Electromotive - The Story of ARP Instruments

[Music] pioneering has its has its joys and sorrows I was seven or eight years old so started all I know is I got caught up and it just absolutely fascinated Irish the music and electronics this big and that's where beta synthesizer so it was the two years it was in I mean it was in between in between the sounds that you could do sighs your hands interested just back in those states it was like magic but it was on our flight at law but it wasn't quite as long that the seventies and early eighties were were just a Wild West everybody was so excited about it it was a great time is exciting time artist music introduce me came out there was something new on the new feature [Music] Xplosive time [Music] now say it's what to seek your dream this you know carries its manifested [Music] because it was actually a music which cemetery very beginning this is electro-motive story of our instruments alan robert Perlman was born in New York in 1925 his father was an electromechanical designer who created projectors for movie theaters and Alan's own interest in electronics began at a very young age and my grandmother used to tell me stories about my father and his brother when they were little kids and one of the favorites was that he took a part of radio and then he ran away from home because he was afraid he was gonna get in trouble he did a lot of that he lived did a lot of taking things apart I think he went to a an uncle or a cousin's house but he managed to put it all back together and then my my grandmother realized that she had of course on her hands he was for music also became a part of Alan's life early on as he started piano lessons at the age of six whilst a high school allons then piano teacher invited a lecturer from Yale to give a demonstration to her pupils on acoustics at that time I knew nothing about Tambor's and all that sort of thing but he relates the recordings and illustrated with some examples what of distinguishing tambour might be sort of got the idea that maybe I'd like to work and doing something about that after high school and the student serving in the military Alan attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute graduating in 1948 it was here that he got his first recognition for his engineering talents I decided to do a little study myself I guess it's now called a an envelope follower we play an instrument process they sound electrically and you come up with an envelope that you can put it in to another instrument and it worked pretty well not only well but they asked me to present a paper at a student conference and I did and I was very much surprised to win a prize certificate or something like that but that really got me interested Allen's earliest professional work included designing a radiation detector with six decades of logarithmic response you also set up the Nexus research laboratory which even included work for NASA and George a Philbrick designing op-amps at home one of the things that um is visit vivid in my memory is having an oscilloscope in the basement and I thought it fascinating I'd love to look at that it was really interesting and then upstairs we had a music room and this is a sort of indicative of my father's taste so there's a baby grand which I'm sort of sitting at now that was my parents that I have here and while a wall or two of Records and a clavichord that my father and I built he remade one with a kit when I was six and I helped him out I pretended to help him out by the late 60s Allen had registered patents for logarithmic and exponential circuits and with an eye on the new synthesizers being built by Mogan Buchla and inspired by the release of Wendy Carlos switched on bark Allen began to consider whether his discoveries had potential for musical application big problems that the Moke synthesizer and Beulah synthesizer had that they were not very temperature stable the temperature would change and they'd go out of tune I thought about it a little bit so maybe this thing that I have got a patent on is usable in something like that turned out to be was very usable as a matter of fact I guess that's it's sort of established a standard they hadn't been for the fact that I had a job with a company making radiation detector equipment I probably wouldn't have gotten into electronic music Allen subsequently sold Nexus to Teledyne and in his mid 40s formed a music company and set up in a humble building on Kenneth Street Newton Highlands Massachusetts this is a kind of a little crumby warehouse II building on a dirt road which horrified my mother so much mud to go instantly the place was the you really ruin all your shoes things just get been a president of this company it was a big fancy office and all that and next thing we know he's working in you know basically cinderblock and cement floor one of the principal founders was actually actually a law firm at that time was Pollock O'Connor and Jacobs Louis was a graduate of Yale University and as an early alumnus he would get the publication's and one fine day he came to me and said lay here so yeah an alumni magazine over there and there's some articles about various people and one of these people who happens to be a Scott David friend who was in charge of the Electronic Music Lab over there at Yale University said you might want to talk to him okay I went to Yale as an undergraduate and I had a double major in engineering and music and to earn some extra money I worked building equipment for the Yale electronic music studio and I really kind of built the whole thing from scratch and I had moved on to Princeton to do graduate work in engineering and one day I got a call from this lawyer in Boston who said he had a client who wanted to start a synthesizer company and he had read about me and was interested in talking so I flew up to Boston and you know all drove me over did this little garage kind of plant that we had in in Newton and told me about his plans showed me his prototype some of the things he was working on and very shortly there after I left graduate school and moved to Boston to the join Al and founding harp or tonus at that time [Music] band of toner staff also included mani Mandel dick Stearns Ken MacNeil Margaret Shepherd and Buena Pearlman one of the other key people brought on board was engineer Dennis P Colin one of the specific modules Dennis worked on was the 10:47 multimode filter and he subsequently published a paper on it David friend joined them shortly after and and in fact some of the modules for the arc 2500 grew out of the work I had done at Yale because I had been designing and building equipment for the Yale electronic music studio and so I quickly said about sort of building designing and building a few of the modules for the 2500 l was a really great analog engineer and his biggest contribution I think from an engineering standpoint was understanding how to make voltage controlled devices and filters and oscillators that were stable with respect to temperature one of the tricks that al invented was if you have two matched transistors that you want to use for compensating for temperature in order to get the junctions of the transistors closest as close together as possible it actually take the transistor on a piece of sandpaper and grind it down until the epoxy was almost down to where the junction was then you glue the two transistors together and so you know most people didn't think of things like that [Music] moving with impressive speed tonus unveiled their debut instrument just one year later at the annual Audio Engineering Society show in October of 1970 the first version is referred to in documentation as either the series 2000 modular studio synthesizer or simply the ARP synthesizer they followed numerous configurations and cabinet sizes these systems are collectively referred to as the ARP 2500 although that name doesn't actually appear anywhere on the earlier models and came slightly later and as the systems of modular and custom Arrangements could be assembled there isn't one standard instrument that is the ARP 2500 hence it's somewhat more of an umbrella term for family of synthesizers that share common electronics these systems are all distinct in that they used a matrix switching panel instead of patch cords well the patch cords were were widely cited as a real pain in the neck and you know al identified that as a problem very early on and we were looking for a better solution it's clean and when you got good at it you could visualize the patch very easily it wasn't like you know this maze of patch cords where you can can't figure out what's connected to what the The Matrix Switch thing was was quite visual and so even a fairly complicated patch you could run your eye around it very quickly see what's connected to what in this fledgling market using cutting-edge technology the first synths were both expensive and highly specialist the system prices ranged between four thousand and twenty thousand dollars which converts to around twenty five to one hundred and thirty thousand dollars in today's money and the average musician was unlikely to know how to operate one either so it's not surprising that few ARP 2500 variants were ever built but the 2500 had an impact far greater than its numbers [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I think there were four or five of us at the end of building the first 2500 and I remember we all sat around and looked at it and said wow this is great and then somebody says now who's gonna sell it and I was elected having been kind of the least nerdy of the of the five people that were there so I put the thing in a station wagon and drove it around and sold one to Brown University and then sold went to my old alma mater Yale University and then sold one to my wife's University Sarah Lawrence College down in New York and that's how it began and that's also the kind of the end of my career as an engineer because I went on from there they're really just getting sucked into sales and marketing and eventually ending up as president of art as the technology was so new the adoption of synthesizers by mainstream musicians took a couple of years the first round of them pretty much all went to universities and the second round started to get into you know the jingle business and you know people doing commercial stuff in home studios and then you know and then they really started to catch on in recording studios that bands were using you know and that was that was precipitated by some of the early rock and rollers who you know bought them for their home use and the sound started to appear on records and then that started to create demand in the in the pop music business Pete Townsend was an early adopter of synthesizers who'd previously used an EMS vcs3 he later upgraded to an op 2500 and used it prominently on the who's next Quadrophenia and tommy albums amongst others sparking a long relationship between himself and art in fact he still has his 2500 in his studio to this very day Jimmy Page George Harrison and jean-michel Jarre also purchased when 500 as did Vangelis who later used it on the Chariots of Fire soundtrack the opening synthesized arrangement to Elton John's funeral for a friend was also performed and recorded on a 2500 by David Hentschel elsewhere French contemporary composer le an addict used a 2500 for decades in her electronic works finding ongoing inspiration from the instrument several years after its release the 2,500 even made a physical appearance in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind where it was used to