Small Synth Boy in a One Synth Town
Electronic music predates my birth,
so its commercial and expressive applications sound totally natural to me, who,
to a large extent, was groomed by numerous presentations to accept it. Though
the early means of manufacturing electronic music, in facilities now referred
to as the classic studio, grew from and was associated with radio, the greatest
exposure came through commercial use in movies and television. In my case, the
penny nail through the forehead was during the television premiere (1961) of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951),
when the sounds of twin Theremins (invented 1919-20 by Lev Termen) warbled
otherworldly atmospherics throughout Bernard Herrmann’s brilliant score. Not so
long afterwards I experienced the shockingly radical, all electronically
generated soundtrack of the movie Forbidden
Planet (1956), composed and executed by Louis and Bebe Barron in their New
York City studio. I, like many Americans in the early sixties, was seduced by
The Maxwell House “Percolator” Jingle
(composed and executed by Eric Siday around 1960), and after that the sounds of
the synthesizer, unusual and infinite as they seemed, found acceptance not only
by me but also by players and listeners all over the world.
I’m not sure when synthesized sound
first entered my ears; in fact, I’m not even sure the first synthesized sounds
I heard were actually made by synthesizers. Instruments like the Ondes-Martenot
(invented by Maurice Martenot in 1928), The Ondioline (invented by Georges
Jenny in 1940), and others certainly produced wide scales along with complex
harmonics and timbres, and compositions constructed in classic studios often
recorded sounds originally produced by components later used in synthesizers,
so pinning an exact date is difficult. The first time I heard music described
as performed on a synthesizer was Switched
on Bach, by Walter (now Wendy) Carlos (recorded and released in 1968).
However, a Moog was used on several tracks by The Doors on Strange Days, and I may have heard that prior to SOB. I know for sure that the first
synthesizer line that really stuck in my skull was the end lead on ELP’s Lucky Man in the spring of 1971. I’ve
been in love with synthesizers from that moment until now.
Other than sensing that the synthesizer
was a keyboard instrument (I believe I’d already heard of ELP and knew that
Emerson was a keyboard player), I knew nothing about ELP, its music, or of the
synthesizer. I bought a Crawdaddy
magazine with ELP pictured on the cover, and after reading the article a couple
of times, I learned a little about the synthesizer, and a bit about Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, the band’s
first record, which I purchased via mail from the Record Club of America.
The summer of 1971 (the Summer of
Love in my little hometown) was a great musical time for me. The only other
time to compare to it in terms of new musical possibilities was the official
Summer of Love in 1967 when an entirely new kind of psychedelic consciousness
unfolded as much on the Top 40 radio stations as at the acid tests and
experiments in the Western world. By 1971 much of what had in 1967 been
considered experimental became mainstreamed and in some cases even standardized
in the music industry and society in general. The cutting edge of popular or
youth music offered up a variety of styles later referred to as Progressive, or
Prog-Rock. One of the hallmarks of this Progressive music was an attempted
mixture of popular and classical elements (with varying success rates),
including, because of advances in multi-tracking and other studio technologies,
the conception of the rock combo as a chamber orchestra. These studio rock
orchestras, comprised of many gifted musicians, composers, recording
technicians, and producers, and utilizing new instruments like synthesizers and
Mellotrons along with traditional rock combo formats often supplemented by more
traditional orchestral instruments like members of the string, reed, brass, and
percussion sections were able to achieve finished compositions that rival traditional
orchestras in power and subtly. Advances in amplification and the new, portable
instruments allowed groups to present studio accomplished works on stage.
Following pioneering bands like The Beatles and The Mothers of Invention, acts
like ELP, King Crimson, Yes, Pink Floyd, and the Moody Blues took advantage of
new and evolving technologies in their compositional and presentational
approaches. I delighted in the entire movement.
To be honest, Emerson, Lake, & Palmer took some getting used to. The opening
cut, The Barbarian, at first, and
maybe a little yet, left me with the same kind of feeling as Switched on Bach had. I like the sounds
of SOB, but was put off in the same
way as when the bald headed guy exposed us to the fine music of Bach in eighth
grade music class. I just didn’t want to hear Bach, especially on a
synthesizer. I felt new instruments should play new music constructed for those
new instruments, and ELP was nearly the only game around for synthesizer compositions.
