Bright Sparks Documentary - A Side

[Music] they would seem to be this period i think really from the late 60s to the sort of mid-80s when particularly analog synthesizers um every country seemed to be trying to outdo every other one and there was this kind of race in a way a bit like the space race where there were the walls were up between them all and they were all beavering doing their thing and it was all top secret and then the japanese would come out with another kind of amazing synthesizer and presumably the americans would be going how do they do that you know now we're going to go polyphonic now we're going to go whatever it was you know it was this kind of arms race of music you know and in a way that generated amazing amount of creativity i've been reading this book called analog days by trevor pinch and uh i thought what was really interesting was the actual little stories behind all these inventors and i thought there was a similarity between kind of what the inventors went through getting their instruments and uh doing something that they loved and was were inspired to do like a real passion for it and then having to deal with the business side of things and often not dealing with it very well it's kind of seemed a bit like us where we just enjoy making the music and making the tune but then the business side of it you kind of you have to pass it on to someone else and sometimes it doesn't quite go right so we had the idea of making an album that looked not just at the instruments but kind of paid tribute to some of these that are all men to these chaps that they gave us these kind of weird and wonderful machines so we narrowed it down to eight inventors and inventions or companies and it it turned out it was like four american companies and uh four kind of british companies so moog was the obvious one to start with obviously he had a massive breakthrough with um working with wendy carlos and the switched on bark album and yeah mode became another word for synthesizers [Music] during the early 1960s i was fascinated with all kinds of new electronic music and i was also just beginning to do some private teaching and the dad of one of my students told me that there was a really interesting article that he read in a magazine and it was an article on the theremin he gave me the magazine and the article was written by bob moog i had no idea who he was but it was a very interesting article about building your own theremin and when i saw that i thought that is really a fascinating way to get into this world of electronic music that i was just beginning i had just gotten out of college and i was just beginning to really think about what a fascinating world this could be and so i contacted the moog house he lived at that time in ithaca new york and there was a phone number in the article and so i contacted the house and i spoke to his wife and ordered a theremin kit which was 49.50 in 1963 at the very end of the year i had just started teaching college and i decided i would like to go to the new york state all state program where all the high school students were the best high school students were playing and it was up in in rochester new york and when i got to the allstate festival lo and behold i discovered a little room where uh some people were able to demonstrate them things that they were selling that might be of interest and i walked into the room and there was a room full of theremins and tubers and one tall young man was there and i walked over and it turned out that this young man was bob moog and i said have what are you doing in electronic music and bob really didn't know much about electronic music he obviously knew a great deal about electronics and engineers working on his doctorate in in physics at that time and he was an amateur musician but that was not his main direction and so we started to talk about electronic instruments and we immediately started talking about the synthesizer the only instrument at that time that was called a synthesizer now this is 1963 was the rca mark ii synthesizer which was actually a room full of equipment that was at columbia university and i said to bob wouldn't it be interesting if we if there was such a thing as a small instrument like that and for three hours nobody got bob's attention and i don't think he sold anything and all we did was sit around and talk about the idea that perhaps there could be a synthesizer made now that was december of 63. in january of 64 i was giving a concert in greenwich village new york and after the concert he was there with his wife and i was there with my wife and we immediately talked about building a music synthesizer that night in january of 64. that was followed briefly and very not really not that briefly by bob inviting me to come to his uh studio which he had just moved to a little town called trumansburg which is right outside of ithaca and he was making amplifiers too and you know just trying to make a living and he sent me an invitation i gave it to my university and the chair of the university who loved electronic music said this would be fascinating let's see if the university will give you some research money and go up to develop a brand new musical instrument and the university did they gave me two hundred dollars and it's a story that's often been told but for two hundred dollars i went up to trumansburg new york and worked there for two weeks and we basically developed what was the basic moog synthesizer the concept of the original moog right away was that there were little individual modules that did things one of them was an oscillator to produce sound now oscillators had been around already they had been used for various things but never specifically like this and an amplifier and bob's immediate idea was to have voltages control the pitches and the oscillators were voltage controlled that was bob's most important contribution to the building of musical instruments at that time we he was having trouble getting the instrument in tune and i and we talked about voltage control in that way and bob said oh i get it if you tune you can generate a voltage to control a basic instrument a basic pitch and that pitch could be say one volt and an octave higher could