My Analog Days......
Jul. 29th, 2004 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poltr1The Moog Synthesizer also turns 40 this year. For those of you interested in the early days of synthesizers, the book Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer by Frank Trocco, Trevor Pinch, and Robert Moog appears to fill the bill quite nicely. While there were other synthesizers and inventors, like Don Buchla, Alan R. Perlman, Tom Oberheim (on whose instruments the logo below appeared) and the EMS Systems' VCS3, the Moog was the best-known.
I have my own 'Analog Days' stories. While I wasn't around synthesizers in those early years, I definitely had an interest in them before most other people did. So sit back and enjoy as this synth geek recalls his past exploits with filters, oscillators, envelope generators, and glorius sound.
In high school, I started getting interested in synths. I remember going to a demo in the fall of '79 at a local music store for Moog Music's new product line. I think they were just rolling out the Micromoog at the time. There were 6 Micromoogs on tables that we got to demo and play. (I think it was Herb Deutsch who gave the demo.) I also grabbed some product literature, which I still have in my files.
That year, I met Glenn, another student who was interested in synthesizers. We developed a friendship and got together frequently. He had connections with some of the local studios and colleges. One of the studios qw went to had a modular Aries system.
In my senior year, Glenn had rented a Minimoog and Polymoog for one of his own projects. I asked if I could borrow them for a public speaking class project. He agreed. In the speech, which was a final project, I covered the history of synthesizers. I also ended up playing "Send In the Clowns" and making falling bomb noises, which caught the attention of many people in the hallway, including the hall monitor. They were gathered around the doorway, looking in, while I'm creating musical magic...or noise.
Eventually, I came up with the idea to have a semester-long high school course in electronic music. Glenn and I worked on a 20-week curriculum, which included field trips to local instrument makers (Moog Music, Harald Bode, Polyfusion). We also worked on getting grant money to purchase a few instruments (we ended up buying 2 Multimoogs), and presented the idea before the school board. It passed. Unfortunately, I graduated before I could take my own course. But Glenn, who was a year behind me, did.
I didn't play woodwinds or keyboards much in college, except for a course in electronic music offered by the College of Mathematical Sciences, a non-traditional subunit of my university. During the class, we got to spend time with a Moog modular synthesizer and two large IMF speakers in a room on the 10th floor of the Wilkeson Quad tower. I remember the instructor setting one of the low-frequency oscillators to 10 Hz and seeing the woofer move in and out 10 times a second. Somewhere in my parent's house is a reel-to-reel tape of my final project: a piece called "Inside the Mentat's Mind" that featured a lot of sequencing and sample-and-hold effects. (Does anyone have a reel-to-reel deck I can borrow or rent?)
In '83, I (with the help of my parents) bought a used Minimoog. It got some use while I was in college. I jammed with a few of my fraternity brothers a few times. Some days, we sounded great; other nights, we sounded like shit. But we had fun. One night, it was Ben on guitar and me on synth. I had set up a Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays flute-like sound that Ben called "Indian bagpipes".
I also ended up using the Minimoog for sound effects for a local radio production of "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy". A couple of folks I knew from the school's BBS -- actually, the VAX's bulletin board system -- had copies of the Radio Scripts book, and we re-created the shows for the school's current-carrier radio station, WRUB. I remember one Saturday night, that several of us crammed into the studio to do a higher-quality version of an episode -- I want to say "Fit the Fourth" -- to be put on tape for later broadcast. I had come up with sounds to represent the Vogon demolition beams and a sliding spaceship door. I still have the patch sheets from that night. But not the tape. :-(
I remember going back to my high school's music teacher and giving a demo to several music instructors at a conference he was at. I talked about Fourier series -- periodic waveforms are the sums of sine waves at different frequencies and phases -- and harmonic theory while doing the waveform/harmonics demo for them. (It's the one where I use a sawtooth wave, high fiter resonance, and slowly sweep the filter cutoff -- you can hear the harmonics as they come in.) Either I impressed the hell out of them or I went over their heads with the mathematical stuff behind the sound and music. I will say that having the Moog helped me a lot during electrical signals class -- the only EE course I did well in before 'defecting' to CS.
