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Emusic-L folx:
Well, the response has been remarkably strong, so what the hey: there
follows below Part 1 of a detailed, historically and contemporarily
relevant, and pretty much irreverent look at the whole process of user
interface and electronica, past and present. Structure will be somewhat
flaky, but I'll do my best to keep it readable. Also, watch out for
smileys |->, as my own twisted opinions have a way of mixing in with the
less arguable factual content of the piece. Okay? Here we go!
*****
Own up and be honest, people. How many of you would have bothered to
learn how to play keyboards if they WEREN'T essential to synth
operation? I'll admit it: I learned to love the piano for its own sake
YEARS after I'd begun working with synths. My first keyboard and my
first love was actually the Hammond Organ in our living room, and touch
sensitivity for me has always been a weird thing to master. Which gets
us into historical perspectives.....
The first synthesizer, in general terms, was the pipe organ. Its various
manuals and stops allowed the tonal characteristics to be "programmed"
by its user, to hint at non-organish sounds to some extent. Arguably,
then, the first electric synthesizer would be the first electric organ,
right? (Well, no, not right, actually. The first electric synth was the
Telharmonium, a monstrous device that filled an entire building, ran its
music over Con Ed telephone lines to "Telharmonium Parlors" in New York,
generated a vast amount of relay noise and waste heat, and eventually
burned down. Alas.) Anyway, the invention and proliferation of the
electric organ produced one seemingly inescapable chain of facts, as
follows:
The manufacturers couldn't have foreseen the trend they were starting;
while many individuals utilized non-keyboard means of doing things (to
be covered elsewhere), a large number relied on the cheap and easily
wired organ keyboards for their research. A lot of good ideas that
violated one or the other of the above propositions ended up enjoying
little or no popularity due to the essential "alienness" of their
design. It was nothing short of a miracle that the Ondes Martenot
enjoyed the popularity it had at the early part of the century (Ravel, I
believe, wrote a number of pieces for it), in light of the fact that it
had a keyboard, but that the keys didn't move when touched.
*****
Sounds good? Well, let me know if you're interested! I'll also be glad
to elaborate on any particular instrument, answer any questions, or
throw queries on stuff I don't know much about (there must be something
here I'm not an expert on |-> ) to the List.
*****
Ah, drums. Whackety whackety whack! How we all love to hit things and
hear them make noise... it's a primal instinct we all share. The love of
percussion is as old as civilization, and it's a safe bet that the sorts
of percussion devices we consider commonplace these days were elegantly
refined millenia before the keyboard came along. So it was inevitable
that when someone discovered that you could press a key on a synth and
it would go "CRASH!", they might have begun to muse that it might be
eminently (pardon the pun. actually, pat yourself on the back if you
even spotted it! |-> ) more satisfactory to give some undefined THING a
good whack and hear it go "CRASH!" instead. And the rest is history....
The first well-known electronic drum was the Moog percussion controller,
a pad with an impact-sensitive resistance in it that could send a
trigger signal and a voltage based on impact velocity to a monophonic
synth. Each synth had to be patched individually for each pad, but the
sound was (to audiences in 1974) never before heard. Check out Toccata,
>from ELP's BRAIN SALAD SURGERY, or the live version on WELCOME BACK MY
FRIENDS.... for a real taste of history.
The late 1970's saw a huge proliferation of affordable analog drum pads,
each with its own unique sound and character. There were the Synares (I
almost bought a rusty old Synare 1 recently; they're rare as hens' teeth
and sound great!) from 1 to 4, ranging from 4-pad synths to single
drums, the Syndrum and Syndrum CN, the Pearl synthetic drums favored by
Klaus Schulze, and (sigh) the ElectroHarmonix drums, a series of cheap,
ugly devices that were a hell of a lot of fun to work with: the Space
Drum, Clap Track, Crash Pad, Sonic Boomer, Rolling Thunder, and
Clockworks "Percussion Brain." The Space Drum, with its awful descending
"Pooooo....", was a huge part of what made disco forgettable, and makes
it impossible to listen to the live version of Jean-Michel Jarre's
Magnetic Fields II from LES CONCERTS EN CHINE without laughing fit to
die. But drummers perservered; there was something here that they liked,
and there had to be a way to get to it...!