generate two volts so if we put a 1 12 of a volt resistor in between each of these it would generate an even 12 tons and that would be what 300 years ago bach called well-tempered tuning once we had designed that concept the first thing that bob said was he had spoken to vladimir usa chefsky who was at columbia university and vladimir was working with that huge room full of instruments called the rca synthesizer but vladimir had no keyboard and said to bob don't put a keyboard on it and bob said to me should we have a keyboard and i said yes because it would work without a keyboard you could just touch things to create the all of this all of this music because but i said put a keyboard on it because having a keyboard did not it did not stop the early 20th century composes from developing new music like 12-tone music atonal music explorations of music and sound but it'll also give you something that would make the instrument interesting and into put it into the hands of players and you will probably make more money if you put a keyboard on the other thing that we discussed right away and this was very early on within the first week in june of 1964 that what we discussed at that point was articulation of music that is music musical instruments have an attack they have a decay all musical instruments when you blow an instrument it will go tah and that will be an attack when you press a key down on the piano it strikes the string and that's an attack when you hold your finger down after that the note decays and bobbin i explained that to bob he didn't understand that so but as soon as i explained it to him he immediately knew how to do it and literally sent me out of the place to buy a he said go across the street and buy a push button door doorbell button and i went back with came back to him with a doorbell button and he had already designed the concept of when you press now this was an instrument that was only a keyboard it wasn't doing anything else when you play a note he said also push the doorbell button and in the little circuit that he designed when you push the doorbell button again using voltage control it would turn on the amplifier and then the amplifier would allow the sound to die away and then he put controls in it to allow for the amplification to be picked up and he had he designed what was called attack and became the most basic function of all analog instruments attack decay sustain and release adsr the basis of all analog instruments approach to true musical sound smoke modular head it's kind of fledgling beginnings in the mid 60s and by around 1967 1968 its usage became a little bit more popular both in academic studios and recording studios but mostly as a sound effect machine it wasn't until late 1968 and early 1969 with the advent of wendy carlos's switched on bach that the mode modular was truly used as a musical instrument and with that groundbreaking recording the mode modular became known as a musical instrument to listeners everywhere and also caught the attention of musicians it was that recording in fact that caught the attention of keith emerson who heard it playing in a record store in london and he decided he must have an instrument like that and there were many other musicians who did take the mold modular and incorporated it into their music which was which was a pioneering effort in itself these were um pioneering synthesis who were figuring out how this new instrument you know could be incorporated into the the language of music on the flip side of that there were also many musicians who who kind of jumped on the bandwagon of the mode modular as as more of a novelty instrument and the result was a a whole rash of um we could say mo exploitation or other kinds of switched on recordings that were not quite to the the musical technical and artistic level of certainly wendy carlos's work i had a rumor and it's only a rumor that um in that in the mid 60s you know the beatles had modular and you know became the thing to have you know and the rolling stones allegedly ordered one and set it up and couldn't make it work couldn't get a sound out of it um which is fair enough if you haven't no background in synthesis and nobody's around you can show you what to do you know you can see how that could happen and they sent it back to think saying oh this is broke this is broken it doesn't work and you know tested it and they said actually works fine but they the rumor is that something clicked in their mind and said well this is going to go to a lot of musicians who are not synthesis they're not electronic musicians there just in a band and they want to get great sounds and this is probably too complicated we've got to make something more accessible to them and i think that's how they came up with the pre-wired minimoog because obviously with anything with the with the modular you have to connect it with wires you can't switch it on and expect it to make a sound you've got to connect stuff together and the pre-wired synth like a minimoog you just press a key and you get some kind of a sound so that's a rumor about the stones i don't know if it's true but it's quite a good one the fact that it drifted out of tune was an issue um the fact that it was a very large instrument and heavy and cumbersome was another issue and the fact that it was difficult to use was another issue so as you might imagine those three factors played in to the demand for an instrument that would allow the musician to to bring synthesis into their music but in a much more accessible way and there was talk of a smaller easier to use more affordable instrument my understanding from knowing what i do about bob moog is that he was very resistant to the idea of taking this musical instrument the moog modular that he worked so diligently and passionately to create an instrument that uh his his sole purpose was to really open up the sonic universe for musicians to give them the highest capability of a sonic expression [Music] at their fingertips he was hesitant to to create an instrument that would limit that expertise that he had dedicated himself to for so many years and that he had seen used with great effect so he was initially resistant to the idea of a a smaller