Live Cover Of Yaz/Yazoo’s Situation

Sunday Synth Jam: Reader Guillermo Caceres let us know about this live synth pop performance by university group, Synt5.

Synt5 is a performance-focused synthesizer group, created in 2013 as an UFC university music project. The group specializes in synth repertoire, ranging from classic synthpop to modern-day electronic music.

The group plays hardware synths, with no syncing or MIDI control.

Technical details:

Every synth line was played live, with no computers involved and no syncing (other than their ears). The drums were reconstructed from scratch using Reaper, and then bounced to audio and imported to the Sp404. The only sample was Alison Moyet’s laughter.

From left to right, gear list and synth players were:

  • Roland Juno Gi – João Marcos – Synth lead #1
  • Sequential Sixtrak, Sp404 – Guillermo Caceres – Bass
  • Korg Microkorg – Tchesco Oliveira – Rhythmic synth
  • Yamaha An1x – George Frederick – Main synth riffs
  • Clavia Nord Lead 2x – Raul Guimaraes – Synth lead #2
  • Vocals – Zeca Filho

12 thoughts on “Live Cover Of Yaz/Yazoo’s Situation

  1. Excellent performance!
    Sounds like it was a great success and rightly so.As a fellow non-MIDI and non-PC/Mac user I really appreciate the effort.

  2. What fun! Great to hear a synth ensemble playing manually, and with vocals. So rare on this site. I ‘specially like the polyrhythmic sounds of multiple instruments with similar timbres. Kudos to Guillermo for sharing it!

  3. “Every synth line was played live, with no computers involved and no syncing.”

    Awesome!. I would pay to see Synt5 for this reason alone.

  4. So good! And that the trickiest/fastest bit was played on the keyboard with the smallest keys (“Korg Microkorg – Tchesco Oliveira – Rhythmic synth”) is really impressive!

  5. The irony here is that Vince Clark left Depeche Mode and founded Yazoo to avoid this kind of set up. He was fed up with depending on other musicians and decided to do it all himself – so much so, that Alison Moyet has jokingly said that she felt her vocals were almost an after thought.

    Regardless, it’s very cool for someone to take on a challenge like this.

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