Synthesizers Part 2

Well we had a quick glance (and I mean quick) at the history of synths from 1870-1950 last month.  Now we move on in time, starting with the 1960s.  It was during the 1960's that we started to hear a lot more of the synth in popular music.  With the move toward experimentation of instruments and recording techniques, the synth played an important role, that has only grown to this day.

One of the more famous is the Mellotron.

Now strictly speaking, this is not really a synth.  It doesn't use electronics to create it's sound.  The sound in this machine actually comes off audio tape.  It's more like a sampler than a synth, but its place in music is rich, so I thought it worth mentioning.  Mellotrons were produced from the early 60's to the early eighties, and are still used on recordings today.  They have a very particular sound.

The machine was built by Leslie Bradly and his brothers, but was ripped off an Americam machine called the Chamberlin.  Under each key was a strip of audio tape with a recorded sound that corresponded to the pitch of the key (The Mark II had two keyboards of 35 notes each making a total of 1260 separate recordings). The instrument plays the sound when the key is pressed and returns the tape head to the begining of the tape when the key is released.  Each tape had three tracks, which allowed you to select between three different sounds, or even a blend of two.  You could play a note for about eight seconds before the recording ran out.

So when have you heard it?  Well you may remember I did a story recently about The Beatles song "Strawberry Fields Forever"?  Remember the very start of the song with the flutes?  That's actually Paul McCartney playing a Mellotron.

Still in the 1960s is probably the biggest name ever to create a synth.  Robert Moog. 

He spent the early part of the 60s building Theramins forom his apartment, but after meeting experimental composer Herbert Deutsch, decided to try his hand at creating a synth.  His efforts led to the Moog Modular Synthesizer.  The orders came in, but when Wendy Carlos recorded "Swithed On Bach", a record of classical music played only on synths in 1968 (which sold over a million copies), the orders really started to tumble in. 

They were expensive and big and so in 1970 he released the Mini Moog.  This was to become his most famous synth because it was almost affordable for every musician.

Moog went on to create many more synths as well as being involved in establishing many other brands.  He lost the rights to his company name during the seventies, but got them back in 2002.  And today he is still producing new synths.

On to the 1970s.  The Roland Corporation released it's first synth, the SH1000.  This was Japan's first synth.  Since that time Roland have become one of the biggest and most successful synth producers in the world.  One of their first synth was produced for television stations to create weird new sounds (forget the muso's!).

Roland like everyone was changing the way synths operated.  In the 1970's it was usual to have a synth that needed two people to carry it and it looked more like an old fashioned telephone switch board with all it patch leads.  But by the end of the decade, those patch leads were becoming internal electronic switches, and sounds you created could be saved to memory, instead of having to write down a every parameter you had made.

Into the 80's Roland made some stand out machines including the "Jupiter" series of synths that broke new ground with the comlexity of sounds they could make.  They also made drum machines, most notably, the TR808.

What would we do without this?  Rap and Hip Hop music would be absolutely lost without it, as would Phil Collins who used it on just about every song he recorded from 1982 to the mid ninties.  Having owned one at one stage, I can say they were great and I wish I had it now.  Some of these old synths and drum machines are amongst the only electronic devices whose price has appreciated over the years.

Another Giant that started in the 1970's was Korg.  They make fantastic synths and are one of my favourite brands.  Korg was founded by Tsutomu Katoh and Tadashi Osanai.  They firstly created mechanical rhythm machines in the mid-sixties, but moved to synths by the 1970s.  Their first machine was the Mini-Korg and sold enough to allow them to continue.  And they did, releasing many synths and breaking new ground, but it was their 1981 machine, the "Polysix" that made them famous.  This is a legendary synth which allowed musicians to have a powerful tool at a reasonable price.

They went further creating the "Wavestation" series which allowed mixing of rhythmical waveforms which gave you complex music by pressing one key.

Today Korg still lead the way.  For instance, one of our keyboards can play about eight instruments at once by pressing one key.  With your other hand (or just lock on the note) you can twist a series of knobe to create chord changes, drum fills, rhythm changes and a whole pile of other stuff.  From someone who remebers monophonic synths with patch leads, I find it truly amazing.

Next month we'll do a race to the present including the biggest selling synth of all time.