synthesizer but we know from some of the documentation in the archives that he made a trip to england in 1969 to talk with peter zanavia ostensibly about to discuss r.a moco importing the vcs3 and although nothing came of that he did understand the demand for that kind of synthesizer he just resisted creating one himself the mini moog was developed during the late 60s very gradually it's really about 1969 which was the year that bob was putting together a modulus system for the museum of modern art for me to play bob was primarily pushing the idea of the modular instrument that's what he loved and that was his original concept and when we built the first instruments the idea of modular was the real answer there was an engineer at the plant whose name was bill helmseth and bill helmseth kept saying bob this could be done in a simpler manner we could make a smaller version of the moog synthesizer i don't know when the name mini mode came in but it probably was around that time bob was not in favor of it at first and bill helmseth said this can be done and he first came up with an instrument that he did basically by himself on his own out of things that were around in the factory and they called it the mini moog model a and then they went to a model b and then they went to a model c and they keep they kept improving it and when they finally got to the model d that worked so well that bob was persuaded and this is an interesting thing but a lot of people don't know he was persuaded to build 100 of these and see if they would sell and he got in touch with the person who wanted to be a salesman for him and that salesman was a terrific salesman and he went out and in fact took i think 16 of these things uh and was able to sell them very very quickly and all of a sudden the instrument was there the instrument that you're looking at right now is number 94 of the first 100 mini moogs that were made but by 1970 mini moog started to be produced and by the end of the 70s and into the 80s it was the most familiar and most popular of all instruments it was light it was small it could do all the modular things but you didn't have to plug things in all the modules were interconnected by switches and controls and so the concept is still modular the concept is in fact the way they were designed and most smaller instruments were was thinking from left to right on the instrument which is a kind of modular thinking the oscillators are here they go into a mixer which is here and that went into a filter which is here and that filter design was the only item that bob moog was able to patent because a lot of the other things were already patented but bob was able to patent the design of his filter and it did give a unique sound to the instrument and it was advertised quite frequently as the moog sound it could be seen as a detrimental thing but any sound you pull up on it you think oh blind that sounds like ah sounds like autobahn like what a mistake for sound you know that sounds like someone like bernie world from parliament or something like that you know he's he's got that guy for it but he's a great sound you know you line it up against other sims and you play it it's just quality it's quality and it's dirty and it's what i like about it looks like i use one live quite a lot because it's just so quick to change the sound as well you kind of know your way around it's like it's amazing that that instrument was laid out by the moog engineers the [Music] yeah it's just for me playing live it's amazing i don't really like using presets and stuff like that i like the the battle changing sounds and stuff nothing it's the best symphony for the live world when it stays in tune when you can get it in tune and stuff but you know it's not such an issue that's part of the battle as well i think for me um i wasn't a moog fan moog fan at the beginning because in the post-punk electronic era mooc kind of represented old school and people i knew we were into kind of the wasp and the roland stuff and also in germany a lot of people i knew were into the ms20 you know nobody i knew didn't know anybody had a moog at all maybe it was just partly because there was still expensive partly because the sound however good it was represented something a little bit that punk was trying to destroy and then and then up which i you know the up 2600 which is my you know if i had one synth that i was going to keep out of all this like it would be the art 2600 but nevertheless obviously the moog is legendary i mean i see the mini moog and the modulus two completely different instruments that happen to have components that are common and have a similar sound in terms of what i'm looking for when i use them as two completely different things you know there are two ways that i find you you arrive at a sound one is you have a sound in your head and you try and get it or you you have no idea what you want and just muck about until you get something which i think to me actually is a bit more exciting but more fun and it's good for both of those things because it's quite in one way it's quite simple so if you want a bass it's quite easy to get a bass sound on there a good fat you know classic moog bass sound but if you want to get some other abstract thing on there because it's modular you can repatch it and do what you want so your mood is such a big sound you can't help which is great on one side on one kind of side of it but on the other side it's quite hard on her to fit other stuff around it the punch the sheer weight of the when you push the key you can see your speaker you know reacting and there's nothing quite like a mini for doing that i'm not really excited this is something you know it's just putting out dc voltage and let's do something it really shouldn't be doing which case your speakers start smoking any minute the mini is the only thing that will really do that and i mean that goes for all the other you know the later moog stuff i don't find it does it it doesn't have that immediate thump it just comes it jumps out of the speakers and sits in the middle of the room and growls at him well the mini mug is the um i will say mini moog as well because you couldn't have you know all those albums that we've previously