I'm Amy Sandoval, I am a music mentor who helps self-trained musicians overcome perfectionism, gain musical freedom, and develop confidence.
I'm a lifelong musician, songwriter and teacher of music. I created SoundPaint as a way to bridge that gap between musicians and non-musicians/music lovers, and create a safe-space for learning and exploring music together.
Here we explore sound and creativity using a mix of electronic and analog instruments in our weekly music sessions.
Educational videos for musicians, music lovers, enthusiasts of sound creation and the synth curious
Subscribe to my channel, and go sound exploring with me every week!
The first instrument I owned, in third grade, was a Zen-on soprano recorder -- the standard-issue ones from music classes in the early 1980s. My teacher was a wonderfully authentic grown-up hippie folk musician. Her classroom was stocked with the whole array of Orff Schulwerk instruments, like xylophones and marimbas and zithers and bongos, which I also loved playing, from first grade onwards. I realize in retrospect how lucky my classmates and I were. We got to grow up in a public school system that believed it was just as important to give us the gift of music alongside reading, arithmetic, history, and the other academic subjects. Lucky, too, that they were able to recruit such a talented and inspiring teacher. As you say, you never forget -- and I never forgot the basic fingerings from that recorder. So when an acquaintence dared me to try out her bagpipes, I was immediately able to play a couple of simple tunes despite never having held the pipes or a chanter before. Good times for us all, and a memorable bucket-list item crossed off for me -- and entirely thanks to becoming friends with that simple instrument in my childhood.
When first getting your new studio monitors or headphones, listen to a lot of music on them so that you know what your setup sounds like. Even the most expensive speakers won't help your mix if you don't have a reference, and monitors sound nothing like a hifi setup.
Those chords are used in many scary movies to heighten your senses so you could really feel the fear from the scary scene you’re watching. Monks chanted the chord to enlighten themselves or heighten their senses
I really have no idea why I thought yellow, I thought it before I even realized this was from a music perspective. The letter C is just yellow to me. I tried changing my answer to blue but changed it back because I felt like it was yellow and was sure that'd be it and I'm really curious why that's the most common answer because I don't even know why I picked it
I don’t think it’s entirely due to the sound of the notes. At least for older gen-x people, they’ve found that everyone agrees on what color each letter of the alphabet is. And the reason for that is that we all had a standard set of alphabet refrigerator magnets as children, always with the same color/letter pattern. C is definitely a warm color, yellow/orange.
They used fm synthesis for sega genesis soundtracks very great sounds. I know many keyboards and drum machines from the 80s and 90s when you mix them it gets spicy.
I always feel the songs I make have very blocky and "snap to the grid" kinda flow to them, a far cry from the OG Rock songs that flow like water. I guess that's the price we pay when we use DAWs.
My go-to synths during those days was the Roland Juno-2, and the Yamaha FB-01 (basically DX7 module). Both used the other important 80s technology, MIDI. Without MIDI to sync those samplers, synths, and 808s, all those pop wouldn't have been possible.
Well, it's "that 80s sound" for the small part of the world that is Western. The bigger music of the time was happening in Bollywood films, which had a bigger audience, and in various Chinese styles such as Cantopop, and these scenes didn't really have the traits described.
One big element for me is the Strat in the 2nd or 4th position. I swear they just DI'd it for a lot of songs but it's unmistakably quacky. Like a Prayer is a good example.
Instruments are just a part of it. I have a humble little channel where I, amongst other things, recreate music on primarily organs but also synthesizers, so I have great experience in figuring out what is actually played. If I record a typical 1980's song it will take me 4 hours, while a typical 1970's song will take 6 hours, and that doesn't include mixing. In the 1970's there were a lot of details in the music - some of them hardly noticeable for the average listener - there was the singer or singers, the bass, the drums, the guitar, and the keyboards, but there were also a brass group somewhere, a string group, suddenly there was a flute that just played for a few seconds, then maybe a french horn, and many other details. (listen to 'If I can't have you' by Yvonne Elliman to hear what I mean) It was very orchestral - sometimes almost symphonic. In the 1980's everything became much more 'in your face' and direct: All the little details were gone and instead the focus was power! (and way too much reverb on the drums) The intro to 'Jump' is a prime example of this approach.
The bands of the 80's were very competitive with each other and were always pushing themselves to do better. Like all things when the men in suits take over the priority is making money!
Synth brass was all over the place, no matter the synth. Also "choir aahs", orchestra stabs, synth flutes and other tacky stuff too cheesy by today's standards. The 80s also saw the rise of the rompler workstations at the end of the decade.
I'm not sure what this was about. Okay so reading the title of the video: musicians are saturating a market that is free. It has all changed. We just do it as a hobby, and I buy the ads to push the videos to the masses, all out of my own pocket; I am hoping to go viral. That's all any of us can hope for at this point, and I hear it only lasts 15 minutes anyway.
I think the most 80s sound was: early digital reverb, gated reverb, chorus on everything, synths in every song, very "clean" bright sounds were in fashion. In addition to analog synths, the DX7 had a massive impact, so did the Fairlight sampler, Emu Emulator sampler, Akai S-series samplers. Lexicon reverbs were the dog's nuts, huge SSL mixing boards were derigeur, the 808, 909, 707, Linndrum, later on the MPC were the big hitters with electronic drum sounds.
Very nice episode and lot's of true thoughts, Jump was all Oberheim OBXa though, My strong sonic memories involve Oberheim DMX, TR-808, and Yamaha DX-7 though i never liked the FM synthesis, And all time Synth for me is The MiniMoog, Thank you dear <3 cheers
I'm sorry to say, and I'm far from an expert, but the synths you mentioned as used in those memorable hits do not correspond with what's currently mentioned on well-respected webpages contributed to those hits. I know not better than Jump used an Oberheim, and I just checked the Wikipedia page on West End Girls.