communicate with the aliens then service manager and later vice president of engineering Phil Dodds even appeared in the film as the character operating it after Spielberg thought he looked the part the original service manager I stole him from one of the dealers out of Washington now Clark Ferguson and Phil was his assistant service manager from that dealer in Washington and I stole him and we finally shipped unless something over there and about a week later you got a a call from them they said gee we really don't know how to cope with it we don't have on package set it up and everything like that and the instruction manuals are good but who's got time to roll a can you lend us somebody that'll help he'll ask what can I do it out I say well reluctantly say okay how long does it take you me sir a few days maybe a week okay and about a couple hours before I was to make my way to the airport everything's done I had to do the checkout or the director saying you okay with this and so Steven Spielberg and Sean Williams show up and they say it looks pretty cool and they say well they can you can you give me a demo and see I can make a trumpet sound to do this in such sounds I say oh yeah sure how about that oh yeah it's good how can you do a kind of a cello wish and this went on for a while and then Spielberg and Williams came up to the console and I remember his fieldwork saying that's really interesting I'm just gonna ask do you have any acting and I had the most fun I got things set up and then when the set was closed for the night they hadn't started shooting yet I had about three hours to myself in the dirigible hangar where I cranked up that mission and I had every sequencer going and the sound is echoing and recoiling and the ceilings and I'm ty was told the next day that uh they could hear it a mile away cuz it apparently reflected up on earth the mineral oil that they burned from other clouds coming in it got all over the 2500 it was ruined it it was a nightmare I've never seen a greasy synthesizer before but when this thing came back it was completely coated with oil it was gross we basically threw it away yeah when one of the things I learned when a movie finishes the production company folds up shop and goes away and there's there's not even anybody to sue they have all of these you know very complex legal entities set up and so all of the promises and obligations that they make her worthless trash the synthesizer and they stole my PBS customer support and all we had to show for it was a good story okay they what for me was excellent I don't remember the exact numbers but it was enough to handily put down a down payment on a really nice house and need him for me at that period it was huge the 2500 was also used by Jerry Goldsmith in the Logans run score and further establishing Arps connection to science fiction imagery it was used on Jeff Wayne's musical version of the War of the Worlds five decades later the 2500 is a prized possession that still inspires artists composers and producers who own them such as aphex twin John Frusciante and David Barron whose system this is [Music] in 1971 up followed on from the 2500 with their next flagship instrument the 2600 and so we thought well you know if the university can spend $25,000 what about a public school you know like a high school if they could if we could make it for twenty five hundred dollars instead of twenty five thousand dollars maybe they would start buying it and at the same time we also said look if Pete Townsend can shell out twenty five or thirty thousand dollars for a twenty five hundred why can't the average high school rock man shell out a tenth of that the result was a smaller semi modular mono synth that was normal with a hardwired signal path that could be defeated with PAP's cables rather than the pin matrix of the twenty five hundred hardwired in a sense that if you didn't put any patch cords answer the thing it would you'd still be able to use it as an instrument and there were a predetermined functions as though there are internal patch cords the concept and design of the 2600 was the work of Alan Perlman David friend Dennis : and Jeremy hill and so when we got the 2600 the first 2600 built I put it under my arm and took it to New York City and made what was probably the first sales of a synthesizer manufacturer on a retail music store so I walked into Manny's music which was a big music store on 46th Street in 48th Street in New York City and they took one look at all the knobs and buttons and everything else basically deposit deposited me back out on the street with my 2600 and so I walked literally right next door to Sam Ash music and tried again and they said well we'll take it on consignment how about that and it sold like three days later and so they called up and ordered another one and this time they had to pay for it and about a week later I got a call from Manny's apologizing for throwing me out on the street and said they wanted one too and so that was the beginning of the art dealer network there were at least nine iterations of the 2600 over a 10-year period and you'd have to be a monotonous nerd to go through them all so here we go the first model was the 2600 nicknamed the blue Marvin after there then chief financial officer Marvin Cohen rarest of all only two dozen or so were made one person to get their hands on a blue Marvin was composer and performer Don Moreau I went up to visit them and they were in that big garage day friend and Alan Pearlman met them for the first time and then there were people in the back on stools with soldering guns basically putting instruments together putting 2,500 modules I guess together and that's what they had available to show me and you know $7,000 it blew me away but I couldn't afford it but Dave friend said to me well let's keep in touch because we have some things coming down the pike and I think you'd be interested in them I got a cold later on from I think it was Dave saying that Walter Cyr who was already selling moves in New York City he said to go in and check this out so I went into serie Sound in New York and there was 2600 and I played with it and I said I've got to have one of these and I basically called a friend up and begged him I said you know I really can't see life without this and he said well we do have some early models quasi prototypes that we're just gonna get rid of we have one left if you're interested in it he said you know it's it's it's a metal case I said I don't care if it's a rubber case you know I'll take it so for $1,200 I got a blue Marvin 2600 and that arrived in July and I basically lived with it for a couple of months and did my first demonstration performance with it in the fall of 1971 dawn also experimented with recording the 2600 for the first time later that same year [Music] [Music] [Music] and as well as recording dantas new technology out in public for performances and workshops which received mixed reactions I remember doing a showcase once talking about Letran music at a major of music education university I'm not gonna mention names because bygones be bygones one professor had his back to me the entire presentation they were sitting in round tables you know it was after dinner was a lecture demonstration on the new world of electronic music this one elderly gentleman sat with his back to me sipping his coffee the entire hour but it was it was never I guess they saw it as a kind of us versus them but it's it's all music and it was just too big a step I think for a lot of people who just grew up in a strictly acoustic classical world so I understand that but the early days were pretty hairy at a couple of smarts take a look around we won the original 2600 model was followed by the 2600 C also known as the gray meanie shortly after again only a few dozen of these were made still in 1971 came this 2600 P vs. 1 which is the first to be housed in a more robust portable case with a handle this model used different oscillators to the two previous models and from version one to version 4 of the 2600 P in 1974 there were two further changes to the VCOs version four also had the ability to be played to a follicle envira it's 36:20 keyboard this was thanks to the implementation of a design used in other since such as the e ml electro comp that was adapted for the 2600 by a young engineer and then art dealer called Tom Oberheim wonder what happened to him the music you're hearing now was created by Lisa belladonna on a 2600 P versus 2 [Music] [Applause] it was during the run at the 2600 PS that the company name was changed from tonus to armed al used to sign his schematic diagrams ARP and you know we were sitting around trying to think up a new name for the business and somebody looks down at this schematic diagram it says how about art that's how it happened in some languages let is a harp in Italian and I think our opinion if French is something like a to summon its musical sounding I remember that vividly I do remember that vividly there was a you know a lot of read redesign Margaret Shepherd David friend's wife was responsible for a lot of the art work and I used to really enjoy the art work that came with the collateral the print collateral and things like that the cartoons that she made them she was actually a big influence on me as far as wanting to be a graphic designer in fact the original art g-clef logo with power cord had also been designed by Margaret it was then later adapted by David Frederick into the final version but back to the 2600 in 1975 came to 2601 version 1 which had some improvements to front-end components but was otherwise very similar to the 2600 P version for and in 1977 came to 2601 version 2 which was significantly different and not just because of a new color scheme after conversations with mogh over their patented ladder filter up had to abandon their 4012 design and introduced a new 4072 from this model onwards despite some myths about a lawsuit between Mogan up there wasn't one and then finally came the 2601 version 3 in 1980 of which very few were made across its various incarnations somewhere between two and three thousand 26 hundreds were produced which is quite a substantial number for an electronic instrument from the early 70s whether you're into synthesizers or not you've almost certainly heard it because sound designer ben burtt used his to create the voice of r2d2 it was also used again by Pete Townsend as well as jean-michel Jarre Joy Division where the report to pêche mode Stevie Wonder Vince Clarke Tony banks Edgar Winter and Rick Wakeman amongst many others [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] whilst the early synthesizers were bought by universities music labs and the rich and famous art were quick to realize the need to create simpler and more portable instruments for use by the average musician first instrument to that effect was the ARP soloist which was a single oscillator preset based monitoring with a few performance controls interestingly the soloist had assignable after touch with threshold and sensitivity settings on the back of the instrument and first of all the first soloist was put together with chewing gum and baling wire basically it was it was the service nightmare but it it was a precursor to a later attempt which was the pro soloist where that was properly designed the original soloist was designed primarily by Dennis Colin and British native Jeremy Hill who was one of the earliest engineers ARP hired a subsequent refined version the pro soloist would be his doing prior to ARP Jeremy had taken a pre-university course at associated