I had a chance to study computer music under Lejaren Hiller, composer of the Illiac Suite, the first musical composition to be composed by a computer. The graduate-level music course required permission from the instructor, which I eventually got, but I ended up not registering for the course. I also took a senior-level physics course titled "Physical Acoustics of Music". This covered the physical phenomena behind sounds -- vibrations, air columns, harmonics, etc.
After college, I got a job, moved to Ohio, and was soon introduced to the filk community. I brought the Minimoog to housefilks, and a few conventions, but it's tough to play in a filk circle with no songs, and with a monophonic instrument that could potentially drown out the rest of the people there. I also had -- and still have -- a hard time jumping in to chaos filk circles. I'm worried that I'm about to cut off or interrupt someone else who's starting, and thus piss them off.
My best time at a filk con with the Minimoog was FKO 5. On Saturday night, I was in an empty function room all by myself, noodling with the synth, when other people heard me, entered the room, and joined in. Eventually it turned into a 70's song filk, and I got to play some. That was an incredibly great feeling. The other time I felt like a bona fide part of the filk community was the insta-band with Kathy Mar at Marcon 30. We played "Big Yellow Taxi". Before we went on stage for our song, Kathy anointed each one of us with a spot of Tiger Balm on our foreheads.
Since then, I kind of drifted into the background in filk. I haven't had a chance to practice much. I've written a few songs. I sometimes feel that because I'm not performing, I'm a filk wallflower. But there are people who I see on a regular basis at filk cons who don't perform, and they seem to act or be treated as if they're one of the family. But as Annie Haslam once said on the Renaissance "Live at Carnegie Hall" album, "It takes an audience to make a band."
Perhaps I'll drag it to a filk con, or a housefilk. Or show it off to people. Or better yet, get a synth workstation that's slightly more portable, sample the Mini sounds, and bring them up at the touch of a button.
Update: I really like that Oberheim logo. I should use it as an icon, once I get paid status.
I have my own 'Analog Days' stories. While I wasn't around synthesizers in those early years, I definitely had an interest in them before most other people did. So sit back and enjoy as this synth geek recalls his past exploits with filters, oscillators, envelope generators, and glorius sound.
In high school, I started getting interested in synths. I remember going to a demo in the fall of '79 at a local music store for Moog Music's new product line. I think they were just rolling out the Micromoog at the time. There were 6 Micromoogs on tables that we got to demo and play. (I think it was Herb Deutsch who gave the demo.) I also grabbed some product literature, which I still have in my files.
That year, I met Glenn, another student who was interested in synthesizers. We developed a friendship and got together frequently. He had connections with some of the local studios and colleges. One of the studios qw went to had a modular Aries system.
In my senior year, Glenn had rented a Minimoog and Polymoog for one of his own projects. I asked if I could borrow them for a public speaking class project. He agreed. In the speech, which was a final project, I covered the history of synthesizers. I also ended up playing "Send In the Clowns" and making falling bomb noises, which caught the attention of many people in the hallway, including the hall monitor. They were gathered around the doorway, looking in, while I'm creating musical magic...or noise.
Eventually, I came up with the idea to have a semester-long high school course in electronic music. Glenn and I worked on a 20-week curriculum, which included field trips to local instrument makers (Moog Music, Harald Bode, Polyfusion). We also worked on getting grant money to purchase a few instruments (we ended up buying 2 Multimoogs), and presented the idea before the school board. It passed. Unfortunately, I graduated before I could take my own course. But Glenn, who was a year behind me, did.
