Every few years I go deep into a synthesizer rabbit hole – not just in terms of listening habits, but in exploring and playing the instruments (although my keyboard skills are laughably rudimentary at best). This time, the cycle was precipitated – literally – by the combination deep freeze and snowstorms that hit us at the end of January; ice dams caused leaks in our house, and it was discovered when I noticed the ceiling in my office was dripping water on my Korg Minilogue XD.

I like a lot about the XD, but the 4-voice polyphony and mini keys always frustrated me, as I like my hamfisted atonal chord work to be more complex-sounding. In looking for the bright side of the damage to our house, I thought for sure that the water damage would net me some insurance funds to get a bigger, fancier synth to bang away on. As it turns out, however, analog electronics are more robust than expected and the synth came back with a clean bill of health. So on the plus side, I’ve rediscovered how great this thing can sound – polyphony limitations aside – and it now lives on my desk alongside an Arturia Keylab Essential Mk3 MIDI controller which I got for a steal in the couple weeks I thought I was upgrading.

The main draw of the Keylab was the bundled Arturia Analog Lab soft synth plugins which has great-sounding, if limitedly customizable, vintage synth presets. The out of the box sounds are excellent but a big bonus is that Analog Lab is one of the supported plugins at Reverb Machine, which fascinatingly deconstructs and rebuilds the sounds of indie-leaning artists, and provides presets for a lot of them for various platforms, including for Chromatics.

It’s really tragic that story of Chromatics ended the way it did, with acrimony and accusations. I only discovered the band with Kill For Love towards the end of my blogging days and thus didn’t get a lot of chance to gush about them, but very quickly their cinematic synthpop became the platonic ideal of a band I had no idea I needed. But I was on board in time a) to buy most of their discography on vinyl at very reasonable prices, although a lot of their later singles were released on formats too convoluted to follow b) to see them live once and once only in 2019 on tour for Closer To Grey, though the shirt I bought was grossly undersized and may as well have been a souvenir for my son who was also technically in attendance while the size of a blueberry, c) to experience the absurd drama of Dear Tommy in real time over the course of… what was it, five years? So fun. But for all of that nonsense, there’s no denying they made some stunning, singular music and I still miss them.

But back to Reverb Machine. In/around 2020, before the band’s very public dissolution, Reverb Machine did a deep dive into the sound design of three of their songs – 2015’s “Shadow”, 2020’s “Toy”, and “Faded Now”, which appeared on a deluxe digital version of Closer To Grey and was also released as a standalone album, Faded Now, which I realize I don’t own and now need to consider how much of a completist I am or want to be.

But I digress (again). The piece is super informative to a novice synth nerd, even if I don’t fully understand or appreciate the sonic nuances in what they’re doing. And by following along in the animated reproduction videos, I can play along! Badly.

Chromatics Synth Sounds @ Reverb Machine