Still, though The Barbarian had lots
of juicy organ and piano, it was too long haired for my taste. I was also
peeved that I had to wade through an entire side and The Three Fates before getting to the happy synthesizer material of
Tank and Lucky Man, which closed out the album.
As the summer wore on I heard more
music with synthesizers used primarily for color and atmosphere. My research
into synthesizers consisted mostly of listening to albums and reading liner
notes. I discovered that The Moody Blues used synthesizers after buying A Question of Balance (1970). One night
I accidently heard Beaver and Krause on a college radio station, and heard the
incredible work of longtime synthesizer jockey Don Preston on The Mothers’ Lonesome Electric Turkey (1971) from the
same station. I also saw a demonstration and improvisation involving a
Mini-Moog on the Saturday morning teen show Take
a Giant Step in the early part of the 1971-72 school year.
The infatuation I had for
synthesizers and their sounds grew, in no small measure, from the fact that I
played a little combo organ in a little high school band. The organ I used, an
Italian manufactured instrument (the Italians were on the cutting edge of
transistorized organs at that time) under the Gem company name, was a rather
modest 49 key instrument of four voices, vibrato stop, and a stop that allowed
for a double bass sound on the first octave, separated by reverse colored keys.
Though the exact same organ, made by the same company, was distributed under
other names, including Vox (a highly prized, iconic organ of the pop combo
(used by Paul Revere and the Raiders)), many fellow musicians occasionally
pointed out its deficiencies, mostly complaining about its cheesy tone. I guess
therein is the rub. But there was nothing I could do about that. My Gem was
purchased for $300 and financed for eighteen months. I know, financing
something at that price could not happen now, but I grew up in a working class
family, and $300 was about what my dad pulled down for two weeks work, so that
was the only option.
Strangely enough, that same $300,
worth far less now than in the late 60’s, purchases keyboards of greater
capability than any combo organ (or most organs and myriad keyboard
instruments) of the past. I own a Yamaha DJX purchased around sixteen years ago
for just under $300. Not only does the instrument’s palate contain a
respectable representation of iconic organ types (and 61 keys), but also iconic
pianos, and strings, winds, and many other orchestral families, and the ability
to change the timbre of any voice while playing. The DJX contains an engine
that offers highly alterable accompaniments (not unlike the old Magic Chord
feature of Lowry organs), sixteen arpeggio settings, and other performance
control features, and a six track on board recorder. A single musician armed
only with a DJX can play an entire gig and make sounds ranging from an
orchestra to a jazz group to a hip-hop artist from a single keyboard. Nothing
from the 60’s can rival the DJX’s possibilities. And the DJX is more than a
decade old. Even cheaper models with similar capabilities crop up all the time,
and right now is a golden age of popular instrument performance and price.
One of the first things I realized
about synthesizers was the possibility of incredibly widened and deepened sonic
capabilities. I’d been hacking away with a mere four voices for years and was
ready for anything new and more expansive. To a certain extent, that had
already happened in that the organ I used was not the Gem I owned, but a more
powerful double keyboard Whitehall owned by my group’s bass player. Still, even
the Whitehall paled in comparison to the synthesizers I’d heard, and I felt new
sounds would be helpful, mainly because my resources as a keyboard player had
topped-out and hit the wall long before. I had a few things to say, but not the
skill to properly say them.
Regardless of how ready I might have
been to give the synthesizer a whirl, the main obstacle was again price. Keith
Emerson’s monster synth cost a staggering $20,000.00, and though I had no
illusions about owning one of those, what about something smaller, like
Mini-Moog? No go there, pal; no way! A Mini-Moog, at $1,400, might as well have
been Emerson’s as far as I was concerned. The minimum wage then was $1.60 an
hour, so do the math. The dances I occasionally played on Friday nights after
football or basketball games paid $10 to $15 per group member per night. Get a
job? I lived in a small town. There were no real youth jobs there. Wait for adulthood?
That was all I had left.
Right near Christmas, my friend,
also the singer in my little band, told me he’d bought Tarkus, the latest ELP album. He allowed, rightly, that the music
therein was light years ahead of ELP’s first recording. When I asked to borrow
the record, I was surprised that he allowed it. In fact, he brought the album
to my house and handed it over personally (his girlfriend lived next door). I
tabled it on my little GE Wildcat, expecting the world after my friend’s
accolades, and was not only totally bowled over by the music, but knew I had to
somehow get my hands on a synthesizer. Visions of conquering the known world
danced like sugarplums inside my skull. When Tarkus was returned to my friend, the grooves must have been
thinned beyond a normal play rotation, for I listened to little else before it
went back.