electrical industries or ATI in Manchester in the north of England before completing a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Bristol returning to AEI Jeremy was transferred to their facility in new parks Leicester so I was working on things associated with military radar specifically very high voltage power supplies that would go to a high voltage somewhere between 600 and 900 volts and stay there very precisely for a certain period of time and then randomly change to another level stay there randomly change to another and it was for anti interference anti jamming radar so that you're constantly changing the frequency of the radar so you couldn't track it exactly so the whole with super high voltage is exactly what it was here at this time due to the Vietnam War American companies were recruiting British engineers through an initiative called the manpower register Jeremy went for an interview and was offered jobs with two US companies one of them was Africa and so Jeremy and his family moved to Cincinnati Ohio to join them he continued to work on military technology such as transceivers manpack radios and again anti jamming systems for radar I was into military electronics as you're hearing and I didn't really like the idea into military electronics I wanted to do something that I thought was more useful to the world my wife was in a church choir and she had a choir director who was into electronic music and he told me about art and that's what led me to out of the blue call up and say I might be interested in doing something with you if you're interested music for me after a callback Jeremy flew up to Boston for an interview and was met at the airport by Alan Perlman and David friend how I had this little sob and David was in the back seat I go in the front seat next to Al the first thing I do is I sit there and the engine starts revving very high at it and I thought what's going on I said what's what's wrong he says well you should take your foot off the accelerator such a small car but my foot was on his ass area so that was the start of our interview wasn't very prompted so but he got better after that so he went back to the plant and we taught yeah in the end he said I'd like you to work with us as previously mentioned the first instrument that was Jeremy's design was the pro soloist though he was a new soloist and this was on different concepts and I was totally the engineer that I designed all of that 100% absolutely through its very early employment of digital technology the pro soloist was ahead of its time for 1972 starting with an analogue VCO a ramp and five preset pulse waves that can be combined or generated at a very high frequency this VCO runs into a digital closed loop error correction system that keeps the frequency precisely in place with an optimum settling time between frequency changes this error detection system only covers a single octave range because the digital scanning keyboard then controls a series of digital dividers to give you four octaves within a musical range fire the frequency to voltage converter the divided down signal forces the error detection system back into action to correct the oscillator frequency keeping it perfectly in tune and whatever octave you're in so this essentially allows for continuous slowing across the keyboard this keyboard also uses binary code to find both the octave and the specific note within that octave when a key is pressed this means that like the oscillator is also both accurate and stable especially when compared to the standard analog keyboard designs of the era although it's monophonic jeremy's digital scanning keyboard predated Oberheim in sequential circuits hues of EB systems digital scanning keyboard by half a decade and then further digital dividers to give you the pulse trains you needed to form the waveforms and then they were combined just by resistive summers so the whole keyboard was totally digital and what we had was lots of different boards one board for each function with an 8-bit input and a ribbon cable that tied them all together in parallel and so that ended up at the switch Bank and so when you switched an instrument you've got the right code that went to all the modules and set them all up you know if you had one for the instrument number one then out from that would pop 100 100 100 1 1 1 or something to set the modular so they were individual roms on each board and that's how it all worked and it was it was very successful and very stable super stable because of the digital electronics like the original soloists the pro soloists had assignable after touch with thresholds and sensitivity settings which was achieved by using closed phone conductive rubber under the keys it didn't matter where you compressed that the change in resistance was about the same so you can now press any key and and and you could use that as an effect you could use it for changing pho hmm or you could use it for adding Wow you know or you could use it for frequency modulation you'd have a little bit more you can add tremolo or you could switch those different things the voicing of the pro soloist was done by Jeremy but also included input from David Fredrik known professionally as David Frederick's over beer and bananas in Jeremy's basement information that may cause some viewers to let out a comic Wow the pro so Louis proved influential and became a path that several competing manufacturers subsequently walked down in the early 70s with these instruments intended to sit on top of an organ or roads and be used for solar lines the mogh satellite mini Korg 700 Yamaha sy 1 and 2 and the Roland sh1 and 2000 since being comparable examples it also became the lead instrument of choice for Tony banks of Genesis for a time as well as cropping up in the music of Billy Preston and David Bowie amongst others [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the final version of this concept was the later prodi-g ex [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the 2600 had been the first link to david frederick who's at that point of regional sales manager and concert artist for the Lowry organ company David received a call from a friend who ran a music store who had taken in a 2600 to sell he called me up one day said hey he said I've got this thing I don't know out of Boston he said it's it's like they call it a synthesizer he says it's got holes in the cabinet and he said I don't know what the how to deal with it he said why don't you come up and let's play with it and I went up and I looked at and I said well what is it how do you make a call what this thing and anyway to make a very long story short he said wants to take it home and play with it and I said okay so I took it home and basically I don't know it's just I just knew what to do after getting the hang of this newfangled instrument David's friend asked him to help him sell it by demonstrating it live at the store so he called me up he says well he says let's do an in-store concert I said you're kidding he says no I said alright so I brought it up there and apparently al Pearlman heard about it and he came down with a couple of people so I started with the Oregon and the 2600 miles making trumpet so I was making trains pulling out of the station all kinds of sounds and Al just was like beyond himself because he never heard it played live and so he asked me to join the company and that's when I joined tonus at the time David's other strength was in human engineering as he developed the patch books overlays and manuals as well as coming up with some subsequent instrument names David used his contacts from the organ industry and started a team initially including Bernie clock Oh bill went down jacala John shaken and Bruce McClendon a little later came bill singer Rick parent Paul Pittman Dan Garrett Ron Fennessy and a 19-year old Mike Prijedor and basically I started developing the sales team and grabbed guys from the Oregon industry because there was nobody from the synthesizer industry and I brought them in and I taught them how to demonstrate the 2600 and the soloist at the time and basically sent them out in the field got thrown out of a few stores because they didn't know what it was or anything else let's just get that crap out of here you know and a year later they were begging us to take the line the inspiration for some of the patches came from various places such as patch number 53 sporadic heavy breathing [Applause] one day I was at my office and my phone rings and I pick it up but I'm saying hello and I hear this heavy breathing like and I'm like I said Mike I said you gotta get another hobby he was in he was in the lab and he created with 2600 the 2600 actually breathing it sits in the patch book by the way and that's my bridge new dispatch book and patch number 74 the Wampus monster you know so the sun's going down and we're saying hey you kids better come in the house because if you don't come in here right now it's getting dark the Wampus is gonna get you and a Wampus was a half man half frog let me see that would come out after children right so I created this sound called the Wampus now it's in your twenty six hundred patch book all you have to do is turn the reverb up turn the lights out and it will scare the living hell out of you [Music] [Music] David's creativity around the demonstration of synthesizers in a performance setting led him to record bespoke records for the art products [Music] [Music] so I did this blue plastic demo record using the soloist and the 2600 and that was the first record so we went through the first name show and it was again a piece that you could hand out to everybody and then he could take it home and they could listen to it and it was a full demonstration onto the two products it was designed for people to listen to it to say hey this thing can play music it's a musical instrument that was the idea was to cede the market and and let that record be the salesman but David also wanted to emphasize to musicians that synthesizers weren't just for use by studios and universities they could be kicked with the perfect opportunity to show this was at the NAMM trade show and I said okay what we're gonna do is we're going to let the industry really hear what synthesizers could do I got a hold of the hotel and I got a hold of the people in the bar and I paid off the band and throw them gone for the weekend after work and we put together a variety of songs and I decided well we're gonna make this so that they're gonna remember us not only besides the music so it was called the art name Jim as you know musicians we jam so what I did is I decided okay this is really cool I went out and I bought quite a few cases of strawberry jam and after the factory closed myself and one of the engineers I took the jam and put it in hot water and took the labels off and I had labels printed up I wish I had that today and the label said art named Jim it was strawberry jam it doesn't matter and then I put ingredients and then I put you know Mike and myself and Tom and and Cleve and then starring and then I had the synthesizers listed we put them on the tables you know and in this big this big blonds that we had and then I had napkins made and sters made so I really laid it down so that when people came it wasn't just listening to a bunch of guys playing some something new it was an event and we made it hard for somebody to get in I mean it was pretty interesting and it's one of the funniest stories we tell it was one of the things was Bob Mogan his sales managers snuck in the back took back of the room he thought the