Musical Synthesizers of the 1980s

Lesson Plan - Get It!

Audio:

The music of the 80s is as popular as ever!

Countless radio stations replay the best songs of the era, 80s pop stars keep themselves busy touring and playing concerts for fans old and young, and the music videos that defined the decade still fetch millions of views on internet websites.

If a sound captures the decade, it might be the synthesizer's sound. A synthesizer is a musical instrument that runs on electricity and produces sound.

The element that makes the synthesizer such a unique and special type of musical instrument is its range. Synthesizers can produce staggering sounds by building sounds from their most simple components.

The music you listened to initially relies almost exclusively on synthesizers for its sounds. Listen to an isolated track from the same song of just the synthesizer without the vocals, drums, and other production.

• How would you describe some of the sounds you hear?

• Are you ready to listen to some of the other great songs of the 1980s?

Choose at least three of the sample songs below and carefully listen, trying to isolate the synthesized sounds.

Choose at least one sound per song and describe it using some of these Interesting Sensory Words.

When you are finished, consider these questions.

• How could you tell synthesized sounds from other sounds, like percussion, voice, and conventional musical instruments?
• How do you think synthesizers create different kinds of sounds?
• If you were to classify all possible sounds, how would you do it?

There are many different types of synthesizers, and music production technology is only becoming more sophisticated. There are a few techniques that the earliest pioneers of synthesizers used and reached their peak in the analog synthesizer technology of the 1980s — that 80s sound!

In the Got It? section, learn the basic principles on which those synthesizers were based.