Following a Christmas dance, my
little band became largely inactive for the whole of basketball season.
Everything picked up again in the spring, though it was the last hurrah since
most of the members graduated, and the band, like nearly all before it,
dissolved. Two members of the group began playing with another band at college.
I stumbled through my senior year concentrating on my girlfriend and playing
basketball. There were not enough players to form another combo, so I sold my
rig, and, except for listening, pretty much left keyboard playing behind. A
couple of former band mates and I occasionally performed on acoustic guitars
and banjo as accompaniment to songs I had written.
One day in early spring, while
skipping school with a carload of friends, we stopped, for some reason, at a
music store. Most of the crew were high, but we went inside anyway. The place
was known for selling and renting marching band instruments, though they also
carried a limited assortment of guitars and other combo equipment. One of the
guys and I went into a room where a Mini-Moog sat lonely and neglected. I
literally developed a lump in my throat when I saw it, and stood gawking as if
looking at a flying saucer or a visiting deity. The Moog wasn’t connected to
power or amplification. I asked one of the salespeople if I could play it, but
was rejected. I dreamed about the instrument for a long time.
While booked to compete at a talent
show, I was asked to sit-in with a group. The band members pretty much kicked
out the guy who had practiced with them, and whose keyboard I was to play, so
that I could share the spotlight. I still feel horrible for the poor kid. He
was a very young fellow and I’m sure felt abused. Nonetheless, the one song we
played brought back the desire to again become a keyboardist.
The problem, just like the first
time around, centered on how to purchase another rig. A friend of mine informed
me that the guy I had sold my rig to was willing to let it go at a little less
than he’d paid, so I got a pretty good deal (I don’t remember where the money
came from) and repurchased the Gem. All was great except that the guy who had
owned it was a bit of a jackoff (a Methodist minister now), and had lost a
piece of the legs, the support carrying case, and had also, without any
revelation, removed the fuse to put into his stereo amp. I took the keyboard
directly to a gig, but was unable to play without the fuse. That’s showbiz.
The first synthesizer I saw in the
wild was owned by the keyboard player from a rival band. The band was setting
up for a Skateland gig, so I went up to ask him about the synth. The instrument
was an organ/synthesizer combo, a Cordovox, the CDX-0652, a double manual organ
with an on-board altered version of the Moog Satellite which shared the upper
keyboard with the organ (and could be played in unison or separately). I didn’t
know such equipment existed. The entire concept seemed like a great idea, but
something about it bothered me. Moogs were sacred, and this machine purported
to be a Moog, except it seemed a little too canned. Instead of the programming
power of a Minimoog, the CDX-0652 was all about presets, not unlike the organ
itself. The Satellite has been compared to the Arp Pro Soloist, but the Pro
Soloist was far more powerful and ballsy sounding, as the Satellite had a
thinner sound without the expressive qualities of the Arp. That’s not to say I
wouldn’t have killed for one, because I probably would have.
I was finally able to purchase my
first synthesizer a few months after the Skateland encounter. That meant, of
course, that prices of synthesizers had finally fallen to a level that a guy
like me could afford one. The instrument that caught my eye was a mini Korg
700, a pretty powerful little box for a mere $500. Ok, I really didn’t have
$500 lying about, but my local bank agreed to finance the purchase for 24
months at $27 per month. Again, though I know terms like those, or even the
idea that a bank would loan such a pitiful amount, are foreign now, they were
more the rule than the exception to loans in 1974.
The mini Korg was quite a sweet
little instrument whose sturdy outer shell was constructed of wooden sides and
an eighth inch thick meal that housed and protected the keyboard and inner
electronics. Two holes, about ten inches apart and reinforced by metal bolts in
the middle of the top, were included to accommodate a metal music stand, just like
many combo organs. With the exception of the Moog Satellite, the 700 is the
only synthesizer I remember as having controls situated under the keyboard. As
awkward as that seemed, it worked out just fine in practice and execution.