talked about like the electric cow goes moog you couldn't have that if it was moog it wouldn't work would it so i still i mean lots of us say moog but it is mog which is such a brilliant name is but moog is just the word moog is iconic you know people talked about it when i was a kid you used to see them a moog synthesizer even if it wasn't a move they were always called a moog synthesizer all those bands of that time pop bands had moogs in them but obviously you know being 15 16 in the 70s there's no way i was going to get one not because it's so expensive and when i first got my mini moog which was the one this is my second one um i actually couldn't believe i had one i was just looking at it for hours and hours and hours i always regarded my father as he's pretty serious guy a lot of the time not all the time but a lot of the time he was pretty serious even more serious depending on what grades are brought home in chemistry but you know generally serious i had a great sense of humor um but he always had a very kind of rare wise presence that i was very aware of that changed for me when he died and the reason it changed or morphed into something bigger if you will is because my father really never discussed his career to any extent um for my entire childhood and it wasn't until he passed away that i realized and i think this goes for most of my family as well to the uh the impact that his work had had on people's lives [Music] and that's when i began to to see that as i like to say there's my dad the cool cool geeky funny guy and then there's also bob moog this icon who revolutionized the face of music and people's thinking about what all the music could be he was something bigger than i ever realized as um as a child and that was a a overwhelming dawning that happened pretty pretty soon after he passed away and it's it's also the genesis the impetus for the bob moog foundation to be able to carry on that incredible inspiration that he invoked and so many people all over the world bob loved engineering and he loved to work with musicians he did not love the business people he didn't have a good sense of doing business he had a wonderful sense of doing design and electronic things and building out of musicians dreams the instruments that would make those dreams come true [Applause] [Music] because you gave us the synthesizer [Music] one of the things that i think is most appealing about booklet's history is the fact that it's mostly a non-keyboard player instrument as opposed to the east coast school of synthesis where we have mold and wendy carlos and keith emerson and then more more of a way of utilizing the synthesizer from a keyboard player point of view and as a as a as a means to coming up with new sounds with a known interface on the west coast with zubotnick and don's boxes i think there's more of a there was more of a research into sound as opposed to recreating something that existed already as far as as opposed to the synthesis process the word more of a creative process new sounds not only new sounds but new sounds in space so each one of his machine allowed for an easier placement not only the stereo field but like the quad field quite often so as a non-keyboard player i think that i got attracted to that right after i saw them you know the way they looked i think it was the first thing that got me interested in them just because they looked like toys um i remember i think it was mark vale's synthesizer book and i remember seeing these color photos of some of you know the later 200 modules where like kind of blue blue knobs and i'm like man they look like toys and i just did not know what you know like nomenclature i mean the way whatever was written on the faceplate was just not your typical oscillator and you know filter and whatnot and it didn't really matter i was like i gotta know what this does and then that's when i sort of researched uh the music that was made with the booklet and tsubotnik obviously suzanne chiani i would probably think it was the the easiest bridge into the world of bukla because suzanne is a very melodic musician and a lot of the stuff that has been documented that she's done on the book club although the booklet is a historically considered an untamable machine she was able to enslave it into something very melodic to a certain extent obviously the machine won in the end because she had to give it up but um from her stuff to mor morton sobotnick stuff and realize how a machine could create sounds that were far from what the synthesizer used to sound at that time you know the moog approach and whatever i grew up thinking was a synthesizer wasn't a synthesizer anymore because the booklet machine it just sounded like something it could have been the sound of an animal or a creature from somewhere else in the world or another planet you know it sounded like something real something living not a machine and i think that's how i got attached to it not having any background in keyboard playing because i've never studied it the moment that i joined nh nails is when i seriously picked up a keyboard for the first time so all of a sudden being able to hear a machine that doesn't rely on that sort of input method to create music and at the same time comes up with sounds that you've never heard before to me was a right you know a revelation and a revolution because all the songs like i got to get myself one of these boxes and i remember it was 2005 when i met don during a nih nails tour and um after that tour he called me called me asking if so are you gonna buy one and i'm like i can't can't really afford it right now but then two years later i ended up buying my first system 200e and from there on it was just a slippery slope you know from there i got more into the vintage stuff which is uh same air interface but just different sound obviously and that was the end of it pretty much ended up yeah with that hefty booklet collection which which you know the thing i like about booklet's instruments is that don is uh also a musician so the base of the creative process comes from his need to create something it's not hardly ever him listening to somebody else's needs maybe at the beginning when you know morton subatomic and ramon center