Should this be a subjective trope?: Synthesizeritis

I don't think one can say that use or overuse of synths is a good or bad thing in itself, although the article appears to be a little one-sided on the issue. At the very least, shouldn't it be a subjective trope?

I would have preferred name that simply conveyed "A whole lot of synth," rather than making it sound like a disease.

Searching for plausible mechanisms.

I think that, as it currently stands, the article takes too much of a "synthesizers = bad" attitude, rather than the "too many synthesizers or over-reliance on synthesizers = bad" perspective one might have expected.

It should be a subjective trope, at the very least, if not renamed.

I agree this should be "overuse = bad" not just any piece of music that uses Synth.

Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!

I believe there's something similar in the Queen entry on the New Sound Album page, which I think suggests that the presence of synths on their albums made them automatically bad.

Maybe a rewrite to give it a more neutral tone is in order. I recall seeing this listed on some articles (I think Wings may have been one of them, though I'll need to double check that…) with a "Tropes Are Not Bad" disclaimer next to it.

edited 28th Dec '10 9:43:46 AM by 0dd1

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.

I don't believe it's really possible to make a trope named Synthesizeritis neutral...but maybe that should be embraced, and this dedicated to when the heavy or ostentatious use of synth has been cited as having ruined an otherwise good work? Simply having a lot of synth seems like it should be branched off of Electronic Music or something.

edited 28th Dec '10 12:23:31 PM by MoCellMan

Searching for plausible mechanisms.

It seemed to me that this was more about people in music hating synthesizers, more than the instrument itself or how it's used in a song.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

There is a neutral trope in there, so it should rather be rewritten, and even renamed, than marked as subjective.

edited 28th Dec '10 1:21:37 PM by EternalSeptember

If it's simply using a synthesizer, then other instruments should be tropes. If you mean something else though, than please tell us what.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

Another major problem with this trope was that it was mixed up with Auto-Tune, which I think was created later. Here is all that I removed on that suspicion:

[from description]
Again, the attempt to drive the sound into the sonic Uncanny Valley is deliberately invoked in several instances. A particularly notorious application is the Auto-Tune plugin, which attempts to correct the pitch of out-of-tune singers. It does what it promises, but the result often sounds unnatural (think "Believe" by Cher or "Still Alive" from Portal for extreme examples, though both of these cases are deliberate: in the former, the producer was goofing around and Cher liked what she heard; in the latter, the singer is actually portraying a computer).

• As was mentioned in the section intro, the Cher song "Believe" is one of the most prominent examples. It was notable for two reasons: it was the first successful song to use Auto-Tune, and it made her the oldest female to have a number one Billboard hit. (She was 52 at the time.)
  • And who did she dethrone? Grace Slick, of Starship ("We Built This City").
• Among the strangest examples (or aversions, it's not clear) of this was Neil Young's largely forgotten experimental album Trans. On several of the tracks (including a remake of "Mr. Soul"), the vocals were 'sung' using a Vocoder. According to Young, the album was in part inspired by the difficulty which his son, who has severe cerebral palsy and used the Vocoder to speak, had trying to communicate with other people. Others feel that it was also meant as a reaction to the rather jangly synthpop coming out at the time, however. Regardless of the intended message, the album was a flop, though some critics saw it as a bold effort.
  • "Transformer Man", one of the most synth-heavy songs on the album, later received a much more organic arrangement in his 90's MTV Unplugged performance.
• Kanye West's album 808s & Heartbreak features nothing but autotuned vocals, apparently because West thinks autotuners are the funnest things ever. Judging by the weirdness of the video for "Love Lockdown", the album's first single, the sterility was a desired effect.

