Creating 80's sounds with Cubase

Hi everyone. This is my first post so forgive me if I ask some stupid questions. I'm not a musician, but I am very computer literate. I've bought a PSR S500 Yamaha as a MIDI interface for Cubase so that I can learn to play keyboard.

I want to recreate some of the exact sounds from the amazing 80's pop bands like Pet Shop Boys, A-Ha, Erasure etc..

I figured it would be fun to learn how to play by trying to play the stuff I love listening to. The only problem is that as I've managed to grasp the concept of synthesizers and how they work, I've realized I'll need some synthesizer plugins for cubase. The problems I face are..

a) Which plugins are best for recreating all of the 80's synthesizer instruments used by most 80's pop/rock bands.

b) The songs themselves are made up of various sounds that I can barely pick out individually from the entirity of the tunes. Is there anywhere where anyone has been able to obtain the exact settings for any particular synths for specific songs from specific groups.

Realize I might seem like a loony, but some of the software synths I've seen have so many buttons that I would be here for the next 3 years just trying to recreate one sound from the 100's of virtual dials in the plugins.

I learned to play guitar by using the OLGA chords site to find chords of my favorite songs and used Chordfinder to look up the chords. Seemes to work well for me. Keyboard/Synthesizer is leaving me bewildered as to where I start.

Thank you to anyone who can help :-)

Get something along these lines:

Native Instruments FM8

Native Instruments B4-II

Native Instruments Pro-53

sonicprojects OP-X PRO

Arturia Minimoog V (or GForce Minimonsta)

Korg Legacy Collection Analog

Korg Legacy Collection Digital

You should be pretty much set.

All that is kind of pricey. You could just pay for Logic Pro or Ableton Live and get /most/ of that capability for a start.

(Ableton is quite good about not exposing a lot of overwhelming buttons, and much more friendly about recovering a lost serial number.)

Adding to the list: Waldorf PPG 2.V.

Anyway, you should be able to do a lot with free stuff like Synth1 and http://www.bostreammail.net/ers/polyiblit.html and http://www.geocities.jp/daichi1969/softsynth/ . These have the structure of the classic synths, and while they won't imitate the exact sound right out of the box, few things will.

No. The closest to this you can get is a reconstruction or the blatant use of an artist of a factory preset - see http://www.synthmania.com/Famous%20Sounds.htm . Even when it's known that a certain sound comes out of a synth, there's still reconstruction work to do.

Furthermore, even if you -had- the exact same synths in their original hardware form, you'd still not get the same sound, because a lot of what you hear is also in how things are mixed and layered on top of eachother, and put through effects.

Well, that's why you have to learn what those buttons do, and that's why you should start with something simple like the one I've linked for you above . There is no easy way.

you need sample libraries

There's some good suggestions already, but there's plenty of free stuff.. off the top of my head.. Tal Uno, FXPansion Orca (v. limited but some good bass sounds), SQ8L, xhip (you need to install a GUI to make that one more usable), etc..

Paid, there's some very good stuff for cheap too like Cobalt..

http://www.lesliesanford.com/Cobalt/Cobalt.shtml

(And if someone's reading this and hasn't heard of that one I suggest you give it a try, can be rather nice )

I've been playing and programming synths for quite a while, and I totally agree with you - a lot of soft synths simply have too many parameters. The good news is most have a good bank of presets that dial up everything for you.

Here's a page of links to free stuff: http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/

Thank you so much, all of you, for your responses. You've all given me some great stuff to be looking into and try!!

It sounds like the musicians keep their configurations pretty secret then, like a corporate recipe.

I have nothing but the highest respect for musicians and the years of work that must go into learning the art of each instrument. Sometimes I listen to an 80's tunes in disbelief that someone has been able to layer so many synth sounds in such a combination as to produce something amazing.

Once I've got some of the synths you've mentioned, I'll just keep playing around with the settings to get used to the way they change the sound.

It would have been nice to have got hold of some configurations for tunes though. Can you imagine having a few good tunes and a complete breakdown of each music layer! What a way to learn that would be!!!!!!

Guess I'd better knuckle down and do it the way everyone else has to do it. See you all in 5 years lol.

No secrets - however there are mostly hardware users here. You'd have to sync up with a person using the same softsynth.

Also there were a lot of synths in the 80s being used in several genres. There is no one "80s sound."

Yahoo Answers: 80s Synths