and everybody the san francisco tech music center asked him commissioned him to build the first bukla box i think that's where it stopped i think that's when don realized i have my own idea of what i want to do and every instrument every module i think it's a manifestation of that view which makes it very unique and also compatible just to a few not many you know and i'm not talking about an elite i'm just talking about the fact that you know i mean there are certain things that are very unique and not everybody likes them and when i bought my first one i was very scared because it was a big investment probably the biggest investment i had made at the time which was about 20 or 15 or 20 thousand dollars u.s and i was scared because a lot of the music wasn't it was a tonal which i like but i really was scared of buying for like a better description a reactor you know native instruments reactor in a box but i was pleasantly surprised because the booklet 200d allowed me to do both you know um more abstract compositions and songs so it was more of a confirmation that i had whatever inside anyway and then it was just a matter which tool you put in front of me it'll come out with a specific flavor but it didn't really matter you know so um and that that i think the apex of my booklet relationship came with when i found an older or one of the first easels the music easel from the 70s which are very different from the current uh easels as far as the way they're built and the way they sound and and there were no new easels when i was looking for mine so maybe i would have stopped if they were available and anyway they i looked probably for six or seven years for one until i found one and i remember after a week of having my friend mark verbose helping me or mostly fixing it that i was i was helping like a father outside of a delivery room helps you know by smoking in the balcony at the time i still smoke just what's the smell is that you oh no what do you mean no no what happened you know but after a week he was able to fix it i remember setting it up in the studio between two speakers and i recorded for days days and came up with three and a half hours of music which then turned into the forza records volume one two and three and none edited you know just spent a little time coming up with something that i liked and then press record and perform it live and and that's how they came up you know and to this day i don't think i've ever been as creative as i've been with that instrument you know but what i've learned besides from the musical output what i've learned is that um the more limitations the machine gives me and the more i try to work around those limitations or live with them in a way where i can be creative without feeling like i'm compromising the usual was a big learning tool for that makes you realize how much stuff you have and how much you are under using it just because of the fact that oh i'm going to use this just for that or just for this and just for that when when you use one instrument only um say the booklet to do everything to do drums and everything you'll come up with drums that don't sound like any other drum machine or past they sound like no other paths just for the simple reason that it's a machine that theoretically wasn't designed for that you know and on top of it i mean this obviously can apply to any instrument but i think booklet has a specific voice as an instrument i think the way that don designed them it's a very unique way of doing it and um no matter what um no matter how wide you know the the market is i think his designs will always have a unique sound i think mostly because he's never really based his designs on subtractive synthesis so hardly ever about having a rich sound and then sort of shaping it by cutting stuff out it's always been about fm wave shaping you know and later on wave tables and so it's more about the richness of the sound to begin with and with spectral processors and a lot about space you know and so i think that's one thing that will keep him how can i say it'll keep him relevant i think his his uh catalog will always be relevant because it's a very unique way of approaching and also consistent because from the 100 up to the 200e it's you know both in the modulars and the non-modular instrument there's an approach that it's present in everything he's done you know and um yeah he's a very interesting individual also you know he's a very very unique character very stubborn very sure what he's doing very clear clear ideas and uh he's also a good friend so it's um it's it's i've been honored uh with his friendship and being able to spend time with him and learning why the machines are the way they are [Music] [Music] i was in i was manufacturing some small modules called operational amplifiers that were made by old-fashioned techniques in other words resistors and capacitors and transistors and they were encapsulated and they plugged in to various places and they give we did a good business there uh we only had one or two competitors and we sold that company that was called nexus research to teledyne and uh tilden was a very strange outfit singleton was his name his theory was to uh acquire uh small businesses and he could do this uh even if at the 20 times earnings that's what he paid for it and then he would find it easy enough uh because uh as the market said that other people were willing to invest in him at 40 times earnings so uh so we made a tremendous uh uh killing until uh the bubble burst someplace alone uh well we we've got about quite a bit of uh capital out of it in those days and and uh decided that i would like to do something which it was more interesting than working for teledine so uh when mo came out with the uh way of uh voltage control and uh but his uh synthesizers didn't stay in tune it's well so i said to myself uh-huh there was an opening that well how about i make something to compete with moog but it will stay in tune so here it was still a stable anti-large logarithmic circuit would would do the tricks so you know we had a little bit of money from from uh selling the company tell banks instead of another little company and we we developed the the uh a large system called uh uh 2500 