• The electro/synth pop group Electric Valentine has also been infected by the Autotune-itis and Vocoderitis bugs.
• April - Hanami, from Super Eurobeat 196. Not even the Eurobeat genre is safe from the vocoder virus.
  • Also, David Dima's Eurobeat remake of Duran Duran - Save A Prayer uses the vocoder a bit too much.
• With her latest album, She Wolf, especially the titular single, even Shakira has acquired vocoderitis, among other things. When will it stop?
• Rediscover is a case of a band with terminal Vocoderitis; seriously, they can't go through at least one song without the thing. Doesn't necessarily make them bad, however, though Your Mileage May Vary.
• The song "Still Alive" from Portal evokes this trope on purpose, and it works.
• Hip-hop/R&B artist T-Pain, whom the T-Pain Effect is named after.
  • With a hung lampshade in this video with what sounds like GLaDOS's younger brother.
• Imogen Heap makes creative use of vocal processing, both in her solo work and with Frou Frou. Her breakout solo hit "Hide and Seek" consisted solely of her voice fed through a keyboard vocoder.
• Any nu-Italo dance song that uses a vocoder or autotuner, eg Eiffel 65 - "Blue", Kim Lukas - "All I Really Want", Sarina Paris - "Just About Enough".
• Don't Copy That 2, the sequel to Don't Copy That Floppy, uses Autotune on B Sheba's vocals during the bridge.
• Heidi Montag used an autotuner for her debut album Superficial, though unlike other examples here, this is one that most people aren't complaining about, as Montag's normal singing voice isn't very nice to listen to to say the least, listen to her earlier song "Higher" and you'll be glad she tuned her voice, trust me on that one!
• Although most of their songs use a vocoder or Auto-Tune to some degree, Kandystand's "On Another Planet" and their remake of The Cult's "She Sells Sanctuary" have vocoderitis to the point of Creepy Monotone. Is it a real person, or a completely synthetic voice? Luckily, "Love Invasion", their latest single, uses the singer's real voice (mostly).
• Symphony of Science is a series of music videos of various science popularizers, especially Carl Sagan. The original shows are taken and auto-tuned so that the scientists are singing about their different topics.

edited 28th Dec '10 4:32:04 PM by Prfnoff

Well, I think it's pretty clear what to do with those examples: move them to the Auto-Tune page.

Accidental mistakes are forgivable, intentional ones are not.

I agree that something should be done about this page. Either this article should be about Synth in general or about the overuse the synthesizers. Right now it is somewhere in the middle. If it is about synth in general, it should be renamed to simply Synthesizer and rewritten to have a more neutral tone. If it is about the overuse of synthesizers in music that doesn't need it, the page should become subjective and possibly renamed to something along the lines of Gratuitous Synthesizer to lessen the negative feel of the article. However the latter option may just lead to unnecessary complaining.

I have an idea: Why not redefine the trope so that it's clearly about a band making and album with lotsa synth when, perviously, they had used little to none. So In Through the Out Door would go under this trope, but 808s and Heartbreak would not.

I like the above and would also throw in shows that used to not use them in the sound track. Power Rangers is a good example, as they started out using either real instruments or samples (with lots of electric guitar), went to synth in the middle seasons, and back to real instruments.

I'd also point out in some section (Real Life?) that the whole country went through a phase of liking synth when it first came out, when we had previously preferred real instruments. Again, the theme is that regular instruments were used before. Specific examples of shows/music that always used synth would be unnecessary.

Everyone Has An Important Job To Do

Any name ending in "-itis" connotes a disease, so going by the idea of "suddenly synths", the trope would have to be renamed. As it stands, the name is appropriate for a trope that complains about synthesizers, and should be a subjective trope. The trope does define a good standard: the point at which the synthesizers cause the music to become mechanical. To me, the synths on In Through The Out Door sound very organic, but someone else might disagree, which still leaves this as a subjective trope. And then again, sounding mechanical is sometimes the entire point, and should not be considered as a "bad" thing. Which makes the whole thing a mess.

I also like the idea proposed above. Suddenly Synth wouldn't be a bad name for it. Whatever we do here I think this should be objective not subjective because as a subjective it would invite complaining and come across as a condemnation of synthasizers. No matter how many music fans hate synths we have to take the stance that Tropes Are Not Bad. I'll bet if this site existed in the past there could have been a page for Electric Guitaritis because people thought they sounded too mechanical and not organic enough.

edited 4th May '11 12:36:57 PM by djbj

Well, we already have New Sound Album... Suddenly Synth sounds like it's just a very specific version of that. I don't think having a synthesizer-focused version of that would be all that useful.

Given that we don't have trope pages for other instruments for commonality reasons, I think we probably should just cut.

Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.

We don't have this for other instruments, but synthesizers are more controversial. I love them and hate to see them insulted, but I'm not in favor of cutting the page, because enough people hate them that it needs to be acknowledged. It may intersect with New Sound Album, but subtropes are not bad, are they? Maybe the definition needs to be narrower. It's also something of a Dead Horse Trope. In the 1970s, synths were new and people were still learning how to play them, and hard rock albums would have "no synthesizers were used" disclaimers. Then they became more versatile and affordable in the 1980s, so everybody had one, and got corrupted by their power.

