MODULO: The analog synth documentary

Wow so most people are familiar with this this is this is a synthesizer it's not hooked up right now hook it up so you have the keyboard and then you have you know either knobs or faders or just buttons you know and for the most part these types of synthesizers are there they're all internally wired they're all internally routed everything is predetermined for the most part there's not a lot of flexibility of what you can do a modular synthesizer is basically the same spunda mental building blocks as something like this or this or anything here except nothing is pre-wired internally everything is you just plug it into the power supply and then everything has external jacks that you can plug in or out of and so this sort of system here this sort of thing was basically how synthesizers initially when they were first made they they made systems like this where you actually had to patch from one thing to that to the other from the oscillator to the filter to whatever it wasn't until the 60s when they realize well you know we can't exactly sell something like this to you know your local church or your you know your grandmother with that wants to play music in her in our living room so they started to scale them down a bit to systems like this where you know they had to make compromises obviously and they they had to make them less complicated so they made them pre-wired internally and in assist in a setup that was conducive to making music you this is probably the coolest oscillator around people that are like you and I I mean you know that are that are building these things in their basements or wherever I mean half of these things are built by people like me and you Mike McGrath who's he he seemed later on I guess nice one you know if the kids are asleep you can't really crank a synthesizer bang the drums but you can strum a guitar but you can't so I lost a tooth in December not right to that skateboarding Australia so shoot me from this side he runs a website called muff wiggler calm which is the de facto global hub for modular synthesis and just music technology geeks in general the other fella at Egan tuba synthesizers one of them was the really weird curved one and then there's that other one that he was showing with weed pressure pads that one yeah that one's like one of a kind I mean and he's just down the street I used to play oboe and there was always an endless you know you're always controlling this entropic thing it's always wanting to break down and with a digital system if you hit a switch it's going to give you it not typically exactly what you had planned it to do analog systems don't do that like you can you can have things that drone on and on and and I've had sounds where I've played them like had them just run overnight this one was designed I wanted to have a case that just was inspiring for me to come up to it and play it and it's the stand sort of came about as a method of making it I could have everything accessible and when you're sitting at it it's kind of like a space shuttle now that's similar design philosophy to the synthesizer which is similar type of patching structure but here again everything is sort of centralized and the eye and the design philosophy with this was that it essentially has two parts with performance areas here so that you have pressure sensitive pads I've had sounds where I've played them like had them just run overnight he may be like I was you know reading email and just the drone is happening it's still going like three days later and Yuri listened to it it's drifted a bit and there's enough in that drift that your mind is stimulated by the very very subtle changes that occur with your systems yeah okay we're good okay so this synthesizer instead of using cables like I showed you on the other one to interconnect devices the different modules this uses a patch Bay that you have a series of sources and then destinations this way so you do a design where you bring things in and then they come up and then go into the outputs there's nothing really unnatural about it you know it's like it's electronics but it's there's always something imitative about kalitta clicky sounds maybe sounds like crickets white noise band sound like wind because wind is kind of like all frequencies and then tonal things are things that we we hear as just those harmonic relationships so for me the language is the same Oh you can kind of imagine how these things take you places you weren't really imagining you start pushing the buttons pushing knobs you know I certainly didn't have this goofy little techno melody in my mind when we started patching this it's kind of comes from the interactions you're having with the system so this is my daughter's actually my oldest is 10 and she's really into this now and this is the stuff that she tends to do she'll throw a little beat yeah there get a little oscillator pattern going on yeah she barely knows how the things work but she knows she knows where to put cables and she knows if she turns these knobs and she starts to get you know beats and little melodic patterns out of the oscillator I think one of the dirty secrets of a lot of modular enthusiasts I started as a drummer I'm not a trained keyboard player yeah I can read music poorly and very very slowly you know but certainly not in real time there's a lot of people I think who and people like it angry with me for saying this because a lot of people involved in the scene you know they're not traditional technical musicians you know and it is a fair amount of technical knowledge you need to start using these things but it's a very unique specialized kind of knowledge you know you don't you don't get it from having gone to piano lessons or guitar lessons the sounds you're making are really really transient they kind of exist sort of at that moment and you do have to disassemble and take it apart and you're never really going to get that same thing again you know whereas your standards for the digital synth you'll find in a major major music store you set the knobs and if you like the sound you can just hit safe and you have a preset you can recall that exactly you know at any point in the future and you really can't go back to the exact same point in a modular set you sit down you're going to have a session for a couple of hours you have an idea of what sort of sound you want to make can you start plugging the cables and turning the knobs you know to go in the direction that you're imagining and you never wind up always wind up somewhere vastly different you know the the machine surprises you and it throws some curveballs and it doesn't react the way that you expected it to sometimes and then it takes you on a journey rather than just executing the sound I known whoo-hoo cool Akane was I'd heard of him in the electronic sack but it was the first voltage-controlled synthesizer in stuff we were doing downstairs it's voltage control that's how analog control systems work so they had this thing at the Museum is the only thing they were showing and I know that hewlet Kane had quite a large experimental laboratory at the NRC I knew about all these artifacts and they were only showing this one so we come back and the curators waiting there and she says lucky I'm embarrassed to tell you this but she says we have a ton of stuff and I don't know what any of it is but I'm delighted to bring you guys back there and show you what we have no one knows about him you know why well because it didn't happen it happened in Canada you know well it almost looks like a madman made it you know but in actual fact he was just trying to expedite the design process so he had a piece of wood that was that length and so he just put it at that particular angle exactly practical because it's 3-legged so it's not going to be tilted you know four legs they always have to have a stabilizer the historical pill is amazing the aesthetic appeal is or let's just say my wife would not appreciate having a house yeah I look at the control panel on the top and things are written down on in pencil with these knobs and dials do look at the casing on the top is this bent over sheet metal yeah everything is recycled and reused and this grounding pad here is just a liminal foil yeah did to me it paints a picture of somebody who's just absolutely obsessed who has this Fitness vision that you know what I'm going to turn this in a reality come hell or high water no matter what you know we're gonna realize this thing I believe that he referred to these as this serialized structure generators this would be a serial switch probably similar to a sequential switch it controls over direction you have to be a pulse out which probably would follow whatever clock is driving the sequential switch from one stage to another looks like you almost a an arbitrary function generator separate outputs for the control voltage and transpose the ability to expand or compress you know the entire the entire function interesting stuff considering the era that it was built and then you know a lot of these these ideas yeah I think in the modern day get credited to surge Terrapin and you know anything that sort of three dates a lot of them it's amazing how ahead of the time this stuff really is again the kind of thing that you know is people are doing in the modern world with with analog synthesizers a lot of times patting them on themselves on the back saying what's the first time we've done this and here in this museum we see a lot of these these functions that are sometimes considered very modern that are probably close to 60 70 years old now it's quite amazing there's a satellite sticker on the side uh-huh yeah that's the Dark Side of the Moon sticker which i think is 1973 wasn't it I'm just speculating here but this was a precursor this is a tape playback system so you'd have these tape loops that were run over on this side here there's a flywheel there and then you can see in behind these banks of switches are holding area so you'd have these tape loops that would come out this is a precursor to a commercial product the Mellotron that was really popular in the late 60s 70s and is actually still being made and there's digital emulations of it now real big with them early prog groups like King Crimson and yes that's just magic it's beautiful magic why the guy was such a so far ahead I mean it's sort of easy to think about this stuff because we have history you know them you know you can live this stuff but he's you know thinking outside and yeah just very very cool it's also it's amazing it's yeah a lot of pride to see something like National Research Council on there and just think think that our government was involved in inspiring this sort of thing here is the famous sine wave oscillator machine this is a an additive synthesis machine that consists of 999 tunable analog sine waves they're tuned with with these sliders and if they ever decide to get this running someone's going to have to clean and refurbish not not 99 sliders got a nice even hundred he wasn't a decimal guy maybe like base three maybe that ties into the three down there yes it does doesn't it you might be right about that this guy's fascinating we looked at this one before if you you may want to see if you have a light source to illuminate inside here but you know it's very much prototype work and actually if you look here it says it's an experimental model it's it's neat to see you know everything being done on on protoboard rather than on you know at circuit boards like it shows you it was probably a one-off or at least the first of its kind he was trying to build the equipment required to create a purely electronic music to be able to synthesize tones and control them in terms of their frequency their harmonic content their time domain and amplitude domain output so that we could create an electronic music using this equipment you know not not not a hybrid of you know violin and you know a theremin or something like this a purely electronic music which yeah I think this is at this day and age we're all quite familiar with every turn on turn on the radio watch the movie Tron that's what you're going to hear in the 1930s that was a very kind of high-flying futuristic kind of concept absolutely he was getting into the control of these electronic components so was he a scientist or a musician both they're both kind of explorers you know and he he wrote music he did tape music Molet electronic music and obviously to be able to construct and imagine these things he's quite the scientist quite the Builder with modulars you can hook things up and always oh go ahead this wasn't meant to go here but that's great let's explore them okay see the UNIVAC that's sort of original computers computers just look like that before they looked like that computers too confident I er room and there's a

