“Hair bands” have been around since the 1970s, but it didn’t take on a new meaning until British pop culture started working its way from punk and new wave enclaves into the mainstream American pop charts.  Hair wasn’t just long, it was frizzy, spiked, colored, shaved… pretty much anything you could do to a poodle, they did with hair.  Wham! had perfect, shampoo-commercial hair.  Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons fame seemed to change her frizzy, multicolored ‘do regularly.  Pete Burns of Dead or Alive would have made a peacock proud.  And Boy George of Culture Club… I’m not even going to go there.  In the ’80s, being unique was so trendy to the point where uniqueness itself was hackneyed and commonplace.

What was arguably different about music in the 1980s was the proliferation of the electronic music synthesizer keyboard.  Unlike electric organs and early “synths” of the ’70s, synthesizers allowed manipulation and shape of the raw components of sound waves: oscillators, envelopes, filters, amplifiers, and various effects.  Tones could be made to resemble musical instruments, from bass guitars to flutes and even accordions.  They were far from the perfect instrumentation of their orchestral counterparts, but the mechanical and electronic “feel” of synthesizer sound was what really gave the 1980s its musical signature.  The resonating saws of the Oberheim OB-Xa made Van Halen’s Jump, well… jump.  The light, almost-hidden, saxophone pad in Simple Minds’ Don’t You Forget About Me adds to the depth of the verses, contrasting with the sharp “da daa ta daa daa daaaa” strings of its chorus .  As a backwards comparison, Never Tear Us Apart by INXS shows us versus full of staccato strings, complemented by a true saxophone solo by Kirk Pengilly.

One of the bands that relied heavily on the synthesizer, perhaps even defined by the synthesizer, was Duran Duran, with keyboard artist Nick Rhodes pushing the limits of what one could do with the technology.  In Last Chance on the Stairway, you can hear the ethereal strings binding the tune together.  The arpeggio was a mechanical advancement in synthesizers, automating rapid, staccato-based tones.  In Rio, the arpeggio provided the “plinking” sound in almost-random fashion, which was also popular with their hit song Hungry Like the Wolf.  Noticeably in Rio, they used a real saxophone for the solos rather than a synthesized sax, giving the synthesizer its own commanding role rather than being a mere replacement for live instruments.  The 1980s synths gave us clever and unique qualities to expand music, meshed with the traditional instrumentation from prior eras.

As music continues to evolve, so did synthesizer technology during the 1980s.  The electric organ had been around for decades prior to the 80s, but the development of the transistor in the 1960s allowed companies like Moog Music to start producing electronic, musical keyboards.  These synthesizers allowed the player to modify various tonal qualities and parameters using knobs, switches, and wires.  The concept of an instrument was no longer limited to one type of tone; a single synthesizer could play tones emulating a bass guitar, string concerto, woodwind flute, or brass trumpet.  They were called analog synths due their reliance on passive, electronic components such as resistors and capacitors.  It was common to have to tune them or otherwise maintain them in order to produce consistent sound.

As noted earlier, the synthesizer was not a true substitute for a real instrument.  By the early 1980s, however, the tones were good enough to reasonably emulate instruments to where the player could differentiate between a church organ and a Hammond organ or between violin and cello.  This imperfection, coupled with new electronic sound experiences, provided the charm and uniqueness of what we now refer to fondly as 1980s “synth pop.”  Bands were constantly adopting and tweaking new keyboards as fast as manufacturers could produce them in order to deliver the next “new sound” to the world.

Music continued to evolve, and synthesizers evolved with it.  The synth industry was sure to incorporate the latest electronics to create more realistic sounds.  One key advancement in realism was the introduction of digital technology.  Instead of relying on passive electronics to generate sound from scratch, real life sounds could be sampled, or stored in a type of computer memory so that a key press would replay a recording of a real instrument.  A byproduct of this was the invention of the drum machine and sampling keyboards, where one could record his own sounds to be replayed at the touch of a key.

Today, keyboards are so sophisticated and refined that the instrument quality of a digital keyboard is virtually indistinguishable from the real instrument, due mainly to the ability to sample real instruments with high resolution.  The grand piano on a Roland Fantom-X, for example, is recorded (sampled) four times per key to emulate four different levels of pressure that a player may exert (known as keyboard velocity). As keyboards push toward more and more realism, technology distances us from the synth pop of the ’80s.  The charm of the genre is still alive, however, as many new bands are reviving that old synth pop sound.  In fact, most new digital keyboards now contain presets that emulate classic sounds of the era.  The once workhorses of the ’80s, such as the Yamaha DX-7, Roland Jupiter, and Sequential Circuits’ Prophet, are now sought after by new bands looking to break away from instrument realism.  These now rare relics fetch a hefty price on secondary markets, such as eBay.  In fact, it’s not uncommon to find an analog Roland Jupiter 8 on “sale” for four-to-six thousand dollars (US), much higher than its original price in 1984, and more than twice as expensive as a modern-day Roland professional digital synthesizer.