and it's still around a few and uh to me that was great and uh well we all were very enthusiastic about it and i was enthusiastic to the point i said how about making a portable one so that for me that'll be like a musical instrument it was very difficult to get to to get my way up this thing they finally uh they came up with uh something which was uh in a uh walmart case and not only that but the the keyboard was exposed so that it would you could break off the the keys and i i finally fired the engineer who designed that really the uh metal thing it's still called the blue meanie or something and uh i went down to my basement over there and i had some power tools and i built a uh the 2600 uh and uh you used the same layout as the blue mini that uh incorporated uh a number of nice little features including uh the keyboard which would it was rugged enough so that the the keys would not break off when we were carrying two units the first thing i did was work on the 2500 that is when i designed multi-mode filter resonator the who used it in that song with a hammond b3 organ and then they said we want to make a low-cost synthesizer because that one sold for something like oh 12 000. perlman and i got together had a big meeting about what should be in it and what it could do how to control it and any other suggestions i might have so i spent the next few months on deciding what kind of circuitry one thing we knew right from the start was we want three oscillators voltage control oscillators variable filter which is limited in that it's only low pass but it has adjustable resonance or q so you can give it a sort of focused sound emphasizing a certain frequency band and voltage controlled amplifier and a noise generator random white noise or pink noise and finally there was a what they called a ring modulator it's basically an analog multiplier but at the time it used the ring transistors so you could modulate one signal with another turns out that 2600 did quite well for the company and i understand that the 2600s still have a good reputation and it's very gratifying to know that a lot of musicians have uh used it and let's see beat townsend use it herbie hancock you name it they call this semi-modeler don't they and i mean it was all i knew was it was modeler as far as i was concerned you could patch anything anywhere you wanted so when it came to res it was in my spare bedroom and so tracy was downstairs shouted up oh that sounds nice laughs you know like that's so that was a good sign she only did that about three times the other time i think was with born slippy that's with knucks that sounds nice love right okay it was good i also felt kind of desperate because i was mid the piece mid through the piece the actual res sequence which is the heart of it you know made me suddenly almost get panicky and go right i better finish this has to this has to happen now you know really quickly and i did just throw myself in and finish the finish the record in about two hours just because it felt like i got to do this right now just get it done the whole get the whole picture you know i wrote the patch down a day later i couldn't get it back dayla you know so it was one of those really fragile relationships you know to get that i still don't know i've never heard anything quite like it that plays with the harmonics the way that patch did you know i love loads of people don't they they're slightly self-oscillating filter and i couldn't no i could never get it back couldn't even get close just sounded wrong wrong wrong there was no there was no it's not funny you know these things disappear into the ether i do like that about it though the fragility of it all you know and uh one day i got uh somebody rang the doorbell uh it was bob moog he says hey i understand you guys are about making synthesizers he said you know i i'm making synthesizers uh are you sure that you're not copying my synthesizer i said well uh village controlled yes but we're doing it in a different way so that then you stay in tune and he says well i'm gonna take a look at what you're doing and if i find you're using anything that i'm doing uh that i've patented we're not going to stop put a stop to it well he was quite unpleasant at the time and uh well we we did go ahead and he did uh at that time he had come out with a uh low pass a voltage controlled filter and that filter was very good and uh i i really did copy his but that was before his patent issued uh well many months went by and finally his patent issued and he came down like a ton of bricks fortunately i had an idea of how to do it without and i guess a fairly competent analog design engineer so he had another way of doing it which so when he came up with a lawsuit about that i said okay fine i said by the way you were also doing something that we did yeah i have a we have we have a two voice uh analog keyboard and you came up with the two voice too and uh they said i think there's room for more than one uh synthesizer uh manufacturer and he was you know he was about uh he was a little bit surly about the whole thing but after a while uh he had decided that we were in the same industry and we uh so we were both building uh acceptance uh then he got to be friendly and he had nice things to say about the 2600 and the uh it's the mark vale's book over there has a uh a nice little article by bob moog about the 2600. he was so bright he was he was a modest person very very modest they brought out some great scenes you know they steadily when moog had the minimum and then maybe a few years i don't know they brought out a few scenes you know they're polymorph which had his issues as well but art seemed to be a lot more organized so they had their they started off with their modular and then obviously we've got the 2600s which was a still a fantastic synth then there he ordered two the odyssey so freudian slip um and then they just seem to keep keep making interesting little machines i kind of did it right you know it kept producing which i suppose is important they slimmed down the odd odyssey and brought out the uh the artbacks yeah there's a solus as well um string machines omni selena that was a re-badge i think that other people have uh sort of uh