A friend of mine once remarked that
my Korg was more like an organ than a synthesizer. He was right. Like the Moog
Satellite, many of the sounds came from combinations of presets with modulation
and other alterations available, but organs did, too, and were polyphonic,
though only a few synthesizers had that capability. My lowly Korg, the
Satellite, the MiniMoog, the Arp Axe, almost all synthesizer equipment
developed prior to the 70’s produced monophonic signals. Polyphonic
capabilities aside, organs could not produce the sounds possible from even a
simple synthesizer, which allowed variation in basic waves, attack and release,
modulation control, and even some repetitive possibilities. I always thought
that the mini Korg 700 had a thicker and better sound than the Moog Satellite.
In fact, I thought the Korg’s basic sound was comparable to the Arp Odyssey,
though the Odyssey had duo note polyphony, and a sound creating arsenal more
comparable to a MiniMoog than my box.
Having a new instrument was good for
my playing in that it enhanced the depth of my feeble skills. Using the great
power of the synthesizer, the little five note modal passages I played often
sounded totally different with each new patch and its manipulation. Sometimes
the slightest alteration of a slider or the throwing of a switch on the fly
while soloing, or even in accompaniment, could quickly alter the sound of a
tank into that of a screaming bird. I was influenced by the many synthesizer
jockeys who were playing screaming guitar like leads. And yet, as I acquired
greater power, I became more interested in subtle synth fare.
The apex of what I had wanted to do
was realized in late 1974 when a friend and rival keyboard player loaned me his
Fender Rhodes and Leslie cabinet while he was away at college. It was the rig
I’d always dreamed of. Even though my organ was the same cheesy little 49 key
Gem I’d always had, the Leslie cabinet made it sound like a Hammond. There were
all kinds of things the Rhodes allowed, and I still had the synthesizer. The
integration of the new equipment gave the band I played in a much thicker
sound, and, at least in theory, was sort of a top of the line in a poor boy
keyboard rig.
That arrangement didn’t last long,
and by the beginning of 1975 I was back to the cheesy Gem organ and the Korg.
By spring of that year the band had crumbled and I had decided to move off to
ETSU in Johnson City, Tennessee. Some friends and I started a band, but played
a single impromptu gig at a frat house. I sold all my equipment by the spring
of 1976 and went west for diversion and adventure.
*
During the spring and into the fall
of 1978 I played in a country band that always had a steady gig. I owned a
Hammond Porta B organ and Leslie cabinet. The Porta B was a very fine
instrument and I loved playing it, even though the moribund playlist of The
Steamrollers didn’t exactly turn me on. But that didn’t matter because I made
nearly enough to live on each month. Guys I knew in bands far better than mine
were barely scrapping by on occasional decent paying one-nighters, or playing
for a big local radio show at an incredible auditorium in Sweetwater for $30
per man per week. I was knocking down about $100 a week playing in a dive, so
any criticism from my friends in other bands fell largely on deaf ears.
My professional experience vanished
after midnight of Halloween when some creep burned down the dive where The
Steamrollers played. The drummer found his cowbell in good condition, but that
was the only surviving instrument. I’d also lost my day job, so I was kind of
up the creek without a single keyboard. I wasn’t sure financial recovery
sufficient to purchase another rig was possible, and after the fire didn’t
think there was even a reason to care. I had a spare Cordovox keyboard, but
traded it in 1979 for a saxophone I never learned to play.
*
By mid 1980 the yearning for new
equipment overwhelmed me. I’d been listening to what for me were entirely new
types of music and sound. The performers who made this music, from groups like
Kraftwerk, The Residents, Devo, and Tuxedomoon, and like me, loved
synthesizers, and used them in new and interesting ways, often quite outside
the confines of the rock or pop combo format. Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine, and The Residents’ Eskimo, Duck Stab/Buster
& Glen, and The Third Reich ‘n
Roll twisted my brain all the way around inside my skull. These bands, and
others I would later discover, had an entirely different approach to the way
they utilized synthesizers in that unlike Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, or Jan
Hammer, who more or less used synthesizers as soloing instruments, not unlike
the use of guitars or saxophones, in a more or less linear manner, seemed
largely uninterested in that type of playing and more concerned with how the
sounds coaxed from their instruments added to the ambience and mood of a piece.
That’s not to say that the linear elements disappeared altogether, but that
they were no more important than the sound created. For instance, The
Residents’ Krafty Cheese took a very
simple riff and built a wall of wild and fresh sound around it to create the
song. On the album Eskimo, the band,
with help from former Zappa and Leo Sayer synth master Don Preston, shows the
full possibilities of that approach when the wall of sound became the snow,
wind, hunting instruments, and cracking ice of the Arctic. In a way, these
bands and others were the second generation of musicians playing psychedelic music,
and I wanted in there.