air is play live a lot of very important people that came in to hear us and it was the first time it just blew the industry apart because they never heard synthesizers played like we made a play and that was my whole marketing strategy was to be able to get all the music dealers whether it was a piano in Oregon or am I to be able to say wow I could sell these things it's a whole new market the arc named Jim was a tremendous tremendous hit [Music] [Applause] [Music] realizing the appeal and potential of these more compact instruments in 1972 from their new location at 320 Needham Street Newton ARP released and neat and cable free mana Tsin for use on stage the Odyssey [Music] [Applause] [Music] I do remember being aware of the Odyssey when it first came out because the name was so compelling and it was so different than the other ones that were just models 2,500 and 2,600 so I remember how their discussions about that and some of the subsequent names you know the 2600 still had a lot of flexibility because it had patch cords and so forth but the truth the matter is you can get 90% of the sounds that you wanted without any patch cords and so I said why don't we make a synthesizer that's specifically designed for the stage that has no patchwork and you know it won't have the ultimate flexibility of being cable anything connect anything to anything but it'll have all the useful stuff the things you hear over and over and over again and so and that worked out really well I mean that was a incredibly popular stage instrument we made thousands of them far simpler to use and affordable enough to compete with modes model D the Odyssey went on to be one of our biggest selling products although perhaps surprisingly it doesn't actually take top spot in that regard as well see David sketched out the electronics of what would become the Odyssey and arrives at a dual phonics in that has sawtooth square waves available on its two oscillators with the first oscillator able to run in low frequency mode this pulse width modulation one dedicated LFO to envelopes sampling hold oscillates sync ring mod FM a resonant low-pass filter and a non resonant high-pass filter white and pink noise sources and on later models cv/gate and trigger connectivity you can also run external audio through it and control it with a foot switch in pedal plenty to get your hands on but simple enough to understand quickly and crucially without the need for any patch cables and where did the name come from I named it because it was an odyssey it was an adventure of sound you know into the like the universe it was something new that nobody ever explored before and it's an odyssey and that's why I named it the Odyssey as mentioned earlier that you often eat Rick had been implemented as a modification to the 2600 and it was installed as standard on the Odyssey when you press two keys down of the same time it changed the current going through the resistor ladder in the analogue keyboard and if you just take that voltage and add it to the lowest note you get the higher note it's pretty simple I don't I don't know why we didn't think of it originally but you know it was said once once you see it it was so obvious there were numerous iterations of the obviously across three main models and you'd have to be a tedious dork to list them all so here we go in 1972 came the mark 1 model 2800 which was white-faced and used a 40 23 to pole filter later units introduced a new black and gold color scheme but were otherwise the same this color scheme continued into the mark 2's through models 28 10 to 28 15 the mark 2 Mol's saw a new 40 35 4 pole filter as well as CB gate and trigger connections there hadn't been included on the mark 1 from 1978 onwards models twenty eight twenty to twenty eight twenty three with the final Odysseys to be manufactured under the mark three umbrella this model introduced the proportional pitch controller or PPC this was a section to the bottom left of the instrument that housed three pressure-sensitive pads that allow different pitch modulations to be performed on the fly you also find mark twos that have had this section retrofitted in place of the pitch wheel the other significant electronics change with different oscillators and again a different filter under pressure from the aforementioned mode pates at the forty thirty five found in the mark two had to be changed to a new forty seventy five design for the mark three the forty seventy five actually had a miscalculation in its design meaning that it could only reach around twelve kilohertz as opposed to the thirty five kilohertz of the earlier incarnations the result is that the instruments with this filter have a darker sound the other upgrades were mainly cosmetic and introduced the then uniform orange and black color scheme a metal case with embedded PPC pads at a rather precarious looking keyboard design although there is a specific reason for this as since were mainly monophonic and stacked for live performance the cutaway design allow players to key to since at once and/or get their hands between them more easily April 73 went to ARP bought Odyssey and pro soloist so I got the first the white face seventy-three it was very fast to work with if you want to do a lot of you know different things in a solo and if you got a little out you could spiritually see where you are and bring it back to the original sound that you started with where the 2600 you know throwing a couple of patch cords and awesome they bathe you in blue light things could get a little interesting so yeah I think that's contributed to its popularity in addition to his lower price david frederick develops point-of-purchase materials to make sure the odyssey was accessible as possible to those who's confronted with it how do you present a product line in products that people could relate to back then as you know it was organs and how do you make music with these kind of instruments called synthesizers because some of the things that I did in developing the Odyssey was using overlays so that you could put a cutout overlay on the Odyssey and get an immediate sound that's what kind of propelled us because nobody knew anything about subtractive synthesis back then you know let alone anything else and it was just it was new to everybody the odyssey combined this accessibility and portability with a powerful sound and arp knew it was important to get it into the hands of famous musicians so that their fans would want to buy them too if Stevie Wonder had a hit on an ARP synthesizer everybody would run out and buy Arps keith emerson had a big hit with a mogh everybody burn out and buy bugs but this in mind David moved away from the engineering role of his earlier years and began to chase down musicians and bands in order to show the world that the biggest stars played arms that was an experience you know get up at 9 o'clock at night go to some recording studio and hope the band shows up by 3:00 in the morning and and they weren't too stoned or drunk to see the piece of paper you're trying to get them to sign or run interference for the managers is no no no they're not going to sign anything you know for the artists we didn't give any equipment away which a lot of companies do they had to buy everything because we didn't want that taint on the brand but we did have these gold-plated like credit cards that we would give the manager and if you had one of those you could walk into any music store in the world that carried ARP and exchange a dead or defective art for a new one right off the floor and then you know we would reimburse the dealer we give him a new synthesizer plus give him five hundred bucks for his trouble the persistence of this approach paid off and the odyssey was used by ABBA Kraftwerk Ultravox Steely Dan Jimmy Page deep purple Chick Corea tangerine dream George Duke Vangelis John Fox jethro tull Devo and Herbie Hancock amongst many others as well as voicing the distinctive melody that appeared in the BBC Radio phonic workshops Doctor Who theme rearranged by Peter Howell having chased artists David's tired having artists chase him yeah and you know it got to the point where this sort of second-tier bands we used to get you know like how do we get one of those you know I said well you're not famous enough you know when you're more famous again and your name will do us more good you'll get a gold card by contrast Alan Pearlman remained focused on the electronics rather than the rock stars and pop stars who were using them I did not meet any rock stars and there's a story behind this and that is one of my father's co-workers who had a kid around my age was telling me how she had an autograph George Harrison something or other the girls at 14 or 15 can be pretty demanding and I said how come I didn't get one of these so next time he came back from Europe I got a autographed 12-inch single PETA's it autographed it for me to Dino and when I asked my father so what was he like he says well I don't know it's one of the salesmen went out and got it and that was him you know if he met someone because he was told to meet them he would meet them my mother said she met a beetle I said which one she was I really don't remember they but the pair of them were not starstruck methought Nick came around or Mahler was resurrected maybe he would be starstruck but it's not his cup of tea so I did not get to meet the rock stars although perhaps that was a blessing in disguise as musicians having your gold card and phone number wasn't always a good thing as David found out when he got a call from an irate Steely Dan yeah this Odyssey had apparently died in the middle of a recording session and I get this call at like 2:00 in the morning and there's this irate person on the phone and he said oh honey I want you to hear this later bang bang bang and then a penny you know he says we just took this Odyssey you know it's some expletives around that and we just put a railroad stake through it attached to the wall of the studio and it was there years later I went haven't happened to be in LA at the time and I went buying this Odyssey was still sticking there it's bad but impaled on a wall or not the Odyssey can arguably lay claim to being one of the defining mono synths of the 1970s and with an enduring legacy its reimagine in various forms in recent years that we'll discuss a little later [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] backtracking slightly in 1973 art went public and sold stock to raise the funds needed to move the company forward my brother worked on Wall Street in the early 70s and our one public I think that they went public 70s 73 and so he bought a few hundred shares May 22nd 1973 there it is wanna buy some stock that same year are then 24-year old Roger Powell released his debut LP cosmic furnace on Atlantic Records the entirely instrumental album made heavy and skillful use of ARP synthesizers and this wasn't a coincidence as Roger had worked as an applications engineer for ARP in the early tonus days and had recorded some of arts demonstration discs with David Frederick including an entire walkthrough specifically for the Odyssey while his talent led to his recruitment for Todd Rundgren's band utopia shortly after in 1975 and he also had a long career as a composer performer programmer and columnist for publications such as keyboard magazine an amusing story involving Rogers started in 1971 when our then sixteen-year-old Donna countryman posed as dr. Donna countryman pretending to be the owner of a recording studio he received a reply from Roger describing tonus products and