accepted some of the technology that i i invented and my team invented dennis cohen was a very good inventor there was another one tim gillette there was a uh i'm trying to remember he was a very very nice english fellow he developed the uh pro soloist pro they picked out a keyboard for the soloist and the key contact wires that the key would touch and then the pressure sensitive or velocity sensitive thing was very fragile and very weak and i kept complaining about that for weeks look another one just broke why don't we get a good keyboard well they didn't take that too well then one friday they asked me to stay over time which in itself i didn't mind but they wanted me to repair some of these bad keyboards which was a real pain getting in there soldering mickey mouse as best i could and complaining and complaining and finally alproma said well if you don't like it you can always use the door he said okay i had just brought that art proto back from them letting me borrow it and i had it in my van to return well when i got that word about well if you don't like it there's the door i immediately grabbed the 2600 and put it back in my van so about three weeks later i got a call from al perlman i thought for sure he was going to say i want that 2600 proto back well he said okay but he said i really don't care so much about that dennis the reason i called you is i need your lab notebooks and legally they're his property of course i recognize that three big notebooks full of all the circuitry and everything on it so i returned them and he might have mentioned the 2600 or not i don't think he did i think he nothing was said so i didn't say anything i had talked to him periodically in fact once i made a version of that hyper phase pedal for him after showing it to him because he wanted one and that was the last i had seen of al perlman until maybe 10 years ago when i called him to see how he was some of the punks took on the arts i didn't know i mean the stranglers you know they had the he used to love his mini mode didn't he dave grimfield but then bands like magazine who are big kind of art users ultra box of course in 1977 it was time for ultrabox to get a synthesizer in the because we were assigned to ireland records with ultrabox and we're about to do our second album the first album that consisted of just hiring stuff and trying things like string machines but i've never actually got my hands on a synthesizer and so i can't remember why i decided i think i just liked the shape of it and i just remember bringing it into the rehearsal room the island and then the whole band just completely going berserk on it tried to stand back while they just went completely nuts on it and i was like don't break it you know so they just went completely mental for about an hour just messing about with it laughing at it and just having a great time really loud yeah and sorry but surely it uh the whole feeling for the instrument started to develop it's not tempered or anything but it held back it's just raucous punks used to just show up there because you know you used to take their heads off just like what i'm saying nearly take my own head off they just that was it it was like straight between the eyes and it looked like that it looked the part whereas a mini moog please not really uh that looked a bit you know yet like you just stepped out of university you know me give us a break and then it was on a plate there for you and straight through between the eyes it was ridiculous um power absolute power and that's what i was after when i joined um two way army we were called shoot by army then we were just out rehearsing to go out and do some more club gigs which is what i've been doing all the time and also i was ready for that battle stations again you know but things just suddenly changed when he got the success of our friends electric and uh we were playing in big places and i thought it was great opportunity for me and gary gave me the opportunity to do a long solo so that was great and that's i think that's where i got the sound my sort of sound using sync of the first and second oscillator i just used to have a soft sound i.e the sound in the quiet man or a slightly harder vienna or a hard sound really like the solo in sleepwalk you get pressure though when you're in a band to change just because you're a simple sizer player and i just used to say well aren't you still playing the same guitar i have to give myself a bit of a pinch sometimes when i realized what it's ended up on that instrument that one instrument yeah well for a perfect example uh as regards successful tracks as opposed to it now fade to gray that's i remember recording that actually in 19 early 1979 when i was working with gary newman so i laid that down then in the middle of 1979 at martin russian studio i've got the hard sound on on broadway with gary that solo and then there's a soft sound on vienna which was heard a lot and then of course in something like about 83 i think i did that track on fill in a solo album yellow pearl and as soon as i've done it i had it on as a top of the box theme you know with my the vocals off and strangely my sequential bit i did a bit of sequence on that fancy stuff pushed right up to the front we had that in it i thought who the hell was that every week so that i mean it's just been heard ridiculously so you know and that's fanta that's a fantastic feeling uh being heard by millions and millions of people from when it was first brought into the rehearsal room with ultralocks you know in 1977. well it's it's been very uh pleasant uh knowing that i really did make some contributions i never made any money on it but still [Music] so [Music] it's the merry christmas where it starts really this happy chain blue do we need to uh tell [Music] so the entire tape replay musical instrument genre starts with a gentleman in the u.s called harry chamberlin in the late 1940s now harry was already an inventor of note helping to design the electrical system of the b-29 super fortress he'd also devised a machine that allowed one man to insulate a house as opposed to an entire team and the car windshield washer but it was when he was sat at a hammond organ recording some tunes to send to