As always, the reality of expense
weighed heavily on any possibility of a purchase. Synthesizers were a major
investment, or so I thought, until I went on a day trip to Atlanta with some
friends, one of whom was set to purchase a new bass guitar and amp. While he
haggled with a salesman, I wandered into the keyboard section of the store. A
couple of employees were messing around with a new fully polyphonic Arp. I had
no idea such an animal existed, though I had heard of the PolyMoog. Wandering
around the room, several instruments caught my eye. One was a new instrument
called the MicroMoog, a nice looking monophonic synthesizer. The other was a
Yamaha CS50, a 100 pound contraption offering a 61 key manual, full
programmability, four note polyphony, and a row of helpful presets that could
be altered via the programmable controls. It also had a handy set of controls
to the left of the keyboard called a sub oscillator that allowed live
alterations of modulation, waveforms, portamento, tuning, and the addition of
white or pink noise. The real kicker was that both Moog and Yamaha could be
purchased for a combined total of $1,600.00, or about the same price as a
MiniMoog.
I made my mind then and there to
have those synthesizers for my own. Two factors played in my favor: I had a
stable job, and one of my best friends and former bandmate worked for a finance
company. Getting straight to work, I pulled all my strings and within a week
had those two wonderful instruments squeaking and chirping in my living room. I
thought I was in heaven.
The learning curve was longer than I
had expected, but I was eventually able to generate and create new sounds, some
of which were converted into simple compositions. One afternoon I improvised
about twelve minutes of partially realized songs and unconnected fragments onto
a cassette tape. As much as anything I was merely trying to see how the CS50
sounded to me while not having to play. Let’s face it, the tape contained
something of an explosion of energy and pent up experimentation, and was meant
as nothing more than a study. One day while sitting around with a former
guitarist and good friend, I got the courage to play the tape, all the time
aware that he might just laugh and say what shit it was. I wasn’t encouraged by
the look on his face, a little shocked and whiter than usual, as we listened,
and when it was over he said nothing. “Well?”I said.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said.
“I’ve never heard anything like it.”
“You mean it sucks?”
“No, no, it’s incredible. I mean,
I’ve never heard anything like it. It’s totally original. You ought to call
Robert Fripp.”
“Why?”
“I think he’d see it for what it is.
I think he’d appreciate what you do.”
I’d like to say he was right, but of
course he wasn’t. Still, it was a nice thing to say, and I was encouraged that
I was, if not on the right track, on a track that might possibly find some
appreciation, at least with friends.
Over the next two years I played as
much as possible, mostly at home. Playing at home wasn’t bad, really, because
the house where I lived was so unusual. The house had been moved to my town
from the Oak Ridge nuclear facility where it had housed some of the people
associated with the enrichment of uranium during WWII. The place had a pre-fab
look and feel, but had great acoustics, and because of its tiny size and
layout, made it possible for musicians to play in separate rooms and still be
able to communicate with each other on the fly. In a way it was kind of like a
recording studio, and was used in the smallest way as such during several
amateurish sessions involving two cassette recorders linked together to create
a primitive sound on sound device.
I practiced in a band with several
friends and other guys I’d met, and mostly enjoyed the experience. One of the
guys in the group had been a model for a feature in an arts paper another
friend and I had concocted and directed. The guy was a member of the band and
the only one among them who had enough creative spirit to improvise. Our practice
area was a basement across the street from the First Baptist Church, and one
Wednesday evening, during church service, and during a rehearsal lull, I began
to build a hissing, shifting wall of sound from the CS50. Without additional
prompting, the guy grabbed a mic and started making orgasmic sounds punctuated
by “Oh, God,” at absolutely perfect moments. No matter what my synth produced,
he matched it to the phrase, responding in kind to the shifts in the dynamics
of the improvisation. After six or seven minutes, and worried about getting
raided by police (since many of the town’s wealthy citizens and business owners
worshiped there, I figured the church had the clout to bring the full weight of
police harassment down upon us if it desired), I eventually ended the piece.
Damned if it wasn’t great.
On another occasion, the friend who
had listened to my synth improve cassette showed up at my house and told me
he’d help gather my equipment and sit in on a restaurant gig his band was
playing that night. The band had already played a set when we arrived. Once I
was up and running he was ready to launch into a song. I asked what he wanted
me to do.