Channel: Travis Boisvenue

Views: 166,622

Keywords: Modular Synthesizer (Musical Instrument), Electronica (Musical Genre), Techno (Musical Genre), Experimental Music (Musical Genre), Experimental Film (Film Genre), Documentary (TV Genre), music, CBC Radio (Broadcast Producer), Synthesizer (Musical Instrument), synthesizers, modular, hugh le caine, ottawa, science, technology, museum, weird canada, synth, movie, History, Analog Synthesizer (Musical Performance Role)

Id: OZ74EFdW9Ug

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Blutroyale-_-]

really enjoyed that, thanks for sharing

[u/dafragsta]

That long pitch bend up made me think this was about to be some synth Gershwin.

[u/[deleted]]

It really irks me when someone compares an SH-101 to modular gear and says "there's not a lot of flexibility". The SH-101 has its own special and unique character and can product a wide variety of musical sounds for a budget synthesizer. As simple as it is though, you would struggle to build an SH-101 out of all modules, and it would cost a fortune.

[u/OutisAcoustica]

As somebody living in Ottawa, this was cool to see. I will never tire of listening to dripsody

[u/CopiousAmountsofJizz]

I think I speak for a lot of synthesists when I say fuck the Electronic Sackbutt and its hideous dying duck sounding whines.

[u/[deleted]]

The intro is very irritating IMO

[u/eriknstr]

I was unable to hear the URL he said at 4:33 when he talked about the name of some global hub for modular synthesis and music technology in general.

[u/bliprock]

smack that EMS