The Earworm Podcast - Episode 7 BEEP BOOP Synth Happens

On this episode of The Earworm Podcast, Bryan and Patrick trace the evolution of the synthesizer—from the room-sized Teleharmonium and Hammond B3 organ to the groundbreaking instruments that shaped modern music. Along the way, they explore the pioneers of electronic sound, including Raymond Scott, Bob Moog, and the innovators who transformed experimental technology into musical tools.

The conversation dives into iconic synths like the Minimoog, ARP 2600, Yamaha CS-80, Prophet-5, Oberheim OB-X, Jupiter-8, and DX7, breaking down the sounds behind classic recordings from Rush, Vangelis, Cyndi Lauper, and countless others. The hosts also explain the fundamentals of synthesis, discuss the arrival of MIDI and FM synthesis, and examine how today's software and AI-powered instruments continue to build on the innovations that changed music forever.  

Refs:

https://moogfoundation.org/remembering-synthesizer-innovator-don-buchla-1937-2016/

https://www.moogmusic.com/

https://oberheim.com/

https://sequential.com/

https://www.korg.com/us/products/synthesizers/

https://usa.yamaha.com/products/music_production/synthesizers/index.html

https://www.digitalmellotron.com/

https://www.facebook.com/BobMoogFoundation/posts/remembering-inventor-thaddeus-cahill-on-his-birthdaythaddeus-is-widely-credited-/10157363651908479/

https://120years.net/the-telharmonium-thaddeus-cahill-usa-1897/

https://120years.net/the-telharmonium-thaddeus-cahill-usa-1897/

https://modularsynthesis.com/hammond/m3/m3.htm

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/synthesizing-tonewheel-organs-part-1

https://www.nwpianogallery.com/?product=hammond-b3-organ-w-leslie-122-tone-cabinet

https://variety.com/2024/film/global/ben-burtts-vision-award-ticinomoda-locarno-1236105358/

https://www.kjzz.org/the-show/2025-02-24/meet-the-oscar-winning-sound-designer-behind-iconic-noises-like-the-star-wars-light-saber

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:12

So that's the sound of electricity. That is the sound of electricity. I've been trying to figure out what electricity sounds like, but that's the sound of circuitry. Just pure unadulterated circuitry. Yeah. Welcome to Earworm. I'm Patrick Cloud. I'm Brian Clark. And today we are here to talk about synthesizers, the largest topic that we could think of to fit in an hour.

SPEAKER_05 0:30

Oh my God, what are we doing?

SPEAKER_01 1:05

In discussion and preparation for this episode, we said that this was more of a curriculum than a podcast. So we're going to try to dumb it down, not dumb it down. We're going to try to take it down to what really matters is what the music that was created by these particular synthesizers. And of course, we can't start without a little bit of history.

SPEAKER_05 1:22

Aaron Ross Powell No, we need a little bit of history to just kind of get us going. Yeah. But the idea today, ladies and gentlemen, is all we're trying to do is impart to you the classic sounds of some classic synthesizers and some classic songs.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Trevor Burrus And there'll be a little bit of history and a little bit of science. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_05 1:39

Of course. It wouldn't be an earworm podcast if we didn't have that. So yeah, we've got to have that. But I'll try to keep it down. I know you will too, to what we're really here to do, because you're right, this is a lifetime study. We could spend uh years and years and years just talking about certain types of synthesizers, let alone how many recordings that that one particular one's been used on.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Yeah. And you know, it's one of those uh for me, it's it's not necessarily an afterthought instrument, but it's one of those things that and I even admitted this to you today when we were talking about a about a particular song, and I was a little embarrassed about it. It's like we we plugged in and we found the patch for the song, and I'm like, okay. So I heard the patch and I'm like, what is it? Then we played the song and I'm like, wait, that was there, which is an incredible thing to me. But a really great synthesizer sometimes doesn't even stand out. It just rounds everything out and fills things together. Yeah. But then again, sometimes it's the most predominant thing in a track that that's that's being recorded.

SPEAKER_05 2:36

Absolutely. Yeah. And whole genres of music have been developed around that.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Synth wave, synth pop.

SPEAKER_05 2:42

Oh man. Just I mean, so many. And and there's a there's a much there's a earlier history to it as well. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

How far back are we talking?

SPEAKER_05 2:50

Well, we got to let's go back to the Telharmonium with Thaddeus Cahill. The telharmonium. Yeah, let's talk about that. Please tell me about it. Well, okay. So this was a monstrous contraption, and I mean gargantuan in proportion. We're not talking about something that's going to fit on your kitchen table.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

More like a double wide.

SPEAKER_05 3:04

We're well, we're talking about double, double, double, double, double, double, double wide.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

Jeez.

SPEAKER_05 3:10

It's like the the the entire, almost an entire city block underneath in the in the bowels of basements. Wow. Um there was this huge contraption that this man, Thaddeus Cahill, sort of came up with that basically made electrical-based music, the the the strain on the power grid, the lights would dim in New York City when they were trying to play this machine. Okay? That's what I'm talking about. So like essentially it was these giant gears that would move. They called them tone wheels, and they would move and create essentially a pitch. So if you wanted to do 88 keyboard, you know, all the notes on an 88-key keyboard, uh, then you would need to have these massively large tone wheels to generate those cycles, those frequencies. So that's where it came. Uh there's a fascinating story about this man, uh worthy of Ken Burns documentary. And maybe we'll go into that at some point. But to keep it on the safe side, the telharmonium essentially what we really want to take away from this is that the telharmonium is really just trying to uh give us a precursor technology that led to the development of the Hammond B3 organ and and particularly the organ itself or the Hammond organs, let alone the B3.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

So and really he he wanted to make these. Like he wanted to sell these commercially because there was a retail price.

SPEAKER_05 4:29

Oh man, he was such a hustler.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

He was like a sh was like a shamwow kind of you trying to sell this thing that's the almost a city block that you have to install underground. Yeah. The retail price, $200,000, which is about $7.5 million today. Yeah. Could you imagine Sweetwater trying to sell a synthesizer for $7.5 million? I just don't know if it's uh reasonable.

SPEAKER_05 4:51

No musician's gonna buy it.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

Anybody's gonna buy it. You have to have the city, you have to have a the property just to put it on.

SPEAKER_05 4:58

Well, that too, yeah. It was a script, it was an early subscription-based service. I mean, he was a forward thinker, but imagine this, folks. I mean, it put your put your mind back a hundred plus years, okay, and just think of you for the first time in your life walking into a room, a nice room, and you're in your tucks, and all of a sudden you hear music coming from nowhere. Just and they would hide speakers in the planters and in the corners and things like that. So they had a right, they had a cool throw. Because back then, the only technology, if you wanted to hear live music, or music in general, it was either live, which you had one or many musicians in front of you, or you had a uh a new technology, which was the gramophone. Right. Right, the gramophone.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

The gramophone phonograph?

SPEAKER_05 5:41

Right. So if you had uh yeah, but like it or the or wax cylinder recorders, the early Edison, same thing, same technology, just different ways uh of of going about it. But that would have to happen, and then you'd be standing in front of an apparatus that was blasting something out at you that was very horn-based, you know, that kind of thing. So now this was different. This was music that you couldn't see where it was coming from, you just were hearing it. So it was a very much of a magic show. It'd be like us going into a room and having a hologram appear in front of us and it interact with you.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like that it's just totally mind-blowing. Totally. Totally magic.

SPEAKER_05 6:16

Yeah. So the net is we don't want to get one of the weeds about Thaddeus Cahill and the telemonium, it's fascinating. But we want to jump right into the next big development for us, which is going to be the B3 organ. So the B3 organ, the the technology behind it was exactly the same. They used tone wheels, but uh they shrunk them down exponentially. So um so you could fit it into an organ that we would normally think of, the size of that. But basically, when you turn it on, there's these little tone wheels that spin, and they as they spin, they give off a frequency, and the the the the tone wheel is near a pickup, just like a pickup on a guitar, and that picks up the sound, and then then it starts to become amplified. So that's how the the B3 starts to work.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

The early ones had to be noisy, right? I mean when you have open coil magnets picking up each one of them. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_05 7:03

They're different from guitars in that sense. Yeah, they're they're wound in a different way, so they don't throw off as much noise as you'd think. They're pretty, pretty but they are noisy. There's definitely a noise floor to B3. I've no recorded. What's it sound like? You got one? A B3? Yeah. Yeah, sure. So um, I mean, the cla okay. What's a classic song that you'd pick for B3?

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Uh Fly Like an Eagle.

SPEAKER_05 7:24

Yeah, I think that's a great song.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Well recorded, beautiful, great, well known, you know.

SPEAKER_05 7:30

100%. 100% agree with that. Now, before you guys throw us on the, you know, the the the sword of oh my god, how dare you di defame the B three recording canon. We we're fully aware of all of the th hundreds of thousands of recordings that that exemplify a B3. We could talk about the jazz trios that are early all the way back from Jimmy Smith, all the way to modern players, you know, you have Goose, Larry Golding.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

They got one. I mean, you even think of Dr. John and uh millions. Widespread panic, you know.

