What was it that made you first think of using modern technology to make music? Was it the sight of other musicians using synthesisers? Was it the fact that hi-tech instruments seemed easier to play than most of the traditional variety? Or was it the promise of a completely new area of sound, an area in which you could create your own, previously unheard and completely individual sound textures, just by turning a few dials and flicking a few switches?

It's impossible to speak for everybody, but I'd lay a sizeable bet that most E&MM readers took up hi-tech instruments for the last reason, that of unrivalled sound-creation possibilities. You only have to look at the way synthesisers were (still are) advertised, with phrases like 'new horizons of sound limited only by your own imagination', to realise that modern technology's biggest musical attraction is the sheer potential it offers the would-be sound-creator.

Or at least, that certainly was the case a year or two ago. But in March 1986, the month Electronics & Music Maker celebrates its fifth birthday as Britain's leading music technology magazine, I'm not so sure it still is. I am sure that the fascination for new sounds still exists among today's young aspiring technology users, but what's changed is the degree to which that fascination can be turned into reality by the individual player.

Let's look at how things have changed in the half-decade E&MM has been around. The average synth of five years ago was an awkward, unwieldy affair: if it hadn't had a keyboard stuck on the front of it, it wouldn't have looked like a musical instrument at all. And half the time, the people using it weren't really interested in music; they were experimenters, laboratory boffins just as keen to study waveforms on oscilloscopes as they were to enrich the world's vocabulary of machine-generated sound.

Not surprising, then, that synthesisers quickly gained a reputation for being workshop instruments, new toys for engineers — rather than musicians — to dabble with.

Then, somewhere along the line, things began to change. The technology got cheaper, so more people outside research labs and megastar studios could get involved with synthesis than ever before. And the machines themselves got more 'musical': their control panels became more logically laid out, their keyboards got more responsive, and then, to cap it all, someone had the bright idea of giving them programmable memory locations, so that if your twiddling and fiddling did produce something worthwhile, you could store it away for safe keeping.

There was a spirit of adventure surrounding music technology in those days, yet I can't help feeling it's a spirit that's now dying a slow, rather painful death. Thanks to some of the music industry's less welcome innovations (digital parameter access, trimming of parameter numbers, 'soft-touch' buttons — cost-cutting exercises all), the average synth of 1986 does little to encourage adventurous programming.

Regular observers of E&MM's artist interviews will probably have noted that, while some players have mourned the passing of yesterday's attitudes and stuck with yesterday's gear as a result, a greater number have recently taken the opposite stance: suddenly, they just can't see why they should make the effort to program new sounds — it's just too much hassle.

In the wake of this programming apathy, tapes, disks, cartridges and chips full of new, ready-programmed sounds have formed a miniature boom industry, while the instruments they're designed for become increasingly inaccessible and laden with larger and larger numbers of preset voices.

Inevitably, what this leads to is a new generation of records with the same synth sounds on them, and a new generation of synth players who see their instruments merely as preset instruments, street-cred equivalents of the much-maligned home organ. And the deeper that feeling sets in, the more likely it is that young people will shy away from keyboards and take up drumming or guitar playing instead; they may, heaven forbid, decide it's not worth playing music after all.

In his appraisal of two CZ editing packages elsewhere this issue, Simon Trask makes much the same sort of point. Yet even in the area of software, I'm not so sure technology is really being applied in the most easily accessible way. Sure, there's no denying it's handy to see an instrument's variable parameters, graphically displayed, in glorious Technicolor, on a telly screen. But if there's a computer between that display and the instrument it represents, then surely such a system only demolishes one barrier by setting up another one?

Struggling down the aisles of this year's Frankfurt Musikmesse, my arms overloaded with information on the latest gear (see report elsewhere this issue), I was greeted with some more sad news. The Akai AX60, a polysynth that returned to analogue control for all its variable parameters, has been replaced by a new model before it's even been made available. Needless to say, the new model has digital parameter access, so that although it offers more facilities for the same money, it presents them in a much less accessible way. And in the field of new sampling technology, I was presented with the (not unexpected) news that the likes of Sequential and Ensoniq are selling factory voicing disks as fast as they can make them, as users give up the idea of DIY sampling and use someone else's sounds instead.

Of the major hi-tech music companies exhibiting at Frankfurt, only Roland were persevering with add-on analogue programming modules; they may cost extra, but at least Roland synth owners have the option to program their instruments in what is still the swiftest, most logical and most versatile way.

Maybe at Frankfurt '87, a few more designers will realise that in order to leap forward into the future, music technology may have to take a couple of steps back.