And then along came the rhythm machine, and the music world began
talking about the demise of the live drummer. Remember those days? Boy,
I do. And I remember a guy whom everyone laughed at and made fun of,
too. His name was Dave Simmons, and he had one hell of a good idea up
his sleeve.
Other notables in the "stuff to hit" genre included the Octapad and its
many, many imitators (the original Roland design still providing the
best pad-to-pad isolation in the business), the Kat and Silion Mallet
for marimba types, and various bizarre MIDI devices like the Dynacord
Rhythm Stick. (What a screech THAT thing was!) And although Simmons are
no more, the modularity of MIDI has spawned a whole slew of percussion
controllers accessing drum box sounds, samplers, and even (gasp!) the
occasional analog synth. These days, the stores are again filled with
cheap drum pads, but now they're digitally sampled and often have rhythm
sequences built in ! But I'll admit that my tastes run to hitting an
Octapad and listening to my Xpander go "CRASH!", but then again I've
always been hidebound! |->
I think that a fundamental understanding of rhythm is vital to a
musician's sensibilities, and there's something wonderful and visceral
about actually playing a drum. That's why I find that the most
convincing drum tracks on electronic albums these days tend to be done
live, at least with an Octapad.
And even if you can't afford the cheapest MIDI controllers, like the
$100 Yamaha DD5, you can always get a HandClapper or SpaceDrum and go
wild!
*****
*****
THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, PART 3
STRINGED INSTRUMENTS
The guitar and its cousins are, in comparison to keyboards and drums,
huge pains in the anatomy to use as control devices. Why? Because they
violate both the Switch Proposition (each note is not an event in
itself) and the Keyboard Proposition (There's no logical layout for
pitch reference in a mechanical way). But guitarists are an insistent
lot, so let's look at the history books, but not until after we have a
quick tutorial on the technology!
So how did these two approaches fare through history? Well, the early
years were dominated by pitchtrackers, as the pitch-to-voltage converter
was a neat technical problem that folks had been working on for years.
Early synths, such as the Korg X911, were monophonic: only one
cleanly-played note could be played at a time. The ARP Avatar was
another example of this strategy. Sadly, these instruments were ahead
of what the technology could do, and while the Korg was only an
embarrassment, the Avatar contributed strongly to the death of ARP,
alas. The first Zeta pickups appeared at about this time, for use with
outboard P/V converters and synths. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a
profusion of these gizmos, and few if any worked well. Notable, though,
were boxes like the ElectroHarmonix MicroSynthesizer, which was nothing
more than a square-wave divide-down box, and the Oncor Touch guitar,
which was the first fretwired instrument in production: it had metal
bars in place of strings, and was actually an oddly-shaped monophonic
synthesizer!
The guitarsynth's evolution progressed slowly into the 1980s, and might
still be progressing today, if not for the interest taken by one
particular company in the challenge: Roland. Their first attempt, the
GR500, utilized a bass synth, a mono synth, a string machine, and a
divide-down polyensemble, all controlled by a hexaphonic pickup on a
very nice guitar. It tracked half decently, it sounded great, and it was
a big hit at once. (The guitar parts on "Follow You Follow Me" by
Genesis on 1978's AND THEN THERE WERE THREE are all GR500.) Roland
followed this up with the GR300 series, which Robert Fripp made his own
(see any King Crimson album from 1981 or after), and eventually, the
GR700, which was a breakthrough in three areas: it was a true polyphonic
guitar synthesizer, it could be set up reliably and personalized easily
to each guitarist's touch, and IT HAD MIDI! Since then, Roland's main
drive has ben to get faster and faster tracking pickups, and to an
extent they've succeeded. Ibanez has also marketed a MIDI guitar, with a
MIDI whammybar!
The fretwired guitars were much later in coming, but they had
advantages. Muting didn't faze them, nor did hammerons and pulloffs,
and unlike pitch sensors, if the neck was designed right they didn't
mind bends at all. The first and most famous of these was of course the
SynthAxe, an $11,000 MIDI monstrosity that was enormously powerful and
expressive, but actually required a fair amount of retraining to use
properly. (Allan Holdsworth's ATAVACHRON and SAND are loaded with
SynthAxe work.) The Stepp DG1, though the company died, was an
improvement on the SynthAxe in terms of familiarity of use. Other
designs that attempted to avoid pitchtracking problems utilized sonar or
light sensors (the Yamaha GS1 (?) and Beetle Quantar), but these
combined the disadvantages of limited fretwire control and no real
guitar sound and hence didn't catch on terribly well. On the flip side,
Zeta is marketing a guitar now called the Mirror 6, which is a real
guitar that at great expense has been totally fretwired, giving the
ultimate in both sides of the coin. The instrument's cost has been
offputting, but field reports say it may well be the wave of the future.