SPEAKER_05 8:02

Yeah, and you've got you know the classics, you know, Green Onion, you know, with Booker T and the MGs, Stacks, Memphis, Tennessee, you know, that kind of stuff, or you can think about so many others. So we're we're aware of the canon, but I think that's a great example, actually, because it's just such a it's such a well-recorded version, and it all those all the schmutz is on the B3. It's like really good.

SPEAKER_01 8:21

Yeah, what's the sound like? Let's hear it.

SPEAKER_05 8:22

I think it's in A minor, so it's kind of like a little bit of a, you know, uh so it's kind of that kind of a sound, you know, but and then when you have the the the Leslie on, that's where you get your vibrato, but if you pull it off, it gets really smooth. And that can be beautiful for an organ, especially when you like want to come up with this very church, right? But then when it starts getting greasy, and you can think of we Reese Wynans and you know, Stevie Ray Vaughan, you can think of all I mean, there's so many great Robert Cray always has, you know, uh B3 in the band, you know, Derek Trucks, you know, Almond Brothers. Marcus King. Again, we're aware of the canon. So um, but yeah, I think I think when you listen to uh Fly Like an Eagle, Unreal. Dude, it's amazing. And it's very little. Yeah, right. That's a great one. And there's also synth in there, too. Oh yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 9:20

And a cool guitar part. Like, it's a great tune. It's just a great track, all you got. It's a great tune.

SPEAKER_05 9:24

Okay, so yeah, so B3.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 9:26

That's where all that stuff comes from. But there's an interesting parallel between what happens from there and when we get into the modular synthesizers that didn't have keyboards, that were just these boxes that had lots of knobs and switches on them, and you're trying to make music in electronic purely an electronic medium. Which is the most interesting thing, I think, about synthesizers in that sense, is that they are electric in nature. It's their native tongue. Electricity is their native tongue.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

Right. So when you had these uh these modular synth, these boxes, right, and you were doing different patches, and we were in the infancy of multi-track recording, like what little with Les Paul. Uh now for the modulars, uh, since they didn't have like a keyboard to control them or to like create a sequence, how would they uh get each tone to modify and change in a particular sequence?

SPEAKER_05 10:18

Okay, so that's a very fascinating thing as well, because it started to come from multi-track tape recording, right? Which was sort of the Les Paul breakthrough, the father of multi-track recording and and developing um that technology. But recording onto tape. What they started to figure out very, very quickly is that when you have a uh an there's there's a couple of things that generate noise. Because you might go, well, how do these how do these little metal boxes generate a a pitch, you know, like a like what is that? You know, how does that how does that actually happen in a box? Well, what is it happens is that there's an oscillator in there that is an electrically controlled, it's voltage controlled, a voltage-controlled oscillator, VCO. We won't go down to too much in the rabbit hole of like uh what synthesis is in that sense, but you have a V voltage-controlled oscillator, then you have a voltage-controlled filter, and a voltage-controlled amplifier. And the mixture of those uh can give you very complex things when you extrapolate that onto a a concept that we've talked about before, which is an envelope, ADSR, attack, decay, sustain, and release.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

We're gonna talk about that in a little bit. I was I kind of wanted to talk about sequencing. I know that Raymond Scott was a big like he was like one of the guys that was building his own sequencers. And I know that he's such an important figure in this world that I I wanted to kind of tee you up to talk about him. I I listened to, you know, at your recommendation, I went back and listened to some of his some of his uh I call it discography, but this is before disc. Um and a lot of it I I think of Looney Tunes, the music behind that. I associate it with Golden Books, where you would listen to the vinyl and listen to the story. Yeah I would assume uh associate it with Disney, uh I would associate it with commercials. So Raymond Scott, big figure in this thing, so why don't you give us a little bit about it?

SPEAKER_05 12:06

Great composer, great pianist, great player, uh was really into uh very experimental music from his whole career. And so even though he was doing these very successful TV shows like It's Your Hit Parade in the 50s and so on and so forth, uh he had his own little band in his home, he would do he even conducted his own orchestra on television. Uh but he started to get into electronic music and really started to take this into different areas and didn't really tell anybody for a long time. He was just developing this on his own. So um but Raymond Scott, yeah, if you think of Powerhouse, that's the his classic track. That would be like his Purple Haze if he was Hendrix, uh or his Sweet Home Alabama if he was Leonard Skinner. Um that kind of stuff, right? So that's the one to check out. It's been in uh thousands of uh cartoons.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

Yeah, I I didn't know it existed until you showed it to me. Yeah. And then I listened and I'm like, I've heard this a thousand times around the phone.

SPEAKER_05 13:03

Very complex music. I mean, it's very complex, it's very hard to play. And uh the musicians are killer musicians, and they could pull this off. They were just and he would write it and they would rehearse it, and bam, they had to go and record it. I mean, it was a very fascinating guy. But uh he also transitioned out of that and then really went into electronica and this he's really the proto electronic artist. I mean, this is way before craft work, this is way before, you know, Tangerine Dream, this is way before Vangelis, you know, all of these other like, you know, big icons for using synths. He was doing it but modular in a way and running sequencers. And um he came up with some great great music. The ones to check out if you guys are very interested in this, and we have it on our playlist as well, which by the way, Patrick and I have have taken a lot of time to create a gargantuan playlist for this episode.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

Yeah, it'll be in the show notes.

SPEAKER_05 13:56

Yeah, and and and you'll get a real deep familiarity of all of the artists and these particular genres that we're talking about. But uh but yeah, that's the way that uh all this stuff really starts working out for the best with Raymond Scott.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

And you know, an interesting thing about him, and you mentioned this, and I've been kind of ruminating on it, uh, is that not only did he influence all of these electronic artists and all of like the way that uh the art form developed, but he was also very much the precursor to Frank Zappa. And it registered with me when I'm thinking about the music that Frank Zappa came out with, like apostrophe, overnight sensation, Joe's garage. That stuff is very reminiscent of his style of music. And it's very uh playful. It's quirky as well. Yeah, quirky. It it's not and Frank Zappa is such a different different animal that he does really it is really similar. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_05 14:46

Well, and Zappa also, back in his early days, was doing commercials and jingles and stuff, and that's where that's what Raymond was doing as well. He was doing stuff for Sprite and for you know detergents and Wrigley's Gum. Wrigley's gum. Yeah, listen to that one.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

That'll be on the that'll be on the playlist.

SPEAKER_05 15:02

Yeah, talk about how to get canceled. But like, but but you know, there's all that kind of stuff. And then uh but the albums that I was gonna reference specifically were uh Soothing Sounds for Babies. Now that didn't that for baby, but that didn't come out until the early 60s. But that is like proto techno, you know, pre-craft work, all that kind of stuff. I mean, and and you know, a lot of folks will in that genre will say, yeah, Raymond Scott.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

Yeah, and that was in Dr. Spock's book, too. Was it that had Raymond Scott, soothing sound for baby, like they talked about recommending it to play for your baby to go to sleep.

SPEAKER_05 15:36

I wouldn't. It's creepy as hell. It's kind of some of them are really fun and delightful, but some of them are just like it's 17 minutes of the same loop with a different filter on it, and it's like, no, I can't do it. I mean, you'd have to be chemically altered to uh appreciate that sort of it's very like mini rays clockwork orange, you know.

SPEAKER_01 15:54

Yeah, oh yeah.

SPEAKER_05 15:55

Yeah, but it's cool. I mean, so if we're gonna approximate it, it would be something like this, you know, like kind of the kind of this sound. Right, very periodic. Cool. But what are you gonna do with that? You know? Now that would be a tape loop, and then you'd make another tape loop and add some other new texture on top of it, and that's how you make this early forms of electronic music, right? And it's coming from uh a lot of avant-garde composers, you know, uh going all the way back to Edgar Varez and and uh and many other avant-garde composers back from you know from the this time, same time period. Something was in the air.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

And then so and then the bookload, like you what you were just representing here, was a really old synth that from the 60s, but it wasn't and it was modular, but they used punch guards to control the tonality of it, right?

SPEAKER_05 16:47

Uh the bouquet was a little bit different. It wasn't so much punch cards as it was patch. It was patch. What was the punch guard one? The punch card was the ENIAC, which was in the Columbia Princeton school. That was the RCA. The great RCA.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

So what a cool just to think about you building a sequence on a on a punch guard. Yeah. And then you feed it into the computer. Like feed like a scantron.

SPEAKER_05 17:08

And then you go home for the night. Right. You come back. And then you come back the next day and come back the next day to see if you fucked up or not.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

But it's great. It's in the you got the dangling chads that can screw up anything, you know?

SPEAKER_05 17:17

It's right.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 17:18

Exactly right. So yeah, so you had you had the early forms of the bleeps and bloops for folks that aren't really into this type of thing. Um yeah, that's a good way of characterizing it. It was it's sort of non-personal, but it was also new in a way that you could make it personal. But when it was that new, people were having a hard time with it. So that's where we left with this transition between making music in an acoustic way and then making music that's really stemming from electricity. And that trend carries us through into the 60s when we start getting into Bob Moog, who knew Raymond Scott, by the way, and um and even though Scott was a little bit older, but they were contemporaries and they sort of were aware and were trying to do some creative work and use each other as sounding boards. Moog comes onto the picture, Bob Moog, uh, and by the way. Bob Moog? Yeah. Say it right. It's like that moment in you know life where Brian's like, no, no, Brian. You know. Brian? Strike him some joy, and very roughly. You know? And throw him to the floor, sir. What? Throw him to the floor, sir. No, yes, throw him to the floor. You know, yeah, that. So um, but like it's moog. It's it's it's moog.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

It's moog.