services along with a poster of the blue Marvin 2600 when a thread about this story was posted on synthesizers calm in 2004 pal saw it and responded by asking if dr. countryman was still interested in Arps fine units and that he was still patiently awaiting his response interestingly this letter also references the series 4000 encapsulated modules that art was selling at the time these were the same modules used in the 2600 sold separately to clients like Bell Laboratories [Music] for the next part of the art story we need to go to Holland Dutch organ manufacturer Eman BV had been busy inventing the 310 unique home organ this was no ordinary organ however as the instrument had a trick up its sleeve a string ensemble synthesizer section combining the usual divide down technology with bucket-brigade delays and an emulation of the leslie speaker called the orbit own the 310 produced a distinctive and lush sound that was immortalized by jean-michel Jarre on his seminal oxygen and Equinox albums where he ran his 3/10 through a small stone phaser to heighten this effect here we have another flagship Emin an organ from that era that also includes the string synthesizer the 2000 grand theater organ performed by one-time eminent demonstrator John Mann [Music] well I went to the Frankfort Meza and I was walking around and just checking out seeing who's got what and I walked up to this organ that was out of one of the displays and I started playing and I'm like wow these strengths are phenomenal so I went and I ended up asking a few people to say well you know this is a Celina strings and we're license to put her non organs I got a hold of the managing director of eminent which was the company I had a long talk with him and after a lot of negotiations I convinced them to take the strings section electronics out of the that section of the organ and put it in a box and so we ended up the first ones came over and it was the art ensemble and that's what I called it you know we had a very good professional relationship with them and that was that was great because it helped us both [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] the Selina was a hit and wound up on David Bowie's low Gary rights Dreamweaver and Pink Floyd's shine on you crazy diamond amongst many others the relationship worked both ways as art gave eminent circuit boards from their 1975 Explorer Morrison for use in the salinas string synthesizer as well as their c1 12s and c1 17s organs here we have Josh from Belgian synth-pop band Munna tix playing the up eminent hybrid Selina string synthesizer [Music] [Music] although the Selena is one of the most famous string synthesizers and most popular it wasn't the first now I'm going to discard the Hammond Nova cord from 1938 because it was not built specifically as a string emulator and at 225 kilograms it was neither portable either the first lightweight dedicated string synthesizer that employed an ensemble effect was designed and built by British composer and performer Ken Freeman and in fact one of his prototypes had been at the very same Frankfurt mass of the year before the Celina was launched now that's not to say that manufacturers like eminent copied is designed because they didn't they found their own ways to create their own instruments and unfortunately for Ken both eminent and crew ma had got their offerings out before he'd secured formal production of his and as a result sometimes his contribution has been overlooked a couple of lesser-known products from this era of the art little brother which was a monophonic expander module to connect with other ARP synths and also a project led by Tom Pickett called the ARP modular synthesizer lab also known as the MSL and sometimes referred to as the learning modules still with an eye on the educational establishments that had purchased earlier 2,500 and 2,600 models the MSL was built of separate battery-powered modules that could be connected together as the building blocks of an analog synth Perelman friend and Piggott had written a book titled learning music with synthesizers in 1974 and there was an accompanying workbook made for the modular synthesizer lab - along with example compositions Don Moreau briefly became a demonstrator for the MSL and then later went on to set up his own company and purchase the inventory from ARP so my dad and I talked it over and we actually signed a contract in June 14 1980 msl contract for $25,000 we got all existing inventory 10 actually educational books 5 had already been Illustrated five were still draft and we figured it out you know the the retail price on the existing inventory that I had and I can't find the actual numbers but I know was about eighty nine thousand dollars retail now did we sell all of it no but we you know we certainly didn't lose any money we made something you know but it was it wasn't and several years later after the whole thing had passed I basically gave my extra modules to my tech at the time and those modules go for like three hundred four hundred dollars apiece now in 1975 came ops highest selling instrument we were vesting around the lab one day and and basically I had this idea about taking the output and running it through an odyssey and let's see what we could do with the filters and stuff so I asked one of the texts to come in and can you disconnect the phasors circuitry so that it would just be a straight sound and they said yeah sure that's all right so he got the back and disconnected em and I took the output and ran it through the Odyssey and adjusted everything and I had these really cool horns so I said alright this is cool so then I got ahold of eminent and I said to them hey can we put a switch in here I said so we can had the phasers on or off I said and then we can run it through the Odyssey and that was the forerunner of the Omni the Omni was a relatively simple and accessible string synthesizer and you've almost certainly heard it as it was used in the music of Joy Division you order the cars Japan modern English yellow and Journey amongst others building on from the earliest Salina concepts the Omni had separate string synth and bass sounds that could be simultaneously combined with a chorus phaser circuit meaning that the omni was able to produce a lush and swirling sound [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] there was a sequel the Omni - in 1978 that brought with it several improvements including separate outputs for the different sounds as well as a change of clothing also in 1975 up introduced a cut-down version of the Odyssey as you know musicians call whether they're it's a guitar or whether it's a saxophone whenever they call the restaurant their axe that's a phrase so because this was a solo instrument kind of like that I decided to call it an axe this is my axe and that's how I came up with the idea for that the axe had one oscillator one LFO one filter and one envelope simple like many other art products there was a later black and orange version of it with a change of filter and the addition of PPC switches the axe saw some successes elite synth amongst keyboard players [Music] [Music] expanding their portfolio in 1976 are put out an analog sequencer using their trademark sliders and I'll let Ruben walk you through the most user-friendly design feature of our sequencer was the inbuilt voltage quantizer this clever little invention divided the voltage in twelve and the slider can jump between the steps [Music] the same year businessman Joseph Mancuso joined up as a director his suggestions on pricing and order structuring further boosted Arps cash flow from a people standpoint sales team that took the bar and raised it so high that they'll never be another one like it they were not pressure they were not you got you they were the nicest most warmest individuals that believed in synthesizers and there were all players every salesman to play when they went to various stores all I had to do was sit down and play talk to the management this is what we can do their personality last let's go out for beer well that's life for the first couple of years we were so successful David Frederick had been busy pushing op out to the world coming up with as many ideas as possible to grab people's attention in in the trade magazines sometimes I put an ad in and I'd have it upside down so that people are going through the magazines it's just like wait a minute they had to turn it over because it's natural curiosity but I got them to read my ad know the live shows continue to be a big part of how our instruments were demonstrated and David traveled the world getting the word out as a demonstration in Japan this led to a special effect that was a bit too realistic all right here we go Wow Wow and I'm commune Oh three two one and a liftoff and I'm hitting the what you know the white noise generator and the whole thing and and the whole place starts shaking I'm like wow this is really cool I had earthquake speakers you know and the chandeliers were shaking and everything else and I thought this is really cool welcome to find out it was an earthquake following successful sales from instruments like the Odyssey string ensemble and Omni ARP turned over seven million dollars in 1977 had around 40% of the market and had moved to a new premises at 45 Hartwell Avenue Lexington up successes had been hard for as earning money from a fledgling market had not been easy you know it would be I'd be on a bench and I'd be soldering contacts and the soloists or the pro soloist and we'd have to try to put that and the Odyssey together and hurry up before the end of the month and then we would put them finished product on the dock we would be considered a receivable so we could borrow money from the bank to make payroll David Frederick left off in the mid 70s and joined octave electronics for time and a stayed in the industry as a marketing and product development specialist to this very day and if you want to bring the Wampus monster back to life you can even pick up the David Frederick's signature patch book back to 1976 you might assume that the share of the market up had achieved by this time meant that they were a big company but bear in mind that the 70 synthesizer market was never massive so even Arps highest selling instruments only ever shifted a few thousand units and at its peak there were around 200 employees it was a risky business as an investment in just one product that didn't sell could well prove difficult to recover from people thought I had a much more glamorous life than I did people would say oh you're from your father's arc you must have lots of money and things like that it came with sort of a presumption that I was living this high life and I was really looking pretty much normal life as a kid with the exception of going to you know Europe or or California or someplace once a year because we would again mix the family holiday with with the trade show and things like that in 1976 two parallel projects had been started in order to develop what they considered was the way to go a polyphonic synthesizer with a digital keyboard and a sister guitar synthesizer the latter was something that was first done by Bob Easton of 360 systems and other manufacturers began to look into their own technology and it seemed logical given the number of guitarists there were and how much more accessible synthesizers had become to stage performance throughout the 70s well you know I mean guitar players we're always saying how can I make the same sounds that my keyboard players making and there were a lot more guitar players and there were keyboard