his parents that he hit upon an idea and the idea was simple surely it's possible to record any instrument to take chromatically and then lay each of those notes under a key and this was a eureka moment and he set to work and he developed and refined various prototypes until he realized his idea sounds were initially recorded at home but later by the lawrence welk orchestra and eventually he started to sell these instruments as chamberlain branded instruments and the concept was simple and each key was a sliver of tape and when the key was pressed the tape was dragged across a tape head until it reached the end usually after about eight seconds where upon it's released and the spring or later motors re-wound the tape ready for it to be played again now in terms of sounds they vary from straight chromatic recordings of instruments including flutes saxophones guitars and vibes etc right up to full musical motifs under each note now being an electro-mechanical device there were inherent problems firstly there was no internal chassis so if the instrument moved the tapes would become misaligned with the tape heads and cause obvious problems secondly because the tape heads weren't matched even if you left it unmoved the tonal variations between each note were obvious anyway one day harry is beavering away in his workshop and his window cleaner is these magnificent noises coming from within and intrigued he asks to see what is making this music and he's immediately blown away and offers to become harris salesman now this window cleaner was called bill franson and he's gone on to become a kind of pantomime villain of sorts because after a while frustrated by the inherent problems with the instrument he asked harry if he could solve them and then julie vanished completely unbeknown to harry what bill had done is get on a boat bound for england complete with two dual manual chamberlain music master 600s rumor has it that somewhere along the journey the instruments magically became re-badged as fransen instruments and on arrival he put an advert in a newspaper looking for a company who could make match tape heads this was answered by a company called bradmatic whose interest was peaked at an order of 70 tapeheads so they asked to see the instrument and were duly blown away in fact so much so that they bought the rights to the instrument from bill franson writes that bill actually didn't own and so the chamberlain 600 became what's known as the meletron mark 1. are you saying that all those chamberlain sounds predate the metatron ones because i mean i have to say if you're trying to you know okay if you want a melotron sound obviously use that but if you want a kind of degraded sounding violin or cello or you know orchestral instrument chamberlain sound good i mean they're usable i actually you know have used the chamber in orchestral sounds a lot now meanwhile harry oblivious to bill's bit of subterfuge eventually wonders well where the hell is he and rumor has it that after hearing the radio still on his apartment the door was kicked in but obviously there's still no trace of bill so harry carried on as usual building music masters and rhythm mate drum machines now these drum machines also use tapes and were mostly recorded with harry's son richard playing drums and various models were offered for sale over the years not only does it sound great and the recordings are just so idiosyncratic but it's got a limited palette that's its beauty it sounds great as well it sounds great i mean just i came in walked in and just looking at it as a piece of furniture you know it's going to sound great you just look at the cloth on it it's got sparkles that's that's classic great sound isn't it sparkles um he's wonderful it's really it's a wonderful piece [Music] in the early 60s harry got wind of this machine in the uk that appeared to be identical to his so after talking to frank norman and les bradley from bradmatic he was invited over to the uk to sort things out i think it took all of five minutes for him to realize that you know the bradleys had behaved entirely honorably and that everybody had been duped by bill so an agreement was reached and they partly company amicably all except bill of course and actually rumor has it that harry refused to shake his hand at the end of it all anyway harry returned to the us and continued refining and making chamberlain instruments now the most popular of these was the chamberlain m1 a portable instrument not dissimilar to the melotron m400 and this was used by a variety of artists back then including david bowie on the low album and is still used to great effect today by people like patrick warren and john bryan the commercial flagship of the chamberlain range is this m4 it weighs 300 kilos and this one belonged to three dog night who actually toured with it during the 80s now the only sound that's shared between the chamberlin and meletron is the famous three violin sound that's graced at just about every 60s and 70s recording from moody blues to yes and genesis you name it pretty much and it's these evocative sounds together with harry's tenacity and engineering genius and how a simple idea and subsequent eureka moment led to the inception of two instruments the chamberlain and the milotron [Music] friends the window clearing's coming to town he's looking to expand his horizons oh how are you better watch out

Channel: GForce Software

Views: 44,368

Rating: 4.9748425 out of 5

Keywords: Dennis Colin, Bob Moog, Moog Synthesizer, Herb Deutch, Moog Foundation, I Monster, Daniel Miller, Alan R Pearlman, ARP, Synthesizer, Brian Eno, Billy Currie, Karl Hyde, Rick Smith, Underworld, Chamberlin, Tape Replay, Harry Chamberlin, Dave Spiers, Don Buchla, Alessandro Cortini, NIN, Adrian Utley, Will Gregory, ARP Synthesizer, Buchla, Buchla Easel, Dean Honer, Jarrod Gosling

Id: _gXWgBEiNhs

Length: 67min 12sec (4032 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/malint]

If you haven't watched Bright Sparks already, it's now free. An amazing insight into the synth originators. Good watching with dinner.

[u/OldVoltage]

It was posted 5 days ago, but it always is worth as many posts cuz it's great!

[u/Czk_ffbe]

That was great! Thanks for sharing