SPEAKER_05 18:32

It's moog. It's a long O, but Bob said it himself. So we're we're not making this up. You know, it's not tomato tomato. He's pronounced his name moog. I respect that. I'm gonna do the same. But they do confuse the waters with Yeah, mooger Fuger. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

When it's actually is the moogerfuger. It's not the Moger Fogger.

SPEAKER_05 18:49

Everybody says moogarfog. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

Created their own language.

SPEAKER_05 18:54

What a crazy world we live in. You know what I mean? That's why AI will never blend. Yeah. Because we're too fucked up. We have so many errors that it just can't handle it.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

You know? So uh Raymond Scott and Bob Moog being contemporaries, we the Bob Moog starts working on these modular synthesizers.

SPEAKER_05 19:13

He develops the modular synthesizers on his own. So did so did Scott, but uh but Moog really, really was able to get a huge purchase point. And he became the modular synth maker. Now that was essentially on an East Coast phenomenon. On the West Coast, you had Buchla and who was doing Don Bukla, who was doing his thing as well. Um both were were hampered by the fact that they were incredibly expensive. So the only people that had these synths back in the day were universities that were doing electronic music and you know it was a very cutting-edge avant-garde kind of thing. Uh and then record labels and film companies that were trying to capture more advertising and film scoring and so on and so forth back in that time period. They were really the only ones that could afford this. And maybe some you know, Arteurs that were very wealthy.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

Right. So that's it. So before Moog was able to shrink it down and make it accessible to people, there was the Mellotron. Yes. And that was more of a tape-driven Oh fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. So and I love the Mellotron. It's still used today. At least virtual versions are used today in a lot of ways in a lot of different recorded music.

SPEAKER_05 20:24

Yeah. I I I would I would definitely say you don't fellas and ladies, you don't want to buy a a vintage Mellotron unless you know how to upkeep it. Well, it's truly imagine this for a second. We all remember like tape players, like cassette tape, you know, um, or even real-to-reel players. Imagine under every now imagine a keyboard, a piano keyboard. Under every note, there is a a cass a recorder, a cassette there that has a tape loop. Under every key.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Under every key.

SPEAKER_05 20:55

And that's what it was. It was a huge bank of tape, and you literally had to load it in and stretch it across and essentially apply tension to it so that way when you press down, it would literally play this loop of a tape, and then as soon as you took your finger off the key, it would stop.

SPEAKER_04 21:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 21:08

It it it it honestly, it is the first sampler. Yeah. Right? Yeah. It's an it is a sampler. Yeah. Because it's recorded loops, it's just not digital. Dig that, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:18

Yeah, that's wild.

SPEAKER_05 21:19

What NPC 60? What? No, no, it's not happening, guys. Uh, that is the Mellotron. So the Mellotron.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

This was early. This is like the six early 60s. Yes. Yeah, the Mark I.

SPEAKER_05 21:29

And the Mark I is the most famous. If we pull up like a Mellotron, you know, like here's the classic Mellotron track. It's so breathy. Yeah, because it's a flute. It's a sampled flute player that each one of those notes that I played uh was a loop, a tape loop of a flute.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

What what kind of preparation goes into something like that for recording? Strawberry Fields forever. Like so they each tape was each note that that flautist.

SPEAKER_05 22:09

That's right. Yeah, they literally had to go play A, stop, okay, play B flat, stop. Okay. That was the sampling process.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

And then they'd have to thread that into each key.

SPEAKER_05 22:23

Yeah. Corresponding on the key. Yeah. And each one of those keys had to have its its own tape transport mechanism, its own playback mechanism, its own motors. Jesus. Right. It's worth it, man. Highly impractical, but very, very cool.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 22:37

So of course, the all of the tapes have been sampled. You know, like all the original tapes. There was a Chamberlain that came before that. But they've all been sampled, so I would encourage you to buy a software version or the new ones that are made, because Melatron is back in business, but there's no tape. It's digital samples, but the the mechanism, like the way the keyboard feels, they've recreated the cabinet perfectly. Cool. It feels exactly like an original Mellatron. It's fantastic. So for me, that's worth buying.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

And you can get them from Greg Glazer at the Custom House.

SPEAKER_05 23:11

Look you can. That's right. You can. Not a sponsor getting.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

Not a sponsor. Greg.

SPEAKER_05 23:17

So but um Yeah, so that's a that but see, that's the parallel diverging lines between making music electronically and then making music in an analog way, but in a totally new way. Like this is a sampler. Yeah. So on the synth side, Mogue is still doing these crazy modular things. And kind of by the late 60s, he the companies peaked. They were in some financial difficulty. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 23:41

It was hard to sell. I mean, they were selling theremin kits for a long time as like the primary source. And then they start building these modular synths that started four grand. I mean, you can get a moogue now for four grand. That's gut keys and it's uh a full on thing, but uh even just one module back then was four thousand dollars. I mean yeah four grand in nineteen seventy was what? I mean a Cadillac?

SPEAKER_05 24:03

Easily probably some more than some people made in a year.

SPEAKER_01 24:09

Right. Um they had to get more practical. They had to figure out at that point how do you get more practical and how do you make an ease of control? And I think they look at the Mellotron and they look at all these things and they're like, okay, well maybe if we use the typical clavile layout like a piano to control every the the pitches, yeah. Maybe it would we could make it into a smaller box and what happens.

SPEAKER_05 24:30

I I think you're right. I think I it's a good a good rational way of thinking. I don't know if they saw a Mellotron and they were able to sort of do that.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

Well, I probably saw the the landscape of people using it.

SPEAKER_05 24:41

I think that they saw uh they were certainly aware that they were that these were being used to make music, but there was a control issue in the sense of being able to determine pitch and change pitch rapidly. Because to change pitch rapidly on a modular synth, you gotta go over to it and like, you know, change the oscillator value, right? And sometimes it's not exact and so on and so forth. So basically, uh because of the d financial straights, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. So here they are, we gotta make a paycheck. How are we gonna keep the company afloat? Hemsath was acutely aware of this and was starting to develop a prototype of a moogue synthesizer that would become to be known as the mini moog. But Bob Moog himself was not into it. He was like, no, we're gonna keep foraging on with you know whatever that they thought they they had a tailwind on. But clearly there was some financial matters. So um Deutsch uh and whose last name is Deutsch and uh and Moog basically came up with this, they're the ones that are accredited with essentially attaching a piano keyboard to a modular synth.

SPEAKER_01 25:46

Right.

SPEAKER_05 25:46

Right?

SPEAKER_01 25:47

Made it portable.

SPEAKER_05 25:48

And and it it did make it portable. It had a it had a reduced amount of keys on it. It wasn't a full 88 key. And what was the net result of that was is that the keyboard acted as a voltage uh controlled um mechanism. So in other words, when you hit C, it it would basically change the oscillation rate of an oscillator to uh correspond with the real pitch C. Now these early oscillators didn't have a very good tuning, they wouldn't stay stable for very long, they would drift. But that was the the main breakthrough between uh going from modular to a keyboard-based synthesizer that you could control by actually hitting piano keys.

SPEAKER_01 26:31

So in 1970, the model D drops. Yes. And that becomes changes the world. Takes them out of financial hardship, I'm sure. Uh cuz because that really got a lot of traction very, very quickly.

SPEAKER_05 26:42

Yeah, yeah. The one thing that he didn't patent is this this idea. If he would have patented the pitch wheel, he would have been he would have been a billionaire by today's standards.

SPEAKER_01 26:53

Sure.

SPEAKER_05 26:54

But he didn't.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

He didn't, but he created it.

SPEAKER_05 26:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

But he didn't patent it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 26:57

Who didn't? I don't know. I don't know who patented it.

SPEAKER_01 27:00

General Electric, probably.

SPEAKER_05 27:02

Yeah. I mean, you know, I don't know. If Edison was alive, we'd go Edison. Right, right. He was notorious.

SPEAKER_04 27:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 27:08

But uh yeah, so I think that that's the cool part about the Model D. The Model D was a an explosion of possibilities, and it's probably the most iconic synth of the century.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

Yeah, I mean, uh it probably was on more recordings than any other synthesizer, um, especially in that time. And when we're talking about the late 60s through the early 70s, there was just this boom of synthesizer creativity because it had gotten figured out, it seemed like. Yes. And then like, so the the ARP 2600 came right after it, and in between those two, you see some really staggering recordings.

unknown 27:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

So with the Model D, what are some what are some of the ones that we marked down for for today?

SPEAKER_05 27:52

Uh I mean, there's so many on the Model D because it's still being used today. You know, I still use it. Um but here's the one thing that we should mention, and and there's a big key point, which is synthesizers at this time were not polyphonic. Meaning that you couldn't play more than one note at a time.

SPEAKER_01 28:10

Right.

SPEAKER_05 28:10

They were monophonic, one note at a time, that's it. Well, the model D is a monosynth. Right? That's it. So you can't play two notes at a time. You can, when you do a certain trick, you can get one stable pitch and then another pitch. But uh you can't actually play like a chord, a triad. There's that's out of the question. That's polyphony. So these are monosynths. What the Model D excels at still to this day is bass and also lead lines. Right? So some classic ones on that would be borderline, you know, from Madonna. Okay, so um Madonna's borderline, here's sort of like the lead that would take place, right? It's in the key D, but it goes. That's a base uh that's a moog as well.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

Just a classic line.