players in the world and so we figured wow if we could make this work you know this might be a whole new market and I can remember trying to find what the heck kind of connector can I use you know you can't use a standard guitar plug because you got six separate signals and I you know we scoured the world for some kind of connector that would allow you to take six separate signals with coax on each one so they didn't interfere with each other the guitar side of the project started out with the ambition that the six strings could control six separate synthesizers in one box and it was dubbed the central six you know you were basically building special-purpose processors out of discrete logic chips you know or gates and gates flip-flops you know that kind of stuff and so it was expensive it probably would have cost fifteen or twenty thousand bucks if we had had to bring it to market because it had a lot of gear in it well we make one yeah I mean we made a cent or six and it actually worked better than the Avatar and then the Avatar because you know if you only have one string per synthesizer you don't have this problem with trying to figure out what to do with cords because you play a chord you get six notes coming out of six different synthesizers and so it actually would have been easier to build and it would have worked better than the Avatar but just like hugely expensive one of the salesmen Rick parents suggested his old guitar teacher Bill singer as not only a guitar specialist but somebody who had no background with synthesizers as was their intended end user one of the rare photos of the central six features bill sat in front of it guitar in hand the picture that you're talking about was the beach houses studio in London and we had brought the thing over there to show Pete and when we got there the damn thing wasn't working so day friend with many phone calls firing up the thing to to work and we invited press various rock artists of the time to the studio and there is I believe I still have a picture of Big Jim Sullivan playing it the theme was probably around oh five feet wide huge huge sound wise oh my god I am Telling You it was the coolest thing you've ever heard but I mean people were blown away absolutely one away that looking at it from merchandising standpoint it wasn't viable so what happened to the central six and all the stories of it continually breaking down true no it never kept breaking you know once or for the peach demo and it was no shooting it after that it was a one-time shot went back to the factory and all the circuit boards were taken out and things stood in the corner but that can engineering diary entry may 25th 76 dill wins came over who was one of the reps for and I knew a bunch of them because I was traveling a lot so we said talked about the Omni mixer the ARP no noise mixer I guess that had to have been and the guitar synth so this was May 25th 76 work it also began on a simpler monophonic guitar synth using the existing electronics of the Odyssey the ARP Avatar an early print ad announces both the central 6th and the Avatar stating that the former is the world's first polyphonic guitar synthesizer already a claim by top professionals is the ultimate black box and the latter is uniting synthesizer and guitar to become the most powerful musical force of the 70s 80s and 90s the prototype was that we tried some different things on it one of the things that we added there's a switch Bela's octave up octave down a touch responsive thing that we had tried which was if he never made it to the actual production line result was two sizes of hexa phonic pick up that attached to either narrower string space gibson style guitars or wider string spaced fenders the pickups are different than a normal guitar pick up because there's essentially six pickups in one with each individual string signal isolated if by Ron Hogue Rock was the late ticker so how did it work in a nutshell the avatar counts the number of cycles of a very fast clock during each cycle of an incoming note which measures the period of the note the number of clock cycles counted is transferred into a digital memory location or register the value in the register is used to divide down a second clock and this creates a square wave that can be converted from a frequency to a control voltage which in turn is directed since oscillators to sound a note that matches the one you played on your guitar the wave shape created by a guitar itself was too complex to be used directly which is why the conversion to a square wave was necessary so what that means is that for the synthesizer to work you have to have one cycle of a note for it to identify lepen no yes well that's a delay of some milliseconds when you're down on your low V they were working around we played everything an occupier and also the player had to develop a very clean picking style in order for the Avatar to be able to extract the intended note to assist with the isolation the avatar has activation switches for individual strings so the only pitches from those chosen by the user are fed into the multiplexer this then allows for some creative possibilities as the guitarist can run polyphonic parts with the straight signal or the guitar and select one string to run through the since simultaneously the first demo was the scariest now if you can imagine being on a stage and in front of you bob'll Oak Island Prowler tongu by Chet Atkins the folks from the Yamaha the demo opened was me playing a very clean hexa phonic sound in stereo I'd said that such responsiveness so that if I pluck to the heart of this huge ruby bang came out when the synthesizer came I swear to God the looks on their faces was just priceless it was absolutely amazing for them to hear this synthesizer tones coming at the weak guitar at the end of damn guitar player did a piece synthesized just and they called the outside the best demonstrated mister what they'd ever heard this is a social life no so I got in there and that was my first demo I never could get you to try it done there is also another bonus effect on the avatar which is hex fuzz this takes the individual signals from the six strings and sends them through six isolated fuzz circuits and then sums them back together so this is a fuzz effect but without any crosstalk between the strings as you would get with a standard pickup for this reason it was nicknamed the clean fuzz as with the standard hex pickup sound the hex fuzz can also be combined with the synth sound if so desired and with the synth itself which is for all intents and purposes a mark 3 Odyssey a range of the usual analog effects and sounds could be created using things like sample-and-hold ring modulation filtering cross modern attenuation via the foot switches in pedal there is control of portamento filter cutoff and lightly roll in gr 500 infinite sustain [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so this new world of exciting sonic possibilities captured the imagination of guitarists right you so much time in getting your sound out of your gear that anything else is just not going to happen so what do you have an instrument like the avatar it has thousands and thousands and thousands source and it plays their mind they just can't grasp the whole thing it worked well enough for some people but not well enough for they for the broad market it fell short of you know what what you would really like it to be able to do but you know for art it was just it was too much of a technical stretch for what was available at the time you really need a digital signal processing okay shot at the beginning and of course roland came out well this year series I have a rollin - Thank You mr. Kaka Hoshi rollin specimen fresh the Burton mr. Burton makes sense unfortunately with poor sales production was stopped with only a few hundred avatars having been made the project left art with the financial loss that played a part in the company's eventual closure one person who did purchase in Avatar in fact two avatars was composer and sound designer and one-time ARP salesman Allen how earth who used them with John Carpenter on the iconic Escape from New York soundtrack amongst others in fact when I spoke to Alan in early 2019 he still has one in his studio if you look hard enough it also had a few other fleeting uses but in terms of big famous avatar riffs played from a guitar there aren't really any and it's found more favor in recent years as a since module control by standard cv/gate and trigger whilst the central six concept at least all the light of day as the avatar the tandem poly since project had to be abandoned entirely but it was you know we had the same block of six synthesizers or something like that that we had built for the centur and we put a digital keyboard on the front of it and it also didn't make it to market is that a new polyphonic project was started and the resulting release in 1978 was the art Quadra this curious microprocessor controlled instrument combined four different sections monophonic base Dewar phonic lead polyphonic string and polyphonic synth sounds that used to buy down circuits it was multi tumbrel and had independent outputs for each section as well as independent cv/gate control of both bass and lead sounds it also had a comprehensive phase shifter at an onboard sequencer yeah I had some star users such as Genesis Pink Floyd and weather report the right people playing it it really sounded great I mean it sounded like 50 instruments all at once but it was it was basically a bunch of existing technology thrown together in one box so we got away from you know actually routing analog signals through through physical switches and started to use digital switches that actually this the audio signals were switched through solid-state switches not through mechanical switches yeah sold fairly well honey it was on the expensive side but it was it did pretty well and kind of took over from the string synthesizer because it had a strength synthesizer in it as well as a bunch of other stuff and so yeah it was pretty good seller as I recall the Quadro was released in 1978 and that same year a new and game-changing instrument was launched that brought together the emerging technologies of patch memory and a digital scanning keyboard that allowed full articulation of each of the voices once the Prophet came out that's where my head was going and I think everybody else's obviously but once once the OBX came out with eight voices that's it where do I sign here's the check I'll take it the polyphonic thing with are kind of faded out once the prophet and the orion fault - came in that said the Quadra does have its fans and again alan howís and john carpenter used one on the scores for escape from new york and the halloween sequels its sound has done a lot better with age and thankfully for us there are still a few running that we can enjoy forty years later [Music] by the early 80s there were major shifts in terms of both competition and technology there were digital synthesizers and samplers such as the Yamaha GS wand New England digital signal a via Fairlight CMI and EMU emulator models there were digital sequences such as the Oh behind ds2 sequential circuits model 800 and rollin mc8 and there were sample based drum machines such as the linn lm-1 and oberheim dmx the digital revolution was well and truly in motion and the way electronics were being manufactured particularly in Japan was changing the landscape dramatically but you know the writing was on the wall I mean the the Japanese companies Yamaha Korg and so forth they had such