Synthesizers
Culture
12 rabbit holes · 5 people exploring
Common starting questions
- where does the acid squelch come from?
- Why is the 808 such a big deal?
- how did they make the Doctor Who theme in 1963?
- what instrument plays the flute intro on Strawberry Fields Forever?
- what is that big 80s orchestra stab sound?
Rabbit holes
- acid house came from a bass machine nobody wanted
Roland sold the TB-303 as a 'computerised bass machine' to replace a bass player. It sounded nothing like a bass guitar and was discontinued in 1984. Then Chicago producers started turning the filter and resonance knobs while it played.
Rosa Delacroix · 6 sources
- the Japanese Castlevania III has a sound chip in the cartridge
The Famicom's cartridge slot had audio pins, so a cartridge could carry its own sound chip and mix it in. The NES moved those pins to the expansion port on the bottom, so the US release had to be rearranged for the stock five channels.
Rosa Delacroix · 5 sources
- the 808 was a flop
Fewer than 12,000 were sold. Drummers thought it sounded fake, which, fair. Then Roland discontinued it in 1983 and used ones went for under $100, which is exactly how it ended up in the hands of hip hop and electro producers with no money.
Rosa Delacroix · 7 sources
- the Doctor Who theme was made with oscillators, tape and scissors
Ron Grainer wrote it. Delia Derbyshire built every single note by hand from recordings of test-tone oscillators, white noise and one plucked string, sped up, slowed down, cut and spliced on tape. One of the first TV themes made entirely with electronics.
Rosa Delacroix · 6 sources
- the flute intro on Strawberry Fields Forever is a keyboard full of tape
Ama Mensah · 5 sources
- the theremin guy also built one of the best spy bugs ever
Started with Clara Rockmore videos, ended up in Cold War espionage. Theremin went back to the USSR, got sent to a prison lab, and designed a passive listening device that hung in the US ambassador's study in Moscow for seven years before anyone found it.
Marcus Thompson · 7 sources
- Switched-On Bach sold a million copies of Bach on a Moog
1968. A modular Moog could only play one note at a time, so every part was built up line by line on tape. It won three Grammys and became only the second classical album ever certified platinum.
Ama Mensah · 6 sources
- fell into the east coast vs west coast synthesis argument
Moog, in upstate New York, built around a piano-style keyboard and filtering bright waveforms down. Buchla, in California, mostly skipped the piano keyboard for touch-sensitive plates and went for complex oscillators and wave shaping. Both started building modules around 1963-64.
Leo Bergman · 7 sources
- the guy behind the Looney Tunes factory music also built early synths
The frantic assembly-line music in old Warner cartoons is his ('Powerhouse'). He didn't write it for cartoons: Warner bought his publishing in 1943 and Carl Stalling quoted him in over 120 shorts. Meanwhile Scott was building sequencers and electronic instruments in his own lab.
Ama Mensah · 5 sources
- every 80s power ballad has the same electric piano
It's the DX7's 'E PIANO 1' preset, which was apparently on 40% of US number-one singles in 1986. The DX7 was so hard to program from its tiny screen and menus that most people never made their own sounds, they just used the presets.
Tomás Rinaldi · 6 sources
- the vocoder was invented to save phone bandwidth, then it went to war
Rosa Delacroix · 6 sources
- the orchestra hit is one chord of Stravinsky
That 'BWAH' stab on every early-80s electro and pop record is a low-res 8-bit sample from a recording of the Firebird Suite, pitched down and shipped with the Fairlight. Once you know, you can't unhear it.
Ama Mensah · 6 sources