SPEAKER_05 29:12

Yeah, exactly. Right? So that's that's more of a of a really cool way of doing it, but you know, when you when you pull it up several octaves, you kind of get into Snoop Dogg and Dre like ain't nothing but a G thing. Let me pull my sustain level up. So you get into this kind of a stuff.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

Yeah, like that that uh West Coast Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 29:42

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:42

You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_05 29:43

That's that sort of sound.

SPEAKER_04 29:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 29:52

That kind of stuff, right? Yeah, very cool. Yeah. So those are the kind of things that the MOG Model D really, uh or the mini Mogue really start to excel at.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

And then that was also Tom Sawyer, right? Yeah, the beginning of Tom Sawyer? Yeah. It's actually the rush moog right here.

SPEAKER_05 30:06

Um, I think so. Yeah, give me a second, I'll pull up that patch. By the way, we'll we'll speed do this so you can just see that there's no presets on these early synthesizers.

SPEAKER_01 30:16

No, you gotta dial it in.

SPEAKER_05 30:17

You've got to dial in every s every knob, every switch. So if you had to like a switch in between, you gotta be on. Yeah, that's crazy. There's a couple of cool shortcuts you can do, but for the most part, yeah, you you've got to have the time between the songs to get your settings done. And by the way, you know, this is my patchbook of set of patches that I've made that I think resemble these classics.

SPEAKER_01 30:37

Very cool. Yeah, I saw that earlier.

SPEAKER_05 30:39

And this is it, you know, and this is how people would trade stuff back in the day, like in the 70s uh and the 80s, if you had a Model D, you would go, hey man, what's your patch for this cool tone or whatever? And you go, Oh, it's this. And you would literally fax or photocopy your book, and people could actually get your patches. Oh my god. I know, right?

SPEAKER_01 30:55

That's really cool. It's so badass.

SPEAKER_05 31:09

Right? Those are just you know some easy ways to be able to play these types of of keyboard. But that's a lead, those are two lead lines.

SPEAKER_04 31:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 31:16

You know, but the bass lines are are really, I think, where this this synth really excels into into that those upper categories. The bottom or the top?

SPEAKER_01 31:24

Sure. Nothing in between.

SPEAKER_05 31:26

Not on this one.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

No chords, right? No chords on this.

SPEAKER_05 31:29

Yeah, monophonic. Yep.

SPEAKER_04 31:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 31:31

Yeah, it's it's a monophonic synth, so you gotta make your choices wisely. So another great moog, mini moog, bass line. Holiday, right? Listen to this. I always want to hear um time after time from Cindy Lark. Yeah, it's it's very similar, but little lead. Right? Which could be an Oberheim.

SPEAKER_01 31:53

It could be, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 31:54

Or a profit. But here's that bass. Listen to it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

It really made this song move hard.

SPEAKER_05 32:02

Right? Any of the bass lines on Thriller, Michael Jackson, most of them were on a moog.

SPEAKER_01 32:07

Yeah, very cool. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 32:09

Okay. Uh, and then of course, one of my favorites is uh Love is Alive from Gary Wright.

SPEAKER_01 32:15

Oh yeah, you turned me on to this song. I hadn't actually heard this song before, I don't think. I might have, but I don't, it was didn't remember it.

SPEAKER_05 32:22

Yeah, right. And it's such a great sleeper hit. It's there's so many cool things in this tune. It starts with a moog bass, but in a solo mode. It's like they basically sent, oh, uh, who wants to do the fill for the song? Just kick it off, and the bass player or the keyboard player went, I do.

SPEAKER_01 32:37

It's crazy.

unknown 32:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:39

This is a very big rec. Dreamweaver. It's a huge, huge.

SPEAKER_05 32:42

Yeah, Dreamweaver is the classic 70s space out music. But listen. But it opens with this. It opens with this first track on the record, and he sings his butt off, and it's there's a really cool odd meter in the bridge and the outro. It's really great, but check it out. Here we go. This is the bass. That's a Model D.

unknown 32:59

Doom doom do doom.

SPEAKER_01 33:03

It's so good. When you had an ISO and you were playing it on the mug earlier, it's just so cool.

SPEAKER_05 33:11

And then, of course. Where has the song been on my on the snare? Yeah. Big Dark.

SPEAKER_01 33:26

And he just he's just wailing it. Wailing it. Yeah. So good. So the Model D was out, the ARP 2600 came out. So the Model D was out, the ARP 2600 came out.

SPEAKER_05 33:40

ARP 2600. ARP 2600. Such a cool thing. Not used on really any hit records because it was so out there.

SPEAKER_01 33:48

Trevor Burrus We say that, but I seen Radiohead, Chris Greenwood, like tinkering around with an ARP 2600. I'm sure it's made it to some of the Radiohead records.

SPEAKER_05 33:57

I'm sure it has. And it's it's just such an anomaly, because you know what I mean? It's coming out of that modular mindset. But the main thing that I think of is Ben Burt. Oh R2D2. That fully genius that he was.

SPEAKER_01 34:13

And Foley's such an interesting thing because I think that they use, even though it's practical a lot of ways, it's like use a trash can and a piece of foil to make a thunderstorm. Right. But they used a lot of synths in that whole technology.

SPEAKER_05 34:27

All of the R2D2 noises, almost all of them, was on a ARP. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:32

And there was a there was a vocoder for Anthony Daniels that they used. That's right. And there was a there was like a bunch of electronics. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_05 34:39

Amazing amount of electronics. And then of course the analog cool stuff like the rebreather from you know a scuba gear for Darth Vader's voice, you know, just breathing in and out, in and out.

SPEAKER_01 34:48

You know, we could uh I'd love to do an episode on just on Star Wars in general, but I'll tell you I just love there's such a dynamic range in not just the music, but the way that it was produced. You have the practicality of the old orchestra, the old instruments. These are tried and true, hundreds of years old, some of them.

SPEAKER_04 35:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

And then you have the very, very futuristic and new things that were happening, all combined. Just such a cool thing. And it mirrored the film. The film was very aged space. Yeah. You know, the old it's an old opera in a new place. It's just, I don't know. It just really grabs me some. And I think about it often because it is one of my favorite series of IP ever.

SPEAKER_05 35:30

Mine too, yeah. And it's it's all Joseph Campbell, you know, Hero of a Thousand Faces, right? It's those classic archetypes that all world religions do, which is the hero's journey. Yeah. Right? And the sense of self-discovery and where you fit into the larger fabric of your being. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 35:46

And it and they he made it such a cool, especially even with the prequels, to really refined the story arc of Anakin Skywalker, of the hero's journey, where he starts in this innocence, gets overtaken by this dark, and in the end he repents and he resolves. Right.

SPEAKER_05 36:03

You know, just such a cool All coming from unresolved mommy issues. I'm serious. You know, he loses his mom earlier. So it's easy to be manipulated from the Trevor Burrus. Anyway, we're gonna get into Star Wars, but but you know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_01 36:16

And then mirrored in Luke losing his aunt and uncle. That's right. Likely to a uh a pulse grenade from a bounty hunter named Boba Fett. That's right.

SPEAKER_05 36:27

The ARP uh was most notably through the use of Ben Burt, which was R2D2. Yes. Right. Cool. Yeah. So that way gives the kind of sounds of Star Wars stuff like this. Right? That's all like an ARP, you know, synth. So uh and then people started to use the ARP Odyssey for basically the same kind of stuff that they used in Mogue Model D's for, which you could do bass lines and you know other people.

SPEAKER_01 36:51

Also a monophonic. So is the ARP 2600 a monophonic synth similar to the Model D?

SPEAKER_05 36:57

Yeah, the 2600 is monophonic, but the ARP Odyssey is duophonic, meaning you could play two notes, only two notes, that's it.

SPEAKER_01 37:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_05 37:04

Um but uh but that offered a little more flexibility. Okay. So uh so people started to use both.

SPEAKER_01 37:10

So they could play chopsticks.

SPEAKER_05 37:12

They could play chopsticks. Yeah. Got it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:14

Just making sure because that's a really, really important to me.

SPEAKER_05 37:18

I mean it's an underrated song.

SPEAKER_01 37:21

So what are some famous tracks that the that the ARP was used on, either the Odyssey or the 2600, so we can get a good idea of what it sounded like.

SPEAKER_05 37:29

Trevor Burrus, Jr. The the best example would probably be the beginning to the whose Who Are You? Oh that's an ARP.

SPEAKER_01 37:35

Do we have that? Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 37:39

Yeah. Yeah. Right? That's the ARP. Right. Really. But yeah, it's using it as a bass instrument.

SPEAKER_01 37:49

Right.

SPEAKER_05 37:49

You know what I mean? And that's a great kind of a sound. Yeah. That really splatty bass.

SPEAKER_01 37:54

It was really that was a really well recorded track as well. Yeah. It was just such a cool. And that was that led into like their greatest hits record, which is really funny because they had a greatest hits record after being around for like 15 years or 20 years or something like that. And it came out so long ago. And you think about the who, it's like it was that was 30 years ago their greatest hits came out.