vertically integrated manufacturing capabilities I mean we had we couldn't make our own keyboards we weren't going to get into the business of doing injection molded plastic or anything like that and you know they could manufacture a synthesizer for what we were paying to buy a keyboard I remember going to Japan and the Yamaha guys brought me into their lab and they had every single art you know it sort of taken apart on the work benches they were very proud of the fact that you know they were copying every single detail and they even went to the trouble of taking some of the potted modules like the VCOs and stuff and grinding them down you know a tenth of a millimeter at a time taking a picture and reconstructing what was inside them by grinding them down Oh mister friend you know you were such a great better and you know art is such a great company entering this and to show you how much we admire everything you've done take a look at our lab he just looked like an herb graveyard David left off in 1979 has set up his first software company even so Arps earlier 2600 was still in demand from musicians was still in production at this point I remember dating a musician in who somehow it talked me into having my father lend them an instrument and I don't remember what it was I didn't believe it was a 2600 and of course what happens you know the father takes the instrument back when he needs to bring it back and the boyfriend leaves right after that and I know I'm never telling anybody who my father is every so it the identity that I had with being the daughter of Evelyn our Pearlman fluctuated as far as sometimes I didn't want to be identified I have of course a different outlook about it completely now you know you're at when you're gaining your own sense of self it could be quite daunting as the 70s came to a close art released 16 voice and for voice electric pianos aimed at home users that the voices referring to the number of presets rather than the polyphony available as they were both fully polyphonic unfortunately the Mylar used in the button design would set if it got hot rendering the instrument unusable the pianos began coming back for repair as quickly as they went out the last thing our needed one final mono sent the soleus was released in 1980 whilst the soleus is essentially another Odyssey variant is worth noting as during its production regional technical rep Timothy Smith suggested a mod to the 40 75 filter that finally rectified the issue of limited high-end response that had been present on the four-pole based designs for a couple of years later an arp also acquired the MU tron line of effects pedals including the famous buy phase and they rebadged the italian seal orchestra as the arp quartet for the US Phil Dodds was well aware of the direction things were going and continue to build upon arts earlier experiments with digital technology he led a team to develop a whopping 16 voice poly synth with powerful modulation digital control and a computer interface the ARP chroma at this time inspired by Hal Alice work at Bell Labs a couple of ARP engineers started working on a second digital synth intended to be controlled by an LSI 11 microcomputer but it only got as far as two boards covered with TTL logic chips and was never finished and suddenly the game was up for art by the spring of 1981 and the company went into liquidation what would happen is the bank would finance inventory that went out to dealers but they wouldn't get paid until the instruments were sold so if there was too much product in the field that was not selling the bank's underwater it's very easy to get overextended if the market dives down you just get stuck you get that you line that with a market change which was happening in and the shift to you know things like Yamaha and so forth all of that compounded and put the company into chapter 11 and the bank became uncomfortable and asked for there to be a trustee he came in and took over the company and fired most of the management including Aaron basically the company went into liquidation despite everything that was going on Dodds honored an order made by Don gyro 410 keyboards for the modular synthesizer lab which must have been one of the last things manufactured by ARP I'm sure this is one of the last things going out of our if the date is June 19th 1981 10 MSL keyboards and right on the invoice it says pay directly to First National Bank of Boston post office box 1965 so they were already pretty near the end at that point but he honored us he gave us those keyboards and then the ship went down so I would say the avatar and the electric piano were the failed products but lots of companies have failed products and they were able to survive it we didn't we just didn't have the wherewithal I saw it coming and I didn't know what we could do about it dots and his team managed to take the chroma project with them to CBS musical instruments and it was resurrected as the Rhodes Cramer in 1982 the company had shut down lights off I'm working alone in the building for months on the phone trying to pitch this and then going down to New York to black Rockford where CBS was so they strike the deal which is an asset deal and they say ok you the deal is contingent upon your rehiring your entire team you know I remember coming back from New York saying how on earth can I do that everybody's gone and I'm how can I tell them to quit where they just started working or to quit looking and you know come back and reconstitute the R&D team and we pulled pulled that team together that shows you the strength so they all we all came back together into a new facility started from scratch picked up all our work and carried it to completion talking about a microprocessor based product that was you know state-of-the-art groundbreaking in many ways that you know the first instrument that had a computer port to a PC IBM PC and a - and a predecessor to MIDI and had all the MIDI functionality but before MIDI was was was formalized and it was being built side by side with two amps in Fullerton and the bulk of the factory was guitar manufacturing and none of these are particularly high tech compared to what we were doing [Music] [Applause] [Music] the crimer was then developed into the chroma Polaris which drifts beyond what could be considered an ARP synthesizer as this was 1984 in a full three years after our pod closed down perhaps with the benefit of hindsight they could have survived longer but to be fair to ARP with a small high risk and ever-changing market coupled with strong competition from Japanese manufacturers sequential circuits Oh behind linn electronics and Moog had all gone under or been bought and repurposed by the mid 80s so perhaps it was something of an inevitability but I guess we'll never know for sure the tsunami from Japan was just hard competition and then at the dx7 you know goodbye that was it I mean I'm I would do late in the late 80s I would do clinics for Korg you know with the dx7 out you go into these music stores up in New England or down south people are traded in many modes you could buy them for 150 bucks it's just incredible how this tide changed I mean ultimately you know the market spoken vindicated us but we we were just ahead of the technology and what we were trying to do just was impossible at the time and the irony is is when I finally said I was gonna play some keyboards and a band at that point I wanted to play a piano not a synthesizer and my dad ended up getting me a roland what we do know is that interest in art creations didn't end when the doors closed in 1981 in fact if anything it's slowly grown over the decades since ups instruments have been emulated and recreated in software and cloned in hardware in fact three and a half decades later the Odyssey was officially released by Korg with input from none other than David friend in 2015 this thing arrives to the nail there it is it was like 30 years it just passed by in a minute you know so very funny it's great to know that something you did thirty years ago is still the subject of fascination for you know young musicians Allen had also been involved in recreations of Arps instruments in more recent years when he consulted on the time-warp 2600 developed by way out where in 2006 turns out the 2600 did quite well for the company and I understand that the 26th hundreds still have a good reputation and it's very gratifying to know that you know a lot of musicians have used it and well it's it's been very pleasant you were knowing that it really did make some contributions never made any money at it but still following the closure of our Alan Perlman moved into computing and set up sell the systems with one of his former employees Bruce's Chiklis Bruce was also a co-founder of Kurzweil an Allen was a software consultant for them in the mid 80s they also hired several other XR people and Perlman would later be employed by Phil Dodds at Vizag working on projects such as interactive laser discs my father was one of the biggest influences of my life not just because of what he created via these wonderful inventions but because of the type of person he was he mentored me he mentored strangers and he mentored anyone that came to his view that he he felt was really interested in in furthering their education and knowledge of something he was my Google I like to say that a lot when I had a question about anything in the universe I would bring it to him at dinner time and he seemed to always have some kind of answer he had this in a restless spirit and kept that right to the end and he was always just full of ideas and a wonderful guide nice man yeah he eats early missed [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] in the months following Alan's passing the Alan our Pearlman Foundation was formed this would be perpetuating one of his personal visions and that was to pass it on he had taught me very early on that it is the responsibility of one generation to pave the way for the generation after them and he very very much believed in it he felt that it was you know a moral obligation to enhance people's lives younger people's lives people that needed a leg up whether it was for a major for opportunity the plans for the foundation involved working with educational institutions such as Berklee College of Music Brown University Tufts University and we wish to both have scholarships for students that would like to be able to go to these colleges and would not be able to afford to do so otherwise and also hopefully get artists and residences so sponsor some an artist to come and for a semester to work on electronic music projects for instance in late 2019 the door to an art related secret was left ajar and the very good news is actually cog is going to release a a real clone of the art 2600 beginning of next year this is something that's going to be a bigger release for for 2020 in terms of electronic instruments the 2600 reissue sold out almost immediately and fittingly won Best in Show at NAMM 2020 on the 50th anniversary of the first ARP appearance at the famous trade show [Music] back in 1982 only a year after ARP folded Roger Powell wrote this rather prophetic statement about his old employer in an article in keyboard magazine I remember those halcyon days are art with fondness and regret that the mark is no longer with us certainly the instruments will continue to be used to make wonderful music even if the company will never make new ones if you have an old 2600 or Odyssey it could become a collector's item someday [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Alex Ball