“Start playing,” he said.
“Playing what?” I said.
“The song,” he answered. “It’s in
A.”
“What else?”
Without an answer, the band launched
in. Ok, so I’m in A. Now what? The song went through several chord changes. I
looked at him. “Play,” he said. What the hell. I just started trying to play
along. That wasn’t working, so I began to fiddle with the controls until I
found something that sounded good in the song and sort of tried to feel my way
along via the sounds and their manipulation. When the song was over, my friend
told me to apply some strings. What else? No further instructions. We played.
Over the next hour that’s how things went. I got quite a few compliments from
some of the musicians and roadies.
“My god, that’s the most incredible
improvisation I’ve ever heard. How do you do it?” a roadie, brother of the bass
player, said.
You know, I had no answer for him
then and I have none now. I don’t know if it was good or not. The guys in the
band seemed positive, and I thought it sounded all right, but let there be no
misconception, compared to a musician who can really play and improvise, I’m
sure my playing was probably fifth rate, but I’ve also heard plenty of
musicians who were good at playing set pieces and terrible at improvisation, so
I guess it all comes out in the wash. I asked my friend why he put me in that
situation and he said that was when I played my best.
Two friends of mine who were
brothers, and played bass and drums between them, and I started a trio and
rehearsed some songs we’d written. We got diverted by playing briefly with a
young woman and a guitar player for a couple of weeks, but the singer bailed
and we piddled away the rest of the summer until the bass player returned to
college. The friend who had invited me to sit in with his band was inspired by
our arrangement and took the bass player’s place by doing the parts on a Crumar
string synthesizer and switching to guitar for leads. Instead of the playing
self penned tomes, we rearranged some songs he liked and tried to find a gig.
We never did, but it was still great fun. Though I played in three other bands
with the guitarist and drummer, two of them dissolved quickly, and I was tossed
out of the other.
My guitar and Crumar playing friend
afforded me opportunity to work with him on three other occasions over the
period of two years. I auditioned for a band in Cookville, TN, and was actually
offered a job with them, but decided against it when I learned that I’d have to
give up my house and move into a garage with three of the guys. I just couldn’t
do it, and that decision proved wise since the band split before it ever played
a gig. Strangely enough, the reason the band wanted me had more to do with my
vocals than my synth prowess. While doing a Judas Priest song, we all
discovered that the singer’s voice and mine blended perfectly together. It
sounded good, but…
About four or five months later,
guitar guy and the drummer (the drumming brother from the three piece band of
the summer before) and I attempted to put together a band to try some Gamma
(Montrose) material that was heavy with fast guitar and supportive synthesizer
parts. I thought the music was good and playing it was fun, and I thought the
band was beginning to come around just four practices in, but the rhythm guitar
player rolled by one day when I wasn’t home and collected his equipment, and my
friend’s echoplex. Nothing is a given. Guitar guy invited me to join another
band he had put together, and I did play a couple of engagements with them, but
some of the band members hated my guts and insisted I be let go. I was.
Other than a one-off New Year’s
engagement at the Elk Club, I continued to jam with my friends at my house,
sometimes during rounds of partying. One night in particular my drummer buddy
had a little pocket metronome that we used to put together a sociological
repetitive piece not wholly unlike Row,
Row, Row Your Boat, with introduction of various instruments, including
synth, guitar, bass, metronome, and wine jug percussion building into a sort of
anticlimactic payoff at the end. We also put together a couple of other pieces
that I believe the bass player recorded on cassette and owns to this day. He
played them for me about two years ago. They sounded better than I had
remembered. After I married, in mid 1982, I jammed a few times over the course
of three years before ditching my equipment and going to graduate school
between 1985 and 1987.
*
After grad school I bummed around
for a couple of years before securing a position at a Japanese/American high
school near my old hometown. In 1992 I bought two E-Mu synthesizers that I
planned to use to manufacture music to go with videos and slideshows. The rig
reminded me of previous rig in that the two synths were to function as had the
previous gear. Like all of the new digital synthesizers, my E-Mu’s had midi ins
and outs to easily interface with computers for sequencing and other functions.
Unlike my old rig, the E-Mu synthesizers were fully polyphonic and allowed
multitimbra capabilities. It was quite a load for a mere $1,500.