As for other instruments in the string family, the bass guitar has been
approached only by Roland and Zeta. Roland's attempts to quickly trck
the low-frequency bass notes have been frustrating, but Zeta has hinted
at a Mirror 4 bass to be released. Zeta have also developed a violin
synth, utilizing a special pickup. Since there are no frets and the bow
doesn't always start a note cleanly, this instrument uses pitchtracking,
and does fair to middling in following synths. Its real strengths,
according to users like Jean-Luc Ponty and Emilysue Pinnell, are as an
electric violin, which can be transposed down into the cello range
without difficulty.
If I've missed any designs, feel free to remind me of them. But as for
the future, my money's on a dichotomy of designs: some folks only want a
guitar sound with something else behind it, and for them the Roland
designs will do fine for cheap, but others want the precise control of
fretwiring and will pay to get it. That being the case, I think that
real-guitar-based designs like the Zeta will eventually win the day, as
they do leave open a chance to play the real thing. As prices drop,
we'll see who comes out on top, if any one type does. In the meantime,
we'll have to get used to guitar runs with string chords tagging along
behind them, I guess....
*****
*****
THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, PART 4
WIND CONTROLLERS
The wind and brass instruments fall in between stringed and keyboard
instruments in terms of translational difficulty: while there are sets
of keys that definitely tell the instrument what note is being played,
the nuances of breath control are perhaps more complex than those of
string playing. Lip and tongue pressure, expulsion of air, and jaw
stiffness can control vibrato, loudness, tremolo, even pitch bends and
octave jumps. But the fascination of combining this sort of
expressiveness with the sounds of the synth has fascinated people for
decades, and a number of attempts were made:
The two most famous historical wind controllers were the Lyricon and the
EWI and EVI. The Lyricon, marketed by Computone, was a clarinet-like
controller that allowed pitchy and vibrato control over analog synths
through variable control voltage levels. The EWI was a similar
development using a different approach to control style, and the EVI was
a design for trumpeters. While to hear the EWI you'd need to dig up
albums featuring people like Michael Brecker, the Lyricon was actually a
fairly well-known beastie: Emerald Web used them a lot, and the
Tangerine Dream album CYCLONE features one. Another device was the
selfcontained Starwind, a mono synth with a melodica keyboard and
elementary breath control. Neat device, and inexpensive, but never
caught on. It would take the advent of MIDI to produce the same sort of
revolution in wind control that had occurred elsewhere in the industry.
The primary advantage of these early devices was that they utilized
analog signal control, hence had infinite degrees of control shading.
Digital control, by definition, was coarser, and the Yamaha WX7, the
first MIDI wind driver, suffered from some complaints in this regard, as
does the newer, simpler WX11. The newer EWI and EVI, now made by Akai,
actually run a special synth via analog voltages, hence preserving the
expressiveness. They, however, suffer from a non-intuitive keying system
that many players find unpleasant to use. Other instruments include the
Synthophone, the Atrisyn MIDIsax, and the Sting. Each has its own
approach to handling the dual needs of familiarity to seasoned players
and of faithful synth control, and each involves tradeoffs in terms of
performance control, expressiveness, and cost. The WX11, for instance,
has a far more limited set of expressive capabilities than any other
wind driver as of now, but it's simple to learn and quite cheap. The
Synthophone, on the other hand, is built inside a real sax, but suffers
>from high cost and limited synth control. The WX7 is considered
difficult to "set up" by individual players, and the MIDIsax doesn't
even allow certain types of setups to be performed, though it does have
a number of useful features like expression controllers and a program
readout where the player can see it easily. And the list goes on.
Next, our fifth and final part will cover timbral controllers of various
sorts. If you have a bizarre favorite, please let me know, and don't be
shy about which category they fall under: I'll be covering oddball
keyboards, pads, stringed devices, and wind drivers as well as other
stuff!
