The Bay Area is also home to MIDI co-inventor Dave Smith and his hardware synth company Sequential. You can see his office and generous collection of synths from the street, if you roam around San Francisco's North Beach long enough.
And Serge
Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into Long, Strange Trip for Engineer
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Re: Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into Long, Strange Trip for Engineer
#12I got to meet Don Buchla back in the '70s. My friend Will was visiting from Phoenix, and he had a company making studio mixers. So I tagged along while he made the rounds to visit potential vendors and clients.
Don had an awesome setup in his Berkeley living room. A whole ring of synths of different kinds, a Buchla Box or two, a Moog of some sort, and some new stuff he was working on.
I don't think we tripped out on that trip, but maybe Don didn't let us handle the synths enough.
On the way to Don's, we stopped in San Francisco to visit a recording studio somewhere south of Market. When we walked in the front door, no one was at the reception desk, so we wandered around and ended up in the coffee room.
In walked Art Garfunkel to grab a cup, and we got to talking. Will had his Rolleiflex twin lens reflex camera hanging from his neck and asked Art if he could take his picture. "Sure! Hey, while you're here, we're doing some recording, do you want to hang out in the control room and listen?"
Well of course the answer was yes!
After a while, Art's recording engineer noticed us and hollered into the talkback mic, "ART!!! Who are these people?!?!?" Art said, "It's OK, Roy, they are cool."
Roy Halee would have nothing of it. He marched Will and me out the back door of the studio and down the steps to the street. A bit embarrassing but worth it for the experience.
I did learn one thing. Of course I'd seen the Simon and Garfunkel album covers where Art practically towered over Paul. I always thought Art must be really tall! But in person, he was barely an inch over my own 5' 8" height. I just never knew that Paul Simon was on the shorter side at 5' 2".
The things you learn when you wander into recording studios uninvited...
Re: Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into Long, Strange Trip for Engineer
#13This reminded me a little of the story of Raymond Scott's "Electronium" machine, which was not a digital synthesizer, but a very early analog "algorithmic composition/generative music machine", back in the 60's and 70's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronium https://www.laweekly.com/music/raymond-scotts-electronium-ne... He worked for Motown for several years as a creative director, but it seems no music that use…
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but Raymond Scott never wrote music _for_ cartoons. His early music was used in cartoons some time later because it turned out to be an excellent fit, but at the time I believe his stated intention was to 'improve jazz'.
Great music regardless. There's a cool version of War Dance for Wooden Indians with indian dancers on YouTube.
Re: Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into Long, Strange Trip for Engineer
#14This reminded me a little of the story of Raymond Scott's "Electronium" machine, which was not a digital synthesizer, but a very early analog "algorithmic composition/generative music machine", back in the 60's and 70's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronium https://www.laweekly.com/music/raymond-scotts-electronium-ne... He worked for Motown for several years as a creative director, but it seems no music that use…
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but Raymond Scott never wrote music _for_ cartoons. His early music was used in cartoons some time later because it turned out to be an excellent fit, but at the time I believe his stated intention was to 'improve jazz'. Great music regardless. There's a cool version of War Dance for Wooden Indians with indian dancers on YouTube.
> Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but Raymond Scott never wrote music _for_ cartoons.
You're not wrong. See:
https://www.raymondscott.net/features/accidental-music-for-a...
I find his music to be clever, entertaining and well ahead of its time in many respects. His music was sometimes dismissed by jazz purists of the time as being "novelty" or "dada" jazz.
There was a documentary I saw a little while back which included a discussion of Scott's surprise when he started receiving royalty checks again the 1990's when Ren & Stimpy started to use a lot of his music as well.
Re: Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into Long, Strange Trip for Engineer
#15I repair DX7's for a hobby, it's interesting to see how clever devices from that era are. Time and again 'that's clever' hits me when I finally understand how some part of it works. They're incredibly sturdy too, one survived a fire, the outside was pretty grim but it still worked, and parts from that one helped to make a whole bunch of them whole again. I have it down to a pretty simple process now, the only tricky ones are mainboard failures and I still have one mainboard that I've spent multiple days on that I can't get back to life.
I'll make sure not to lick them.
BTW, Suzanne Ciani, mentioned in the article is definitely worth listening to.
Re: Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into Long, Strange Trip for Engineer
#16On the one hand, I would love to own a Buchla synth. On the other hand, no way in hell would I want to maintain an analog synth. The closest I got was when I bought a second-hand Korg EX800, which was a digitally-controlled analog unit. Fun machine, but it was unreliable and I wasn't up to the task of taking care of it.
As a big fan of 70's and 80's pop music, I had always wanted a vintage Sequential Circuits Prophet V synth, but when I saw the maintenance required on even that semi-modern synth, I think I will stick to the VST/AU equivalent!
A company called Behringer are currently making modern ultra-cheap clones of as many vintage ultra-expensive vintage synthesizers as they can. Three models are complete and shipping, and there are rumoured to be another fifty or so in the pipeline - including the P5.
Re: Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into Long, Strange Trip for Engineer
#17I repair DX7's for a hobby, it's interesting to see how clever devices from that era are. Time and again 'that's clever' hits me when I finally understand how some part of it works. They're incredibly sturdy too, one survived a fire, the outside was pretty grim but it still worked , and parts from that one helped to make a whole bunch of them whole again. I have it down to a pretty simple process now, the only tricky…
DX7s are far more likely to have traces of coke than LSD.
Re: Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into Long, Strange Trip for Engineer
#18This reminded me a little of the story of Raymond Scott's "Electronium" machine, which was not a digital synthesizer, but a very early analog "algorithmic composition/generative music machine", back in the 60's and 70's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronium https://www.laweekly.com/music/raymond-scotts-electronium-ne... He worked for Motown for several years as a creative director, but it seems no music that use…
> not a digital synthesizer,
All original synths were analog
Re: Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into Long, Strange Trip for Engineer
#19On the one hand, I would love to own a Buchla synth. On the other hand, no way in hell would I want to maintain an analog synth. The closest I got was when I bought a second-hand Korg EX800, which was a digitally-controlled analog unit. Fun machine, but it was unreliable and I wasn't up to the task of taking care of it.
As a big fan of 70's and 80's pop music, I had always wanted a vintage Sequential Circuits Prophet V synth, but when I saw the maintenance required on even that semi-modern synth, I think I will stick to the VST/AU equivalent!
Not to talk about Mellotrons
Re: Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into Long, Strange Trip for Engineer
#20This reminded me a little of the story of Raymond Scott's "Electronium" machine, which was not a digital synthesizer, but a very early analog "algorithmic composition/generative music machine", back in the 60's and 70's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronium https://www.laweekly.com/music/raymond-scotts-electronium-ne... He worked for Motown for several years as a creative director, but it seems no music that use…
> not a digital synthesizer, All original synths were analog
Not sure your definition of "original" here. Analog synths were experimented with since the 1920's and 1930's[1] with digital synthesis arriving around the early 1970's[2].
The Electronium was late enough not to qualify as an "original" synthesizer, unless you mean it was "all original" work by Scott, which I'm not sure is completely true either. With the first working unit developed only by 1969[3] and used at Motown throughout the 70's, I thought that it was worth differentiating from the digital synthesizers which really arrived not that much later.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_synthesizer