Trax Retrowave and the Philosophy of Limitations

Renaissance painters used to make their own oil paint by grinding scarce and expensive pigments and mixing them with linseed oil. These days you can buy the equivalent in a ready-to-use tub of paint for a few pounds. No sweat.

The same applies to a lot of the tools and materials used to make the art of the past millennium. They're now cheaply available from most art shops, to most people, almost instantly

When it comes to film and music, the advent of cheap computing made the rare, expensive tools of the past (or their equivalents anyway) available to pretty much everyone. Whereas a decent movie camera was a bit of a luxury half a century ago, you can probably achieve similar results with the standard camera on your mobile phone.

Of course, this is a bit of an oversimplification. No pre-made paint will have the exact same hues of those made by Jan Van Eyck. No digital camera will give you the exact same feel and possibilities of 16mm film. No virtual Minimoog will exhibit the exact same tonal properties of the real instrument... But they will probably come pretty close.

Which brings me to the subject of synthesisers.

Nowadays, anyone can have a go at being Jean-Michelle Jarre, Kraftwerk or Giorgio Moroder - and create much more besides - with a bunch of software plug-ins available online (and mostly free). All you need is a computer and a bit of time and imagination. 

This democratisation is a wonderful thing, but also presents a problem: Everything is available - all of the time. The possibilities are endless. It can be confusing and paralysing.

This may explain why you may want to escape this state of crippling, endless choice. And instead 'make your life difficult' by using rather awkward, limited tools - thereby imposing artificial restrictions and limitations in the hope of focusing your efforts on a small set of possibilities. 

And that finally brings me to the Trax Retrowave. 

What do you do with a monophonic analog synthesiser that can only produce one tone at a time and has a limited palette of sounds? An attempt to answer that question, and try to showcase the capabilities of the Retrowave is the demo below, kindly featured by Trax Synthesisers on their official website:



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