Well. Here we are at the end of this little series. If there's anything
I've missed, please feel free to ask me, and I'll include it later. But
for now....
*****
THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, PART 5
UNUSUAL CONTROLLERS
When I say "unusual" I mean stuff that either puts a new wrinkle on old
ways of determining pitch and start/stop times of events, or entirely
new methods of doing so. I'll be skipping all over the place, and I'm
sorry for that, but it was either unformatted or never to be finished,
so what the hey.
The pre-MIDI era, and in fact the pre-digital era, abounded with bizarre
attempts at control devices. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the Ondes
Martenot had a ribbon attached to a ring on the player's finger, that
slid back and forth as he played and served as a control device in that
fashion. But for the most part, the pre-vacuum tube age relied mainly
on old standbys of the organ design palette for control: stops and keys.
For people who insisted on the old-fashioned piano keyboard, there were
still a lot of frontiers to cross: one manufacturer has marketed a
keyboard which not only has velocity and pressure sensitivity, but where
each key can move in and out or side to side! Watching one of those in
action is kind of frightening; like someone put LSD in your tip jar....
The Yamaha GX-1, the half-ton monstrosity made famous by Keith Emerson,
had at least one keyboard manual that allowed side-to-side key motion.
(As an aside: I'm looking for data on this beast: I know nothing of what
it could and couldn't do, how many were made, or how it worked. All I
know is, it weighed nearly 1000 pounds, had two fullsize key manuals and
one minikey manual, and Keith Emerson had two: one which got destroyed
by a runaway farm tractor (no, really!) and one he got from John Paul
Jones of Led Zeppelin. Stevie Wonder had one, and so did Jurgen Fritz of
Triumvirat (who was famous for having one of everything Keith had, no
matter what). Other than that, I'm stuck. Help!) And then, of course,
there were always the feet: organ bass pedals have been in existence for
centuries, and from the Moog Taurus to the MIDIstep they haven't been
far from the electronic world either.
Beyond the realm of actually playing the keyboard, however, was the area
of controlling the sound as one played. The area of timbral control is
even richer than the area of keyboard triggering, and has spawned all
sorts of approaches to seemingly trivial problems. Consider the two most
common ways to alter a sound played on a synth (not including the
sustain pedal, which is one thing that survived unscathed from the piano
pedagogy): pitch bending, or the addition of vibrato or tremolo, i.e.
LFO modulation of frequency or volume. "That's easy, man! You just get
these two things on the left side of the board, and...." Yes? And do
what? Pull them, push them, wiggle them, stroke them, press them, punch
them, squeeze them, what? And in which direction? Up, down, left, right,
in, out, forwards, backwards? And what do they do when you let go:
return to zero? Stay put? Keep going to some preset destination without
your help? Hmmm? Well, the answer to all of the above questions is, of
course, "Yes," so it might pay to look a bit at the simplest (HAH!) of
control surfaces before we get on to the heavier stuff....
The replacement for the ribbon, of course, was the wheel, and this is
still (in its MANY forms) the most popular type of controller today. How
do they work? Well, that depends on the synth. For an old Moog, the left
one's bidirectional and is used for pitch bends, with or without a
center detent, and the right one's unidirectional and is used for LFO
modulation. This "standard" (with the modern additions of a spring
return-to-zero on the pitch wheel) is used by Ensoniq, Emu, Yamaha, and
on older Roland and Korg boards. Oberheim uses a reversed design that
was copied by Chroma and (partially) by Kurzweil: the wheels are shaped
like paddles, and both are bidirectional and springloaded. Older designs
for such a mod wheel were "dead" in one direction; nowadays, each
direction accesses a different modulation (VCO vs. VCF, perhaps). Roland
has a side-to-side pitch paddle, which is pushed forward for modulation:
I, personally, find this dsign unusable and not a little silly. Korg
uses a joystick for pitch bend and two types of modulation (left, flat;
right, sharp; up, VCO; down, VCF) that wouldn't be bad if the joystick
moved in a circular well rather than a square one and wasn't so flimsy,
argh! But I digress. The joystick idea was also marketed as a pressure
plate, where the XY position of the fingertip sent out voltages. Another
idea that ARP tried was the PPC, or Proportional Pressure Controller:
three pads, on which you rested your left index, middle, and ring
fingers as you played. Pressing one bent up, pressing another bent flat,
and the one in the middle added modulation. (It didn't sell.) Then there
was Yamaha's old setting-the-clock pitchbender, and... You get the idea.
