303 is considered one of the most influential electronic instruments ever, and just because it was cheep at certain times and from the 80's does not mean it is a bad thing. --Insomniak 23:15, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
    • Yeah but there is a wiki link to "piano", which gives the misleading impression that the album contains pianos. This is quite wrong (It's Drukqs that features a lot of sequenced prepared MIDI-player pianos). The generic digital piano sounds he used were pretty ubiquitous on a lot of 'dance music' records in the late 80s/early 90s (remember Black Box's 'Ride on Time' etc etc?)

I don't see why you think "cheap 80s digital stuff" is an insult?! For a start, it's factually true. And young Richard got some quite tasteful sounds out of it. (It's hardly surprising that a teenage bedroom musician like him could only get his hands on cheap digital retail synths like a DX100, is it?). For what it's worth, I've always been rather fond of this album. As for the "customized syths" - fib or not, can you really hear much stuff on the record that needed a 'customized' synth to perform? --feline1 23:26, 30 July 2005 (UTC)