SPEAKER_05 38:11

Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_01 38:12

Okay, so we've gotten through the 60s, we've gotten through the early 70s. Yeah. So before we move on to like some more complicated synthesizers that we start to see, we should probably talk about a little bit about how the synth works.

SPEAKER_05 38:26

Yeah, okay. Fair question uh and good point. So uh the way that synthesizers work is there's basically uh a uh three main ways. So there's four types of synthesis. There are there's additive synthesis, subtractive synthesis, granular synthesis, and fM synthesis. Now, we don't need to know what all any of those are in any great detail. Just know this all the synthesizers that we've talked about so far all use one type of synthesis in common, and that is subtractive synthesis. Meaning that it has a very complex waveform that it starts with, and then you, by choosing a wave shape, you systematically suck out overtones and it starts to change the flavor. Let me give you an example. I'm only gonna use the minimok here, we're only gonna use one oscillator. So you're just gonna hear something that's gonna sound very basic, almost like a early Nintendo video game. Right? That kind of stuff, right? Okay, so um, so as you start to play that, if I just change the waveform, and what the waveform that was a sort of a triangle wave, which is um basically has odd order harmonics to it. But listen to how loud some of the others get. Here's a square wave. Here's this here's for comparison. That was the triangle wave, right? And then here's a sawtooth wave. So you can hear how they are very different.

SPEAKER_01 39:53

And now visually they're exactly how they sound when you describe them. Yeah. A triangle wave. Yeah, it looks like a triangle up and down. Yeah, it does.

SPEAKER_05 40:00

Yeah, the great yeah, the graphics on here are Sawtooth. Right. Um now on here you have different uh abilities to do different types of s of square waves, which are basically called pulse waves. But basically what you have is you have sine waves, triangle waves, sawtooth waves, and then square waves. Those are the main four. There are hybrids, but uh essentially those are the big four. And on most of these synthesizers back in then, even the modular ones, you could choose between what your your starting sort of tone was going to be. So, what do you need to put those in motion so that we can actually hear them? You need an oscillator and a voltage-controlled oscillator. So what's cool is you can take one oscillator, okay, which is basically think of it as something that makes noise. Okay. It's just it's a piece of an electricity that's making noise. Well, how do you get it? Well, if you don't, if you're not able to control the voltage on the oscillator and strip things out, like even in odd-order harmonics that we talked about with these different waveforms, then you end up getting noise like this, right? Like a sounds like static to our ear, right? It's just static. So by us stripping out, that's uh that's every harmonic through every frequency spectrum. So if we start to strip things out, then we can re deduce it to something as simple as that. So we have three basic areas. We have a voltage-controlled oscillator, that's what makes the noise, and then we have it being fed into some type of amplifier that will increase the signal. So it's a voltage-controlled amplifier, a VCA. And then we may have something like a VCF, which is voltage controlled filter. So the voltage-controlled filter is essentially like your old tone knob on your car stereo or your home stereo or whatever, you know, trouble bass mid. We can do the same thing with this. If I adjust my cutoff frequency, you can hear I can make it sound very bright and very dull. Right? Somewhere it almost goes away. So that's sort of like a cutoff frequency, and that's where we start to start shaping it. All right. Without getting in the weeds, any more than that, and by the way, ladies and gentlemen, that's all you need to know. There will be no math in this episode. If we take all those three elements, uh an oscillator, an amplifier, and a filter, and we add in other cool things like low frequency oscillators that we don't actually hear, but we use it as a controlling mechanism to adjust stuff, we start getting things like envelopes, attack, decay, sustain, and release. And we've talked about this in the previous episode. Um But essentially that's what makes the synthesizer start to come alive. Because if you just have a dry tone like this, this is boring. There's not much there.

SPEAKER_01 42:34

Right.

SPEAKER_05 42:34

You know what I mean? So but once you start adding other control elements onto the top of it, uh it starts to sound magical. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 42:43

Right. And as you add more energy and more power, more voltage behind different filters, you get more intense changes in the shaping. Yeah. Right. And I think that's really what's interesting about how they were progressing as you got into the later 70s, transistors got more efficient. You were able to push power in different ways. So like these, you were able to build a greater capacity on these synthesizers, and then you're you're able to do all kinds of incredible sounds. And when the late 70s start to hit, and we start getting the CS80 from Yamaha comes out, which becomes you know one of a very popular synth, especially in modern pop music that was coming out at that time. Uh and I think when I hear bands like Toto and hear these really unbelievable synth tones, I really wanted to know what it was. And like Africa, Rosanna, big songs, all done on the CS80. Yeah. Um great crazy synth solo.

SPEAKER_05 43:38

Yeah, let's listen to that in Rosanna. Here it is, cued up. Yes, it's such a okay. Get ready. Hold on to your socks and such a cool tune. Yes. It's so big. Nice octave duplication of that riff. Nice layer. Then this the nice portamento beds. This is a very guitarist solo.

unknown 44:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 44:13

You know what I mean? You could play all this on a guitar and it would sound great. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's such a cool thing. It's not a very keyboard-esque piano player solo. This is a musical kind of a solo. Not that guitar players are the standard of musicianship, but that's like one that would but that's one that would translate really easily.

SPEAKER_01 44:30

Yeah, totally. Like uh like a Jordan Rudis dream theater solo, right? It's the same type of thing. Or the guy from Marillion we were looking at that song yesterday. Yeah. With that just ripping keyboard. So it could have been a guitar solo.

SPEAKER_05 44:42

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 44:43

And then I love when Dream Theater does, where like Petrucci and Rudis, well, they'll they'll they'll harmonize with each other. Well, Petrucci will play a solo and Jordan Rudis will harmonize over it. It's just like that's dope.

SPEAKER_05 44:53

Yeah. Uh the other one, Africa. So let's get there because we we know what that sounds like. Right. So we get that.

SPEAKER_01 44:59

Of course it starts with the Serengeti.

SPEAKER_05 45:01

Right. But the the lyrics a little questionable, but but they know that, do they? They did when they wrote it when they were like 19. Something. Yeah, I mean, it was ridiculous. This, yeah. So come on, dude. You can't get that. That's it has just the right amount of filter sweep that is so characteristic of a CS80.

SPEAKER_01 45:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 45:21

And it's layered, but it's it's beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 45:24

But it it definitely like, I mean, that's one of the defining parts of the song, is just I hear the job.

SPEAKER_05 45:30

I can't get I can't get the profits and the Oberheims to make that exact sound.

SPEAKER_01 45:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 45:34

And not not at my level of ignorance.

SPEAKER_01 45:37

I can't do it. They need a vintage CS80.

SPEAKER_05 45:39

Right.

SPEAKER_01 45:40

Probably have.

SPEAKER_05 45:40

Yeah, that's right. That's what you need. The CS80 was Yamaha's way of saying we're serious about synthesizers.

SPEAKER_01 45:46

And it was really Japan's first big entry into the like really big commercial entry into the space.

SPEAKER_05 45:53

Yeah, it was. And boy, what a what a massive entry it was. It was a lost leader. They knew that they were never going to make money off the CS80. If you've ever looked inside it, it's completely amazing. But there's just looms and looms and looms of cables, all hand soldered, the whole thing, and that they had a very crude way of saving presets, which was underneath a hidden compartment on the left. You'd lift it up and you would adjust. It looked like just graphic EQ sliders. Oh, that's cool though. Yeah. You'd do that, and then it'd be like, well, that's my preset one. And then you'd do a whole nother little, it's almost like you were EQing things. Yeah. You would do that, and that would be your second preset. You could have a limited number there. The CS80 is probably one of my holy grail synths, you know, if I could afford one, but they're, you know, anywhere from 250 to 500 grand now.

SPEAKER_01 46:38

But you could get the sounds for sure. Why don't we dial it in? Because I want to hear the Blade Runner track.

unknown 46:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:43

Or I want to hear the Blade Runner sounds. That was like such a cool example of the CS80 in action. Two.

SPEAKER_05 47:06

Right? I mean, that's just like w one version of a CS80 sound. But to me, the greatest, the the the greatest example of a CS80, and my favorite example of a CS80 is obviously the original score to Blade Runner.

SPEAKER_01 47:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 47:20

You know, that's that.

SPEAKER_01 47:22

Very memorable score. It's just what a mood. You know.

SPEAKER_05 47:25

The whole, yeah, it's so much this dystopian atmosphere, but the CS80 to me is that. Stevie Wonder used to tour with three of them on the road. These things are heavy, they weigh like 250.

SPEAKER_01 47:36

Now why would you have three? Is it so you could have different pre like a set preset already, so you can just change keyboards? Makes it simple for a blind guy, I'd imagine.

SPEAKER_05 47:42

Yep. And uh and uh well, if anything else, for redundancy, because you don't know how long they were gonna last. These things were built like tanks and they weighed as much as the tank, so that's the problem, is that getting it. Um I don't recommend buying a vintage one, folks, just because unless you're uh really good with soldering iron and you know what these boards are, you don't know how long this this this technology is gonna last. That's the problem with with synths in general.

SPEAKER_01 48:06

Well they were all handmade and they were it was kind of inefficient, you know?