One other expression controller, that's been single handedly shoved into
the spotlight by Yamaha, is the hooter: the Breath Controller. It's a
gizmo that generates a CV based on breath pressure, allowing lines to be
articulated as with a wind or brass instrument. As Chick Corea once
wrote: "You get into blowing." The Yamaha MCS2 specializes, in fact, in
adding controllers to MIDI pianos and the like: you get a MIDI merger
that adds a pitch wheel, mod wheel, hooter, two footpedals, two
footswitches, two sliders, and three buttons to your MIDI control
arsenal. Yippee!
Of course, this doesn't hold a candle to the single best design for
left-handed control of a synthesizer ever, which was invented by Hugh
LeCaine in the 1950s for his Electronic Sackbut. The left hand rested on
a plate, with each of the four fingers controlling a slider that varied
some component of the sound in realtime, so flexing the fingers caused a
very smooth and natural evolution of acoustic-imitative sounds such as
strings. And the thumb, not to be outdone, rested on a sliding pad that
moved joystick-like across a circular plate that was divided into
different waveform types, and allowed formants and waves to be blended
in real time with a twitch of the thumb. Only LeCaine himself ever
mastered this instrument, but the sound was, well, amazing. The
imitation of a string quartet he did in 1958 was frighteningly real, not
so much in sound but in articulation of the instruments' bowstrokes!
Other parts of the body were used for timbral control, of course:
footpedals and footswitches were and are common, and the GX-1 had a
gizmo for bending pitch when the player drove his knee up under the
keybed. Visceral!
And what of the future? Well, we're seeing bits of it today, in the
Airdrums, a pair of MIDI batons that send messages when moved on their
axes in various directions, and the Hands of Michael Waisvicz that
control synth parameters in real time by flexing the fingers, touching
the palms, waving the arms and turning the hands (I want a pair.
BADLY!). Robert Moog recently spoke of a design student's idea for a
pole-shaped controller with keys on its grips, played in a dancelike
motion. And for the instruments themselves? I have fond memories of the
instrument that sank PPG: the Realizer, where you punched a button and
the entire front panel changed. Bip! It's a Minimoog. Bip! It's a DX7.
Bip! It's an Emulator....
Oh, before I forget: I did get one contribution, from Pete Lucas:
*****
Man-machine-interface: One instrument i came across some years back was
a thing called a 'Tactophone'. It was a metal framework (steel tubes
and angle sections bolted together, standing about 3 feet high) with
wires stretched between the upper and lower members, in the style of a
harp. It had about thirty strings if my memory is correct. An
electronically energised coil vibrated the top member, and hence the
strings, there were pickups on the individual strings along the bottom
edge. Output from the pickups was fed back to the energiser, hence if
you plucked a string, and then took your hands off the instrument, you
could get a sustained note, or a note that died away very slowly,
depending on the settings of the amplifiers (oh yes, i forgot to
mention, there was a mass of amplifiers, ring modulators, notchfilters
etc attached, with a console for the sound engineer to manipulate) You
could run your fingers up and down a string, instead of plucking it,
this produced noises like a musical saw (ethereal wailings reminiscent
of the ondes martenot, or running a wet finger round the rim of a
glass), or alternatively, since some of the strings were wound, running
a hard metal object up & down the strings made interesting
grating/screeching sounds. If you got the gain of the amplifiers just
right, then merely touching a string very lightly would start off a
vibration, which would grow louder and louder and louder. Brushing a
feather across all the strings sounded nice. There was a pedal attached
to the electronics, which cut the amplifier (and i think also introduced
negative feedback, coz it seemed to damp the vibrations very fast
indeed). I also saw the thing tipped on its side (strings horizontal)
and played like a xylophone with two metal rods as 'sticks'. The
'player' and 'composer' of music for the beast was, if i remember,
called David Morkrum (or was it Morkum, Morecambe?). Wonder if you've
heard of this 'thing'? Possibly under a different name?
Pete L.
*****
Well, thanks for your attention. I hope folks got something worthwhile
out of all this; I had a lot of fun going back through my archives
getting this stuff out. Now it's time for me to go back into the studio;
I just had this great idea for a song, using nothing but a pitch
bender....