Synth-Aesthesia: YouTube Icon Synthiefrau

RBMA: How exactly did “Christa” become “Synthiefrau”?

SYNTHIEFRAU: Synthesizers have fascinated me for quite a long time now. So, about four years ago, I had the camera rolling while I was playing a bit – just for fun, really – and uploaded the video to YouTube. The response was immediately quite overwhelming, so I just kept on going. At some point, uploading videos became a steady hobby. I’m definitely trying to improve the sound quality of my videos, as I’m currently only recording with my crappy digi-cam. Some of my ‘fans’ – for lack of a better word – have asked for better audio-quality. One of my synth-buddies is going to help me with the digital recording. I’m not much of a software freak; I stick with my analogue synths and try to avoid plug-ins.

RBMA: Definitely a topic I want discuss later on, but for the sake of chronology, what was the music you grew up with? Did synths play an important role in your musical upbringing?

SF: Hmm, sort of, yes... When I was a small kid, my older cousin used to play a Jean-Michel Jarre cassette in his car, which I really enjoyed. I was brought up on everything Neue Deutsche Welle, really –  Nena and these folks – who employed very basic synth riffs. As a teenager I was more into hard-rock and prog. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Uriah Heep, these things.

RBMA: Can you pinpoint the moment you wanted to get engaged with synthesizers yourself?

SF: Sure, and it was pretty much due to my former music teacher. I think I was in seventh or eighth grade or so, and he brought his Korg MS-10 or MS-20, a semi-modular synth, to play around with in class. Apart from me, everyone else lost interest pretty quickly, but I stayed there during my lunch break fooling around with all those buttons and weird sound effects. Back then, I had no idea that this thing was called synthesizer. When I turned 15 or 16 in 1986 or ‘87, I got my first Casio SK1, which could record short samples. It wasn’t really a synth, but playing around with samples sort of led to my fascination with synthesizers.

RBMA: Are you a classically trained musician?

SF: Ha, no way! Not at all. I work a lot with sequencers and you don’t really have to be a master to do what I do. All I do is play a pattern or a theme that leads to another melody and sometimes the whole song is done within ten minutes. But sometimes I play around with my machines and nothing works for days. It really depends on my general mood and the flow of my creative energy.

RBMA: Now, collecting and playing synths can be quite a lonesome thing to do. Were you ever part of a band or a synth-project?

SF: I used to jam with a synth-band, yes, but we never turned it into a proper project. We started with five, then four people and we could never really agree on the musical direction of the project. After a couple of months we just cancelled it. I do have a friend in Ulm who’s also a certified synth-freak who recently called me up to get some new project going. But recording songs and videos is all we do, we don’t play in front of an audience. I think I’d be too much of a messy player for that, to be honest with you.

RBMA: Going back to your fascination with sound modulation, can you describe what’s so interesting about the special aesthetics of synthetic sound textures?

SF: I think it’s the general diversity, really. The Minimoog, for example, is such a simply built machine, but you can imitate everything from flutes, to oboe, to totally obscure sounds. It’s definitely still my favourite synth, just because of its simplicity and great, brutal sound. Besides the Minimoog, I really cherish the synths I have from GRP, a rather young, Italian company. I especially like their prototype, the A3, which is a very small machine with three oscillators and no sequencer. Then there is another prototype called GRP A5 and a big shot called A8, which is a humongous machine that works without patch-cables. I don’t like preset sounds on analogue synths whatsoever. I used to have the Little Fatty which had presets, but I always preferred the Prodigy or my Minimoog, even though I never managed to imitate a specififc sound twice. The GRP A8 has a fantastic sequencer as well, you can do so many different things with that one.

RBMA: Is there something like a scene you consider yourself part of?

SF: Yeah, I used to go to small synth-conventions, like the one in Kufstein, for example. That was basically just a bunch of synth-aficionados bringing their machines. The organisers did that three times, and it grew from 40, to 60 to more than 100 people coming, including Dieter Döpfer, Paolo from GRP and people from Wavelab and Moog. But if I have a question, I simply visit one of the various online synth forums. The internet really helps, of course.

RBMA: Obviously, today’s musical landscape is heavily shaped by bedroom producers solely relying on plug-ins. Do you think software is at all able to replicate the analogue sound? 

SF: I do, and I really admire people who play their own stuff and handle their software well, but I’m just more of a hardware freak. But it’s true, with a laptop you can play every sound that I have, but I would miss the haptic feel. I wouldn’t get much out of playing something on a MIDI-keyboard or clicking a mouse. Korg used to have digital versions of the MS-20 and the Polysix that I found quite decent. But analogue synths just sound more vibrant, more lively.

RBMA: So, what are some of the machines that you cherish the most?

SF: I’d say the GRP A8, the Minimoog, and the Döpfer Dark Energy.