Views: 299,226

Keywords: ARP Synthesizer, ARP Instruments, ARP 2500, ARP Soloist, ARP Pro Soloist, ARP 2600, ARP Odyssey, ARP Omni, ARP String Ensemble, Solina String Ensemble, Solina Strings, Solina String Synthesizer, ARP Axxe, ARP Sequencer, ARP Avatar, ARP Centaur VI, ARP Quadra, ARP Electronic Piano, ARP Solus, Rhodes Chroma, Alan R Pearlman, David Friend, David Frederick, Don Muro, Dina Pearlman, Buena Pearlman, Bill Singer, Jeremy Hill

Id: l31RXiVSI9s

Length: 111min 16sec (6676 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/synth4ever]

A new documentary by Alex Ball on the history of ARP, this is a must-watch for anyone interested in these fantastic musical instruments and history of the company.

Many thanks to Alex for putting this documentary together, and be sure to check out the Alan R Pearlman Foundation:

https://alanrpearlmanfoundation.org/

https://www.instagram.com/arpchives/

https://www.facebook.com/alanrpearlmanarchives/

---

DETAILS FROM VIDEO DESCRIPTION:

"Electromotive: The Story of ARP Instruments

Electromotive is the definitive documentary charting the rise and demise of one of the world’s most influential and pioneering synth companies. It dives deep into the world of ARP and their instruments, with fascinating insights from those involved, copious amounts of previously undocumented information, and then debunks many myths. A triumph, a true labour of love and essential viewing for any synth nerd.

Chris Macleod / GForce Software

//

This was a project that started in the spring of 2019 when I was loaned an ARP 2600. I knew little of the ARP story at the time, but having an amazing instrument to play with piqued my interest. Aware that Alan R Pearlman had passed only a couple of months earlier, I started looking into the articles and history and speaking to a couple of people about it on email. The way things unfolded from there is an entire story unto itself that I’ll probably tell in another video, but suffice to say I was staggered by the generosity, passion and kindness of countless people whose help meant that we were able to feature an amazing array of original instruments and interview many of the original people who were there (on and off camera).

Every single person who contributed to this film did it gratis so that you can enjoy this story free and without even having to sit through a single advert. Isn't that amazing?!

Dina Pearlman has been absolutely crucial to this project and has been industrious in opening doors for me this past year, to the point that we’ve joked she’s the patch chords between the modules. 

Please take a moment to check out the foundation and at the very least, give them a like, subscribe and comment of support.

The Alan R Pearlman Foundation

https://alanrpearlmanfoundation.org/

https://www.instagram.com/arpchives/

https://www.facebook.com/alanrpearlmanarchives/

Also a shout out to Chad and Ryan for the stunning opening and closing title sequences and James for the in film animations.

Chad & Ryan: http://fauxcorp.com/

James: http://vim-vigor.com/

 

// ORIGINS //

0:00 Intro

1:42 Alan Robert Pearlman

4:29 Founding Tonus Inc

 

// THE ARP 2500 //

7:41 Designing the Series 2000

11:14 System 2002 Demo

12:38 “Now who’s gonna sell it?”

14:56 Close Encounters

18:32 System 2003 Demo

 

// THE ARP 2600 //

19:29 Designing the 2600

20:34 The first sales call

21:39 The Blue Marvin

23:36 “First Look” Don Muro

25:17 The Grey Meanie & Production Models

26:04 “Correlative Moons” Lisa Bella Donna

26:30 Rebranding as ARP

27:40 2601 models

28:46 2600 Demo

 

// THE SOLOIST & PRO SOLOIST //

29:57 The Soloist

30:37 Jeremy Hill

33:10 Designing the Pro Soloist

36:40 Pro Soloist Demo

38:25 Pro/DGX Demo

 

// SELLING ARPS //

39:24 Organ donors

41:44 Patch books

43:02 “Stinger” David Frederick

44:20 The ARP NAMM JAM

 

// THE ODYSSEY //

46:43 Designing the Odyssey

52:23 Marketing the Odyssey

55:07 “I did not meet any rock stars”

56:33 2am call

57:34 Odyssey Demo

 

// GOING PUBLIC & COSMIC FURNACE //

58:52 “Wanna buy some stock?”

59:18 Roger Powell

 

// THE DUTCH CONNECTION //

1:00:33 The Eminent 310U

1:01:14 The Strings Ensemble

1:02:17 The Frankfurt MESSE

1:03:13 Solina String Ensemble Demo

1:04:44 The relationship works both ways

1:05:02 Solina String Synthesizer Demo

1:05:54 Ken Freeman’s contribution

 

// THE ARP MODULAR SYNTHESIZER LAB //

1:06:42 The “Learning Modules”

1:07:22 Don takes over the project

 

// THE ARP OMNI //

1:08:21 The polyphonic system

1:09:09 The Omni

1:09:35 Omni Demo

1:10:32 Omni 2 Demo

 

// THE AXXE //

1:10:54 The logic of the Axxe

1:11:33 “Conclusions” Lisa Bella Donna

 

// THE ARP SEQUENCER //

1:12:12 Sequencer Demo

1:13:13 Voltage Quantizer

 

// GROWING THE BUSINESS //

1:13:36 Sales peak

1:14:22 Marketing ARP to the world

1:16:47 Pretty much a normal life

 

// GUITAR SYNTHESIZERS //

1:17:19 Two parallel projects

1:18:23 The Centaur VI

1:21:15 The Avatar

1:23:33 Demonstrating Guitar Synthesizers

1:25:19 “Upa War Jazz” David Schlesinger & David Torn

1:26:27 “It fell short”

1:27:44 Alan Howarth

1:28:21 Parallel polysynth abandoned

 

// THE ARP QUADRA //

1:28:34 Designing the Quadra

1:30:08 The Prophet~5 and OB-X

1:30:53 Quadra Demo

 

// THE DEMISE //

1:31:32 Digital revolution

1:32:04 Japanese Competition

1:33:21 The 2600 endures

1:34:16 Electronic Pianos

1:34:42 The Solus

1:35:00 MU-TRON, Seil & Digital Synths

1:35:42 “The ship went down”

 

// THE RHODES CHROMA //

1:37:22 CBS Acquires ARP

1:38:52 Chroma Demo

 

// BEYOND ARP // 1:40:23 “Incredible how the tide changed”

1:41:35 Legacy and resurgence

1:43:13 “He’s sorely missed”

1:44:46 The Alan R Pearlman Foundation

1:44:52 The Korg ARP 2600

1:46:33 Epilogue

1:49:12 End Credits

[u/arashinoko]

Yes! Been looking forward to this for a long time.

[u/ElGuaco]

This is Alex's best work yet and I enjoyed every minute. It's better than many documentaries I've seen on Netflix. The fact that he can take some of these historic instruments and use them to make new music is just icing on the cake.

Bravo!

[u/soothingscreams]

This looks exhaustive. What great work! I know what I'm watching this evening. Thanks for the head's up!

[u/GUNF00]

I thoroughly enjoyed this documentary, thanks for the links