SPEAKER_05 48:10

Aaron Ross Powell Well, and just a lot of room for entropy, but there was also a huge great quality control back in those days. Wow. You know, which you don't get right now because it's not cost-efficient. It wasn't even cost-efficient for them back then. Let me just play a little bit of the Blade Runner theme.

SPEAKER_04 48:24

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 48:25

So these clouds and this synth line that will come in to play, this is all CS80 kind of beautiful stuff here. Cool thing about CS80, it had a ribbon controller on it, unlike any other. There was no center pitch, so you didn't quite know where you're gonna get it. And it was the first synth that actually started to have aftertouch. So that if you press down on the key past where it would normally stop, you could open up the filter and actually get it to respond almost like a guitar player would use a wa pedal.

SPEAKER_01 48:58

That's very that creates an amount of expression that yeah, very cool.

SPEAKER_05 49:03

This is just gorgeous, you know.

SPEAKER_01 49:05

Yeah, right?

SPEAKER_05 49:05

Blade Runner blues.

SPEAKER_01 49:07

And it puts you right in it, right in the theme and the mood of the movie, right?

SPEAKER_05 49:11

Oh, it's so good. I can just I know exactly what scene I'm looking at.

SPEAKER_01 49:14

Yeah. That's incredible.

SPEAKER_05 49:16

So that's Blade Runner. Uh, and that's that that is a classic example for CSID.

SPEAKER_01 49:22

Wow.

SPEAKER_05 49:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:23

So what was next? What like after the CS80?

SPEAKER_05 49:26

The big one started to be uh the Prophet, the sequential circuits.

SPEAKER_01 49:30

And you hear that on I mean, so many recordings even now, Tame Impala and uh I mean, there's so I can't even I mean there's a the list goes on and on of how many great great recordings of that synth.

SPEAKER_05 49:42

Yeah, the Prophet 5 is the classic synth, especially for sequential circuits. That was as every bit as important as sort of like what the 808 drum machine was for Roland and their drum machine. There were other drum machines around, but that one, for whatever reason, everybody had to have. You know what I mean? And uh and so that was it. It was the Prophet 5. Profit 5's been on so many amazing recordings. I can't we cannot list them all. It's not possible.

SPEAKER_01 50:10

I'll put I'm gonna point out Pretty Hate Machine because 1989, I think it was like one of the best sounding records that was that was around at that point. Okay. Really cool stuff.

SPEAKER_05 50:24

Yeah, the the Prophet 5 is such an amazing thing. I I think of like it's really it could do a lot of different things, um, but it had presets that were very easy to recall. So at this point, we're getting into digital presets that moved in from an early chipset to basically the cur the CES chipsets, um, which was a that was called Curt Curtis, they were called Curtis chips. But this is all stemming from Palo Alto. This is the other kind of contingency that I think is kind of interesting, yeah, is is that Palo Alto, um not just Palo Alto, but what would be called Silicon Valley. So all of those mini cities that were s just south of San Francisco in that Bay Area, you had EMU, you had sequential circuits, you had um Oberheim, you had all of the great sort of synth makers were there because all of the great electronics were there, and that was stemming from all of these research facilities that was started by Stanford and UC Berkeley. And remember that these two universities were part of the original Manhattan project. So there was a huge emphasis on tech and development of tech and using integrated circuits, particularly as synthesizers maneuvered themselves away from using op amps and started to use integrated circuits that were basically silicone wafers with transistors on them. And then you had Moore's Law, which was you know the amount of transistors that would be able to stack on a single wafer of a of a silicone, you know, just sort of a transistor chip uh would double every single year. And now, you know, we're in you know, hundreds of millions and just like the tip of a pen. You know, it's just crazy our tech now. So all of this stuff was happening there, and everybody was able to collaborate and they all knew and they were just trying new parts and everything else. So uh this is where you know Yamaha enters into the market, they're trying to get into there. Mog is already, you know, sort of transitioned in a very healthy way. ARP has basically gone out of business uh because you know they just they couldn't keep up. Uh but sequential comes in and they come out with the profit five. And the profit five, out of the profit fives, uh the rev 3 and 3.3 is like the one that everybody likes because they updated the RAM and you could do 120 presets instead of 40. But there's a lot of folks that say uh that Rev 2 sounds better for them. But everybody from the cars to Nina, I mean, that's probably like my quintessential one would be uh listen to 99 Luft Balloons from Nina.

SPEAKER_04 52:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 52:57

And that's that's a profit. Yeah, you know, just like those big clouds, but also the cheesy little bass line, bam bad, bam, bam, which is my w I hate that part of the song.

SPEAKER_00 53:11

Thanks to fellas, the singer shall need finish by non-anon session of a lost.

SPEAKER_05 53:28

But the song wasn't long enough, and the keyboard player actually put that in.

SPEAKER_01 53:32

Wow, that's a cool story. I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_05 53:34

Yeah, but uh I love her singing and I love the atmosphere of that. That just calms me down. It's just it's such a beautiful song.

SPEAKER_01 53:41

And then we have uh Radiohead. Yes. Everything in its right place. Yeah, everything in its right place.

SPEAKER_05 53:46

Yeah, I'll pull that up. And so on and so forth. It's beautiful, you know. But you just heard me play it, but let's hear them play it, you know, so you can really hear it on a profit. Yes. Classic. Creamy. Yeah. And that little pop is that little articulation is from a filter that's being closed so quickly that it actually creates a pop.

SPEAKER_01 54:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 54:19

Because if you if you if you widened out that filter, it would go. It's actually being closed so quickly that it creates a pop.

SPEAKER_01 54:28

Yeah, that's so cool. Right? And it's like uh it's a texture. And I think a lot of I mean a lot of scents are known for doing that type of effect too, right? It's not just that one, but like just to close the filter really quickly to get the pop.

SPEAKER_05 54:39

Uh, another classic one, Phil Collins in the air tonight.

SPEAKER_01 54:43

What a mood is that song. I mean, the vibe on that song is so dark, right? Slow atmospheric. It's not like a catchy lead line or a bass line or anything like that.

SPEAKER_05 54:51

It's just like these gorgeous paths that just hover.

SPEAKER_01 54:54

Yeah, beautiful.

SPEAKER_05 54:54

I mean, like just getting into it a couple seconds into the tune. These kind of right? Yeah, just very easy. All right, it's just a minor six to a five, to a four, to a five, to back to one.

SPEAKER_01 55:11

Right? But and it builds so much tension, like as the song goes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 55:18

Well, and especially then you get the iconic, you know, SSL compressor being held down that really defined a drum sound. That big drum sound, that compressed gated drum sound.

SPEAKER_01 55:29

And it began in the song, just went goes from like a medium level, like volume level, even the drums come in and it just like just pops.

SPEAKER_05 55:36

It's massive, yeah. So classic profit example. So many moments we cannot talk about all of the ones that the prophet was on. But here's the cool thing if you had a prophet and you had a Model D or a you know a mini moogue, uh, you're set because you got the low end covered and the high end if you want those cool, you know, mogue kind of sounds, but then you had all of the sequential beautifulness and polyphonic that you could actually play chords into, and you could do lush pads, you could do sequences, you know, all kinds of just beautiful things that you could do with it. So you were kind of covered.

SPEAKER_01 56:11

Yeah, very cool. And they're still making them.

SPEAKER_05 56:13

Yeah, they are. Yeah, I have a Prophet Six, then which I love.

SPEAKER_01 56:17

Is there a big difference between the five? I mean, the five obviously was the classic, but the si what's the six.

SPEAKER_05 56:22

Five didn't have MIDI. Uh six has onboard effects and um and extended ranges. It also has aftertouch, um, which the five didn't have. It has step more stable oscillators.

SPEAKER_01 56:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 56:34

I'm a guitar player. What the hell do I know all this from?

SPEAKER_01 56:37

Well, it seems like you know a lot about it.

SPEAKER_05 56:39

I love it, but yeah, it's maddening sometimes, but uh, but I love the I love timbre. I love yeah, tone. So anyway, but yeah, the six is great. If I had to just take one and run out the door, like, okay, can I pretty much get through a synth gig? God forbid I got called for one. Um, I'd probably take the six.

SPEAKER_01 56:55

You sure you wouldn't try to take the mug? I suppose a tall order trying to get that out the no, the mug one weighs too much.

SPEAKER_05 57:01

And it's it's uh it they don't make them anymore.

SPEAKER_01 57:03

Right. Uh so next in the evolution, we're getting into the late 70s.

SPEAKER_05 57:09

Yep. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 57:10

And I mean Oberheim comes out with their OB series.

SPEAKER_05 57:13

Dude, the Oberheim, what a what a great thing. And Oberheim really kind of got started making sequencers because he was trying to update the sort of the what he saw as shortcomings with the old ARP 2600s and so on and so forth. So he started to get into the mix, but the Oberheim is a different beast. Tom Oberheim and Dave Smith, Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits, aka the prophet, uh they were lifetime, I mean, they were very good friends with each other, very close, even though they were theoretically competitors, you know. And there's a lot of tribute when you look at a prophet and you look at an Oberheim, they're laid out almost the same way. How awesome is that.

SPEAKER_01 58:02

That's so cool.

SPEAKER_05 58:03

That's the classic Oberheim comb filtering going on. Nothing sounds quite like that.

SPEAKER_01 58:09

That's crazy. Hit it again.