GRP A8

The first thing that I have to say about this is that it’s a very solidly built machine. The GRP A8 is one of those classical studio synthesizers that mostly attracts musicians searching for a classical analogue sound and various modulation possibilities without having to rely on a a patch cable. It works just like a modular system, as all singular modules are internally wired with each other. The Italian GRP A8 is either a mono, or duophonic synth with a brilliant sequencer, which opens up completely new worlds for pure, analogue sound creation. It provides 2 x 8 or 1 x 16 steps and serves as CB and trigger-sequencer as well. Breaks, pauses and rhythmic patterns can be a easily programmed and be applied to each envelope curve individually – and combined with noise, it sounds like an additional drum computer was triggered. Personally, I don’t feel like I’ve used its resonance to the full potential. The day could have 48 hours and I wouldn’t get bored with this synth.

Moog Minimoog

As opposed to its ‘modern’ GRP colleague, the Minimoog follows a much simpler structure. Not despite, but because of that, the Minimoog ranges amongst my definite all-time favourites. Nothing compares to its specific sound. Its sheer simplicity and brute sound make it legit forever – even newer Moog models such as the Voyager can’t keep up.

Döpfer Dark Energy

Apart from these two mentioned above, I’d also like to highlight a tiny – compared to the GRP almost inconspicuous – synthesizer, customized by Dieter Döpfer: The Dark Energy. Unlike its predecessors in typical Döpfer-grey, this model comes with a very appealing vintage look that I really dig. After a short induction period, the Dark Energy is really easy to handle. Despite the fact that it only employs one VCO, you can achieve the most radical bass sounds by modulating the pulse width and filter resonance. I mostly use it through the LFO and get the most far-out sounds out of this little thing.

RBMA: An analogue synth collection requires quite a lot of space...

SF: Very true. You can’t see it in my videos, but my bed sits in the very same room as most of my machines [laughs]. I only have three rooms, so yeah. I don’t really plan to extend my collection due to my lack of space – and money. I recently split up with my husband and don’t have the small change to hunt down new machines. Plus, I don’t want to sell any of my synthesizers, so I think for now the collection will stay the way it is. But honestly, it’s not even that big, I only own about 12 analogue machines, so there are folks much worse than me! A friend of mine from Lutherbach, Switzerland, Martin Hollinger, runs a small synth museum. He owns over 350 synths. Everytime I visit him I sleep right between two Moogs (laughs). That’s great. He also owns some Russian Polyvox synths that are really nice.

RBMA: Most people interested in these older machines have a knack for electronics in general. How about you?

SF: Well, I can handle minor repairs myself, but I’m not a very skilled technician. Although, I have to tell you this one, because sometimes I really think these machines have a life of their own. My Juno 60 for example used to break down every time for no apparent reason. I couldn’t find any logical solution, so I just placed it somewhere else and voila – it started working again! Just by moving it to another spot in the room it now works perfectly fine. But the best story is in regards to my Moog – I don’t know if you already knew, but I actually knew Bob Moog personally. I mean, we never physically met, but we called each other every now and then and he invited me to come over to his house in Ashville, North Carolina. Of course I wanted to go there immediately, but I couldn’t afford the flight back then. That was in March 2005, I think, and he died in August. I knew about his condition of course, but I didn’t know it was that bad. The thing is, on the very same day Bob Moog died, my Minimoog broke down. You just couldn’t play it, as the oscillators acted totally weird. So, two days later I wanted to bring it to my Swiss buddy Hollinger to fix it, and all of a sudden it worked like nothing ever happened. It was just like the Moog had taken notice of its inventor’s passing. Of course this is stupid, but you know...

RBMA: How did you get in touch with Bob Moog in the first place?

SF: That’s actually quite a funny story. My former neighbour, Berthold, who is also a musician and likes to drink a bit too much [laughs]... I don’t drink at all, but he came over and had a couple of drinks. So, he was pretty wasted when I told him that my biggest wish was to talk to Bob Moog, as he is my hero. So, my drunk friend asked me, where this “Mister Moog” lived. I never thought about the incident afterwards, but apparently he went home and called up the American equivalent to our Telekom and asked for Bob Moog’s number. Then he simply called him up to tell him that his biggest fan was living in Germany and whether it was possible to get him on the phone to say hello on my birthday. So, on May 16th, I had guests over at my house, the phone rang and it was Mr Moog himself talking to me. I couldn’t believe it! We talked for almost two hours, despite my crappy English. At one point he just said, “You know Christa, we can also talk in German!” His grandfather was German, so we just switched languages all the time. He invited me to come over to his place to stay with him and his wife Iliana. By far, it was the most amazing gift ever. We basically spoke every week since then. It was hard to witness how his health condition got worse so rapidly. He was such a nice, lovely person.

Check the full catalog of Synthiefrau clips on her YouTube channel here.