• thread necromancy*

I've just cleaned some serious natter from the examples and I must agree that the trope is pretty controversial. I gather someone tried to make the description more neutral, but the examples still make me weep. It's a mix of "synths are evil!", "they use synths", "good bands making bad synths". And natter. God, that natter.

I think we have two options: cut it or make it neutral (much like Three Chords and the Truth).

edited 12th Jun '11 12:35:49 PM by AnnaTheCrow

This article can't stay as is. It's written from the point of view of a fan of genres A, B, C to express a dislike of musical instruments and techniques X, Y, Z.

Stuff like this has to go:

• "Many fans of Heavy Metal or other live-oriented forms of music consider Synthesizeritis to be a disease"
• "The line between "flashy" and "ridiculous" is different for everybody."
• "fans of Three Chords And The Truth have very low tolerance, if they don't dismiss all electronic sound as "not music" to begin with."
• Potholing "fans of the trope" to Rain Man.

The last few paragraphs are remarkably petty, mocking particular sounds from certain soundcards!

As a subjective trope it's just hatedom. I strongly suspect we wouldn't keep it. I had a go at unearthing an objective trope from all that: Sandbox/Synthesizeritis. Does this seem like a viable approach? It would also need a new name and any examples which are just "This isn't to my taste, stuff like this is a disease" would go. It would be a radical change but hopefully a more positive one than just cutting it.

edited 15th Jun '11 11:16:53 PM by Camacan

One thing I would also like to see is a Useful Notes page explaining how synths (and audio effects in general) actually work. I had one typed up a while back, but I never did anything with it and it may well be lost now...

online since 1993 | huge retrocomputing and TV nerd | lee4hmz.info (under construction) | heapershangout.com

Cut up like that, it doesn't make much sense. And the name is terrible anyway... Sigh... why don't we just cut the thing, make a new trope with title like Synthetised Sound, put in some short note about the use in creating "inhuman" vibe in music and leave it at that? Nobody is going to cry over that wreck anyway. :d

Maybe we could make a counter-trope to this? Like, I dunno, Everything's Better with Synthesizers?

I do agree that there's a lot of synth-hate in this trope, though, which verges upon offensive to synth enthusiasts such as myself. While guitar is actually my primary instrument, I'd have to say I like synths more in many ways. If programmed effectively, a synth can be as expressive as any instrument, with the added advantage of having more available timbres than any other one. Not dynamic enough? Add some velocity control to the volume, and maybe to the filter cutoff (or if using FM synthesis, to the modulation operator's — or operators', as the case may be — volume, which can have much the same effect as a filter does in subtractive synthesis) as well, so it gets louder as well as brighter when you play harder. Need vibrato? Add it to the mod wheel or aftertouch (a feature most synths and MIDI keyboards these days have that allows you to control various parameters by pressing the keys down harder after you've hit a note or chord, hence the name "aftertouch"). You could even make it so the depth of the vibrato is controlled by how hard you're pressing on the aftertouch, and make the speed controllable by the mod wheel. These are just a couple of examples of how a synth can be made more expressive and human-sounding; there are easily dozens more, although most of them have to do with assigning parameters to the various performance controls at your disposal. Even if you're using a sequencer instead of a keyboard, this stuff can all be automated via the sequencer.

But to sum things up, I think that the idea of "synths = inhuman and robotic" is just plain silly, and it really demonstrates a lack of knowledge of both synths and the music featuring them.

Although I must add that Synthesizeritis is the perfect description for the reason that '80s pop sounds so extremely dated today, along with overuse of digital reverb units, which were still quite new, having been only introduced in the late '70s, as well as chorus, which now has an unfortunate tendency (along with flanging, a very closely related although usually different-sounding effect that was also used almost to death in the '80s) to make any guitar or bass with anything but the tiniest amount of it added to it sound like it came straight out of 1986. Just add a compressor pedal before it, preferably an MXR Dyna Comp or a clone of it, and run it all into a clean amp, and boom, '80s guitar sound.

I'm rambling. Sorry.

edited 27th Jun '11 3:01:05 PM by HolyKatana

Huh. The more I think about it, the more it looks like a completely useless page. We just dismissed all the points it could have. And "all 80's music had synths and now it sounds funny/dated" is barely good enough for an example.

Maybe you (or someone else who knows about synths a lot) could do a Useful Notes page on them and we could end the suffering of this thing...