I didn't play woodwinds or keyboards much in college, except for a course in electronic music offered by the College of Mathematical Sciences, a non-traditional subunit of my university. During the class, we got to spend time with a Moog modular synthesizer and two large IMF speakers in a room on the 10th floor of the Wilkeson Quad tower. I remember the instructor setting one of the low-frequency oscillators to 10 Hz and seeing the woofer move in and out 10 times a second. Somewhere in my parent's house is a reel-to-reel tape of my final project: a piece called "Inside the Mentat's Mind" that featured a lot of sequencing and sample-and-hold effects. (Does anyone have a reel-to-reel deck I can borrow or rent?)
In '83, I (with the help of my parents) bought a used Minimoog. It got some use while I was in college. I jammed with a few of my fraternity brothers a few times. Some days, we sounded great; other nights, we sounded like shit. But we had fun. One night, it was Ben on guitar and me on synth. I had set up a Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays flute-like sound that Ben called "Indian bagpipes".
I also ended up using the Minimoog for sound effects for a local radio production of "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy". A couple of folks I knew from the school's BBS -- actually, the VAX's bulletin board system -- had copies of the Radio Scripts book, and we re-created the shows for the school's current-carrier radio station, WRUB. I remember one Saturday night, that several of us crammed into the studio to do a higher-quality version of an episode -- I want to say "Fit the Fourth" -- to be put on tape for later broadcast. I had come up with sounds to represent the Vogon demolition beams and a sliding spaceship door. I still have the patch sheets from that night. But not the tape. :-(
I remember going back to my high school's music teacher and giving a demo to several music instructors at a conference he was at. I talked about Fourier series -- periodic waveforms are the sums of sine waves at different frequencies and phases -- and harmonic theory while doing the waveform/harmonics demo for them. (It's the one where I use a sawtooth wave, high fiter resonance, and slowly sweep the filter cutoff -- you can hear the harmonics as they come in.) Either I impressed the hell out of them or I went over their heads with the mathematical stuff behind the sound and music. I will say that having the Moog helped me a lot during electrical signals class -- the only EE course I did well in before 'defecting' to CS.
I had a chance to study computer music under Lejaren Hiller, composer of the Illiac Suite, the first musical composition to be composed by a computer. The graduate-level music course required permission from the instructor, which I eventually got, but I ended up not registering for the course. I also took a senior-level physics course titled "Physical Acoustics of Music". This covered the physical phenomena behind sounds -- vibrations, air columns, harmonics, etc.
After college, I got a job, moved to Ohio, and was soon introduced to the filk community. I brought the Minimoog to housefilks, and a few conventions, but it's tough to play in a filk circle with no songs, and with a monophonic instrument that could potentially drown out the rest of the people there. I also had -- and still have -- a hard time jumping in to chaos filk circles. I'm worried that I'm about to cut off or interrupt someone else who's starting, and thus piss them off.
My best time at a filk con with the Minimoog was FKO 5. On Saturday night, I was in an empty function room all by myself, noodling with the synth, when other people heard me, entered the room, and joined in. Eventually it turned into a 70's song filk, and I got to play some. That was an incredibly great feeling. The other time I felt like a bona fide part of the filk community was the insta-band with Kathy Mar at Marcon 30. We played "Big Yellow Taxi". Before we went on stage for our song, Kathy anointed each one of us with a spot of Tiger Balm on our foreheads.
Since then, I kind of drifted into the background in filk. I haven't had a chance to practice much. I've written a few songs. I sometimes feel that because I'm not performing, I'm a filk wallflower. But there are people who I see on a regular basis at filk cons who don't perform, and they seem to act or be treated as if they're one of the family. But as Annie Haslam once said on the Renaissance "Live at Carnegie Hall" album, "It takes an audience to make a band."
Perhaps I'll drag it to a filk con, or a housefilk. Or show it off to people. Or better yet, get a synth workstation that's slightly more portable, sample the Mini sounds, and bring them up at the touch of a button.
Update: I really like that Oberheim logo. I should use it as an icon, once I get paid status.
