From Strings To Synths

There’s something romantic about a guitar leaning against a desk.

Wood, steel, tension, resonance; music in its most tangible form. You press, you strum, you feel it vibrate back. It’s physical. Immediate. Honest.

And yet, not far from that same desk, there might be something else entirely.

In my case, it was a small plastic device, one of those Teenage Engineering pocket operators. My boss handed it to me casually, like it was nothing. A few buttons, a tiny screen, built-in sounds. Next to it, a guitar. Two completely different worlds sitting side by side.

But that’s kind of the point. Music hasn’t replaced itself. It’s expanded.

There’s a tendency to frame things as old versus new, analogue versus digital, instruments versus machines. 

But in reality, they coexist more than they compete. The guitar didn’t disappear when the drum machine arrived. It just found a new role.

The shift really started when music moved away from being purely performed to being constructed. Drum machines, samplers, and synthesisers changed not just how music sounds, but how it’s made. You no longer needed a band, a studio, or even technical mastery of a traditional instrument. You just needed an idea and a way to shape it. Today, that idea can start anywhere.

With software like Serum or other widely used VSTs, you can build entire soundscapes from scratch. Sounds that don’t exist in the physical world. Textures that evolve, stretch, distort. What once required expensive hardware and deep technical knowledge is now accessible from a laptop.

And then there’s sampling.

Which, in many ways, is the most interesting part of all this.

Sampling isn’t just borrowing; it’s reinterpretation. Taking something that already exists and reshaping it into something new.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, here is a video that demonstrates the art form quite well, used on one of the most recognisable songs in recent music history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QwOpRh-IfI

And another, more complex example from one of the most inventive samplists to ever do it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6By2YvpjjWw

Jimi Hendrix had the electric guitar; J Dilla had the MPC3000. A drum break from decades ago becomes the backbone of a modern track. A vocal snippet gets stretched, pitched, and looped into something unrecognisable. It’s not about originality in the traditional sense.

It’s closer to what you’d call postmodern. Everything builds on what came before. Music has always been like this, just less explicitly. Blues informed rock. Rock informed electronic. Now everything feeds into everything.

The tools have just made that process faster, more visible, and more accessible.

What’s changed isn’t the idea of creation; it’s the distance between inspiration and output.

You can still sit down with a guitar and write something simple and timeless. Or you can open a DAW and design something entirely new from layers of synthetic sound. Neither is more “real” than the other.

They’re just different entry points.

That’s what that desk setup captured so well.

A guitar, untouched for a moment.A pocket operator, blinking, ready to make noise.

Two approaches to the same thing: making something out of nothing.

And increasingly, the most interesting music happens somewhere in between.

Where strings meet synths.