SPEAKER_05 58:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:17

I mean, it sounds like traveling through space.

SPEAKER_05 58:19

It's so good. I just remember when Tom Sawyer came out, I was like, I must own this record. There's there's some magic juju going on on that recording. It is they like channeled some celestial stuff on that. I mean, it's just such a haunting recording. Not the fucking remastered stuff that they keep putting out on the internet. What is up with that? Give me the original recording. The original recording is better. Same thing with Back in Black. I don't want to hear the remastered version. It was perfect to begin with.

SPEAKER_01 58:48

I don't need the special edition of Star Wars. Right. Take the monsters out. Greedo, he did not shoot first. Right.

SPEAKER_05 58:56

What's up with all the crazy, you know, extra animals in the Moss Isley spaceport and all the other stuff? Yeah, like just go back to the original, man. It was perfect the way it was. That's right. You know. Marketing departments.

SPEAKER_01 59:08

Uh you know, comps, dude. Yeah, you use comps. You gotta get over last year.

SPEAKER_05 59:13

That's right. That's exactly right. So, yeah, so Oberheim really comes onto the scene, um, you know, and they with the OBX, and it's just fantastic. Another classic would be jump from Van Halen.

SPEAKER_01 59:26

It's huge. Like most memorable synth line, you know. Yeah, right. And the solos grade and the whole thing.

SPEAKER_05 59:31

But yeah, let's listen to that just to kind of get into it. Right? Yeah. It's in the key of C. Four, four, five, five, one, four, four, and it's uh overarching like Tom Sawyer. Right, and then you get the to go underneath Michael Anthony's bass, right? Yeah, so you get this like l synth bass, it's a cool hybrid, right? It's a cool like he needed help. So well, the guy the rest of the apparently the rest of the guys in the band thought so, but I thought he was rock solid, man. Yeah. Dude, great singer. He was hitting all those high notes.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:11

I mean when they lost him, you had to cover for David Lee Roth quite a bit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:15

Well, yeah. Okay. Uh of course, the one of the classics is again uh Tears for Fears.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:24

Yep.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:25

And Everybody Wants to Rule the World.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:26

Whole the whole album is just so Immaculate. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:29

Great record, one of my favorite records, period. But check it out. So you still get the you still get this the wonderful sense of mmm uh right.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:43

The pulsy D.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:47

And this is it was interesting to for you to tell me that it was a mostly the song is mostly programmed except for the guitar parts.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:53

Yeah. Yeah. This is the Lynn drums that are doing the the drumming. It's just a drum loop that's got different things.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:59

Obviously, synth bass.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:00

Yep, synth bass.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:02

Welcome to I mean the vocals weren't programmed.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:05

No, thank God. That's not sound. But what a great track that is. I mean, God. So yeah. So those are great uh uh versions of over Oberheim's.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:16

Right. Yeah, love it.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:17

I also love in that song uh the upstructs on the guitar. Like there's something very punk rock reminiscent about it, and it helps really add that that punch to the bridge. It's just so so cool.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:29

Yeah, that's it. I love it. It's so good. Uh there are so many, so many great sounds in an Oberheim, but they they're very much similar to the way the Prophet is laid out as well. Uh and so you get amazing synths. So let's think about that. Yeah, Tom Sawyer, obviously.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:51

Yeah, and now that's the second time we mentioned Tom Sawyer on the show because they were obviously on the lead part. Is a moch. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:58

Yeah, as Model D, which by the way, they have a the one that you saw me play is a limited edition Getty Lee mini Mogue.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:06

In red, just in red just ripping Ferrari red very cool. Yeah. So anything else that was like uh super interesting about the Overheim stuff? Because I know that they've been releasing keyboards, they still release keyboards, there's all kinds of cool stuff. What makes this so certainly unique from everything else that we've looked at today?

SPEAKER_05 1:02:25

It's the sound of the filters. Remember, we talked about the voltage-controlled filters as a controlling element. Um so voltage control filters and the voltage-controlled oscillators. Uh they are unique to Oberheim, as is all the synths. Okay. So those are really, really fun. Uh I mean, that's what makes an Oberheim sound like an Oberheim and a Prophet or a Sequential or a MOG sound like a MOG. It's their oscillators and the way that they interact with the other hardware that they're paired with.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:55

It seems like it has less tactile like knobs and stuff. Is that because it's more of like push this knob and it does something different than the last kind of thing? It's more digital in that way.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:06

Yeah, it's it well, it's there's more real estate to look at. It's a big boy. But it's very simple in the sense of the of the layout. It's very Spartan. It doesn't have a whole lot of knobs other than what is really there. But you have to learn to program it to get under the hood, because when you get under the hood on a on an Oberheim, uh you can make some very complex sounds. It's like a combination of these. So it gives you it tries to give you the best of the vintage Oberheim sense, and you can actually uh dial in, they actually have a knob that says vintage, and you can turn it uh up or down to your liking, which will make the oscillators drift over time just like the old ones used to. Okay. So you can dial in the amount of like headache you want to have. Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:50

They need a vintage knob on guitars. You know, you can turn turn up the vintage, yeah. Just crank the vintage all the time.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:56

You know, when you think about the synths, like we've looked at some of the synths, you know, the big ones so far. I mean, there's still a couple more to go, but like the big three, pro Moog and Oberheim and sequential circuits with like the profit. Those three synths are to me are kind of like a telly, a strat, and a les Paul.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:16

Which one's which?

SPEAKER_05 1:04:17

Ooh. Quick. That okay. Uh I think I think that's hard because some are Polly and some are Marvel. Okay, okay. But but I would say um the the Model D, the Mogue, the mini moogue, I would say that's more like a Les Paul in the sense it's just beefy and it's got a lot of bite to it and and everything else. And I think the more shaping ones, like the Oberheims, like the OB's series, um, that would be more like a strat and the telly would probably be more like a profit. Okay. But that's a guitar player trying to classify a synth. Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:46

And there's a bunch of synth players watching going, what a guitar player.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:50

Right. Totally.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:51

It's just like just like when we do the drum thing, the drummers are gonna be like, what a guitar player.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:55

But yeah. But hey, this is just one guy's opinion. Yeah. You know, I mean, I'm still learning. I'm not a master of any of this stuff. I just love using it and recording with it and writing on it and doing things like that. So that's just the way they kind of strike me. They're like the big three. Because when I think of it of big three guitars, uh electric guitars, I think of Strat, Telly, Les Paul, those are my first ones. Then you can go, well, what about a 335? Valid choice. What about a Gretsch? Valid choice. What about an SG? Valid, but those aren't the ones that immediately come off.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:25

So would you say that the role in Jupyter 8 is more of the Ibanez of the electric guitars in comparison?

SPEAKER_05 1:05:31

The Jupyter 8 is such its own cool animal. Yeah. And they're so expensive now, they're at minimum if you get a good one in good working order is 25k.

unknown 1:05:39

Wow.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:41

Wow.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:42

Yeah. So I mean, it's like they're even more now, you know, probably closer to 30. But I mean, it's just like, yeah, they're very, very expensive. Not as much as a CS eighty.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:52

But you can get a pretty good approximation with plugins, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:05:55

Absolutely you can, yeah. So do you can you think of a good song? For a Jupiter 8. There's thousands just like the prophets. These were the big workhorses.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:04

Yeah. Well, I can think of one that we talked about earlier, and it was my big embarrassing moment of not even realizing that the Jupiter 8 was in the song. And that was Hungry Like the Wolf from Duran Duran. Such a cool, very well composed, very well recorded, cool, fun song. That I never knew, or even it's so loud in the mix now that I hear it that I couldn't believe that it was part of it. Could you play it? You want to show them the part? Yeah, absolutely. So and if all of you that are listening and listen to this song and know that it's there, it's fine, laugh at me. But if you could in the comments, just tell me tell me that you're with me because I feel really bad about it. Like I just couldn't believe that when I heard it, it's so heavy in the mix. Right.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:47

Let me let me pull up Hungry Like the Wolf. We'll listen to just a couple of seconds of the intro so you can hear the d what's what or where it is.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:54

Right. Because other people may not know either. I I am I firmly believe that I'm not the only one.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:59

Okay, here we go. Hungry like the wolf. Let's pull it up. Listen to the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:04

So you hear the I do now. Now it's the only thing I hear. Right.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:10

I mean so that that is basically on an arpeggiator, that's what they're playing. They're playing this chord.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:18

I'm gonna have nightmares about this.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:20

That's what it is. It's just a they're just holding an E major chord. Now, that wasn't the exact sequence that they were using. Um I don't know if they program the sequence or if it's a if it's truly at random or they cut and spliced it. They could have done a lot of studio tricks, but that's the tone. Yeah. Right? That's that great sort of Jupyter type of sound, especially that patch.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:39

So they use a lot of our the Jupyter's pretty famous for it's just like arpeggiation.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:43

Uh yeah, that's one of the things. Yeah. But man, the Jupyter 8 has its own vibe. It is its own flavor. It's such a great synthesizer.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:51

So it's the Ivan S gem in the guitar analogy?