The driver of the new rig was the
E-Mu Proteus Orchestral Plus. I chose that synthesizer because it had a 61 key
keyboard and a complete library of instruments from the orchestra. The Concert
Grand piano, and several of the string settings were the best I’ve heard. There
were also plenty of electric combo samples of all types of instruments
including drum kits, exotic world instrument sounds, and a section of General
Midi patches that duplicated many of the orchestral and combo sounds, but lined
up in the same way on every keyboard instrument on which General Midi appeared.
To compliment the Plus, I chose the
E-Mu Classic Keys module, which I drove from the Plus’ keyboard via a midi
cable. The Classic Keys had been presented as an omnibus of synthesizers
largely sampled from the great analog instruments of the previous generation,
so merely by whirling the dial on the CK’s front one could call up Moogs, Arps,
mellotrons, organs, and pianos. The CK had the best sounding assortment of
Hammond B samples I’ve encountered in that they growled on the bottom and
screamed on top. The Leslie simulation was good on slow and high (though not as
convincing in the middle) and could be accessed via the mod wheel on the Plus.
Now my figuring was that between the
Plus and the CK all bases were covered, and in one way that was true. No matter
how it was diced, my rig had plenty of firepower and all the patches I might
want to use, but another reason I had decided on the E-Mu brand was that any of
the sounds could be combined with others or altered to satisfaction through the
controls. That was what I wanted as much as anything else, but once I began to
use the rig I found it to be one of the most painstaking process I had
encountered as a synth jockey. The digital controls constituted the slowest,
least efficient system devised by humanity. Unlike the analog system where a
single tiny twist of a single button might bring the wrath of god, on the
E-Mu’s one had to traverse several menu layers to do anything. The system
totally eliminated the possibility of accomplishing anything on the fly.
Problems aside, those instruments
served me as well as they could for eight years consisting mostly of farting
around, alone, or with friends, in a spare room. Perhaps fortunately, an
overflow from a pipe above my school apartment damaged the Plus. The school’s
insurance covered the price of a replacement instrument, and I was able to
purchase two keyboards, a Yamaha CS2X and a Yamaha DJX from the money. For a
couple of years I still owned the Classic Keys, but I eventually dumped it,
along with a batch of video equipment, during the late spring of 2002. I also
dumped the DJX at around that same time and was down to a single Yamaha
synthesizer I never played.
*
The habit of playing, even just
goofing off at the keyboard, slacked to nearly nothing. After a jam at the home
of a friend in 2005, I left my rig, PA system, mics, and synthesizer, in his
basement for years, playing infrequently with him for tiny amounts of time,
almost as though fully retired. I was attempting to write a novel during a
large chunk of that time, so I really didn’t even think about playing music.
Everything changed with a Christmas
present from a friend in 2009. He gave me a book, which I had seen a few years
before, entitled, Vintage Synthesizers.
I was in synth hog heaven. I skipped around and read and reread articles until
I had consumed most of the book several times over. O, what memories that tome
evoked. Unsurprisingly, I hankered to play and experiment with synthesizers
again. I got my CS2X from my friend’s place, and was even able to procure the
old DJX I’d sold to the same friend who had given me the Christmas book. After
setting up in a spare room, it wasn’t long before I was making some real
progress. I wrote a couple of songs for my step daughter, and composed a
fragment of religious music which was never completed, but felt I was moving
forward.
As good as I felt about things, I
realized that something was missing. I needed a new piece of equipment to round
out my playing, and perhaps spark some new ideas or point to a different
direction. After months of research, and budgetary evaluations, I purchased a
Roland GAIA SH-01. I have enjoyed that synthesizer as much as any other, and
consider my current rig, despite two thirds of it being more than a decade old,
to be the best, most versatile I’ve owned. The GAIA allows for a similar kind
of sound sculpting as an analog instrument, including total flexibility on the
fly, and because of its three independently programmable oscillators, is
capable of churning up some huge sounds, exactly what I need for what I’m
interested in doing now, which is setting a working bed of accompaniment via
the DJX and its band-in-a-box capabilities, adding arpeggios from the CS2X, and
wailing away or creating atmosphere with the GAIA. I’ve written a goodly number
of songs, and have at least as many more in various states of composition, and
have recorded some of those, as well as several experimental (experimental, in
my case, generally means terrible or rudderless) jams. I don’t know what it
means or how things will turn out, but I’m having fun, and that’s really about
all I can ask.