SPEAKER_05 1:07:54

I don't know, man.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:54

I mean like an RG30, maybe something like that.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:57

I'm thinking, well, but I think of something. What would be the next classic thing after like Strat Les Paul Telly? 335? I'm thinking of something that has a little more history, too. Historical weight. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:07

True. True. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:08

That that would be like the Jupiter 8 would be like that for me. It's like it's a it's a Titan. It's one of the big titans of all synthesizers.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:16

Interesting. And then that also spawned the Juno out of that, which we're not really going to talk about that much. But the Juno was the Jupiter was such a big hit that it was a Yamaha. They were just like Roland was like, let's just let's put out another one. Yeah. And then they did multiple versions in multiple sizes. Yeah. So you started getting different sizes. Yeah, exactly. And so you see them in a lot, a lot more. And the Juno was a lot more common. But those have also gotten not quite as expensive as the Jupiter, but those have even come up in price. But the great thing about a Juno is you can get a really good replication. They reissued them for a very a very long time. So you can they're pretty accessible.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:52

And there's new Jupiters as well.

unknown 1:08:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:54

You know, that Roland's making now.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:56

Well, I think this brings us to the last one. And I think it's a pretty important one that we hear on so many recordings, and even I mean, it's still being used today in patches and in different uh ways. But the DX7.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:09

Oh man.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:09

Yeah. Yeah. So tell me about the DX7. There's another j Japanese introduction, right? And this was this was and this was late. So this was like 83, but they they really got popular later. Um but anyway, so you gotta think about 83.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:24

83 is a pivotal year because we have Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits, aka the prophet, uh teaming up and creating a MIDI and getting a uh an Oberheim synth to talk to a sequential circuit synth, or a Yamaha synth, right? Or a Roland synth talking to a Yamaha synth and back and forth. So MIDI comes out, MIDI is short, M IDI is short for musical instruments digital interface. And it basically has 16 channels and you can program all kinds of control messages and program changes and everything else. So imagine if you could control two synthesizers at once and just play on one keyboard only instead of having to do a Rick Wakeman where you're like constantly or an air Keith Emerson, where you've got like 15 different keyboards and you're kind of with your own specific port for MIDI.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:13

Yeah. The same the specific cable and everything. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:16

So like this is the cool thing about MIDI. So uh when the DX7 comes out, the big breakthrough for the DX7 was it's an FM synthesis, which was frequency modulation. This is John Chowning who started to come up with this. And when Chowning came up with FM synthesis, you have a carrier wave and then you also have a modulation wave. And essentially it's basically the same kind of technology that is used in FM radio. That's frequency modulation, as opposed to AM radio, which is amplitude modulation. Amplitude was earlier, FM came later, better sound quality, so on and so forth. But same thing kind of happened with the FM synthesis engines. And remember when we talked about the four types of synthesis, we've looked at subtractive, and then we looked at um uh FM now, right? So those are the two. Granular, we don't have to worry about, and then of course, uh additive would be more like the B3 organ, but we didn't really cover that too much. Aaron Ross Powell Okay, so um so where do we go from here? Well, the FM when that came out, when the DX7 came out, man, everybody had a DX7. I mean, it was like the biggest selling keyboard at the time of all time.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:20

And uh and it's just it's a it's an iconic synth.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:23

I remember the ads in uh like the trade magazines and they had like the real cool like angle on the key. I mean, it was just it was it was a big release and it was talked about for years and years and years as like the the new cool thing. Um what are some of the famous tracks that we got from the DX7?

SPEAKER_05 1:11:42

I remember being told that the slap bass patch on the DX7 was used for Jerry Seinfeld for the bass part. But dang danger on that.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:50

Yeah, but it turns out it turns out nobody really knows the story. Right. Because people say that even the original creator Josh Wolf was lying about what he was using. And then we saw him playing the patch on a Kurzweil, like a 2500 or something.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:03

But that could have been triggered sampled. Right. Exactly. So who knows?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:06

I mean, I don't know. But that was that was the lore. The other lore is uh the taco bell, the bong. You know, there was a it's not DX7, and that's just a straight patch. Sure. Like no no sound design off the patch, it's just a straight patch. Um the only one that I can think of is AHA.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:24

I love this song so much. Aha's Take On Me.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:27

Oh man. Okay, we gotta play it. Yeah. Here's a little bit past the intro. Let's check it out.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:32

Does. Yeah. Right? You know, Danger Zone was also, and it's a similar sounding track to that's exactly right. Yeah, yeah. It was also on a DX7. It was, yep. And this is just so classic. Yeah, it's so good.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:52

Yeah, right? This song was remixed so many times that it almost was never a hit. And the last final time that they remixed it, it finally became a hit.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:01

Really?

SPEAKER_05 1:13:02

Yeah, they struggled with this, and this one has such an amazing vocal line. I mean, you're talking two and a half octaves. Take on, that's the major seven to another a me. And then you go take me, that's the fifth, on to the sixth, and then I'll be on Des N.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:30

Very good. You get way up there, too. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I never knew I never thought about it that way, but it is. It climbs that high.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:36

Yeah, you go from a low A to a high E.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:38

Yeah. And one of the things I made that song too was the music video.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:42

Check that out. Right? That's crazy. That's two and a half octaves. Yeah. In a pop song. Yeah. Right. Pre-Mariah Carey and you know the real like vocal powerhouses, you know, the Christina Aguilera's and the Adells, and you know, all the extended range of a lot of female singers. But for a male singer to do two and a half octaves in a pop song, that was unique.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:06

It is. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah. I love that song so much. It's so good. The music video is super cool.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:11

Oh, one of the best.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:12

The weird part is that you know, the interface with technology, particularly from the mid to late 70s and then the early to late 80s, those are like the golden years of synthesizers, you know, especially with the advent of MIDI and everything else. But all the synths from that are becoming uh the the synth equivalent of what guitars were from the mid to late 50s and to the mid-60s.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:37

Still trying to replicate them all, doing reissues like like the R8 and R9, and trying to make them like a 58, 59, Les Paul.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:44

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:45

Uh that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:45

Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:46

And they're making special editions and all that. So what where do we go from here? Like what's the new what are the new things that are out there? I mean, I I look at you know, samplers and and like NPCs, and I love all of that kind of stuff. I know they got the new MPC, the little mini one that's really cool. Love it. Uh, but what what else is new? I know teenage engineering makes some cool stuff.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:04

Yeah. It just depends on the type of synth that somebody's wanting to design now because we don't we basically kind of have unlimited processing power and we kind of have unlimited storage when it comes to designing a synth. So for for me, I see a lot of synth makers use multiple wavetables, multiple oscillators. So instead of having like 16-note polyphony, you'll get 48 notes of polyphony. How are you gonna play 48 notes at one time?

SPEAKER_01 1:15:32

So what if there was like the put the potential to have an AI keyboard, uh synthesizer where you it's a basic layout and you just press a button and say, Hey, I need you to make me a patch that sounds like this, and it just drops the patch in to be able to perform on it. Is that unreasonable? Because there's a guitar pedal that you can program in AI and say, hey, I want it to do these certain things like the like we've described in uh other shows, but like the that you can just tell it in AI and it'll patch it to the effects pedal, and then you can just use it. Are we far away from that?

SPEAKER_05 1:16:10

No. I don't think so. If we choose to go there, but we certainly have the capability to get there very, very quickly. No. Yeah, probably six months or less if somebody, you know, it's just we should develop that. I don't know if I want it to hold that potato. No, it's a big potato. Yeah, and it's hot.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:27

It's a big hot potato.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:28

It's hot. I don't know if I'd want to do that. But I don't know. I see I see people that are kind of like you uh well of course, where you to answer your question even more, I think uh you know, you look at s that uh soft sense. So like Omnisphere. Omnisphere three just came out, I'm in love with it. It's incredible. It's uh exponentially more complex and more robust than Omnisphere 2 was. And this is made by a company called Spectrasonics. Um that is an amazing thing because now you'll get a cross-hybrid where you can take an old type of modeled circuit like off of an old Oberheim or a MOGE, and then you can put your own sample on top of it, and then have them blend together and be able to control the amount and the parameters of which they blend over time. You can already do that now. So you can create things that no one else has. And a lot of newer synths, the cool feature is that they will auto-morph. So if you take up like a basic patch, you know, like I don't know, say something like this, like a right, some kind of rave kind of thing. You're like, you know what, I've heard that a million times. Then you go, cool, uh morph it for me. And you can literally have it morph and it'll keep morphing it as many times as you want, and it'll let you specify how much morph? Little bit, like you want to stay in the same ballpark, are you totally cool with less going into outer space? You can specify that and it will save it every time you morph. So if you go, hey, you did it 20 times and you're like, I want to go back in here seven or number thirteen, you can recall those and it will save it in a directory on your hard drive so you can access it.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:06

Oh, that's in that's incredible. Yes.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:08

You can make your own synth sounds that no one else has.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:10

Aaron Powell That's amazing. So do you have anything uh in finality here? I thank you for the education as usual.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:16

Oh man, thank you for the patience and the like me just stumbling over myself. Because you know, talking about this is really hard for me because I I want to spend like an hour, two hours on each little topic. Well, the comments will tell us. Yeah, well, they'll probably be like, you suck.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:32

Yeah. Well, check the show notes because it has uh it'll have the playlist. We'll also have some links to be able to buy these synths. Anything that you do will help the channel. If you want to see more content like this, please just let us know. Yeah. Like, subscribe, comment, etc. Ear warm out.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:45

Yeah, ear warm up.