If any of you are ever in Milwaukee when SpoofFest is going on, definetely check it out... it is always a great show. They practically brought the house down this year!

Thad

One of the weirdest concerts I have every been to was one where the punk band had a theremin player. Its was cool, this guy had put together a theremin small enough to strap on like a guitar. I can't even begin to describe 'Holiday in Cambodia' as played on a theremin.

And I thought Humanities was boring!

Cheers!

"I'd rather be forgotten than remembered for giving in..." --Refused

I have loved synthesized music from the first time I heard it. Some favorites through the years have been Devo, Gary Numan, and Robert Fripp, who has experimented with synth-guitar.

How the world turns dept.
Mark Mothersbaugh, formerly of Devo, can be seen in the credits for Buena Vista TV (Rugrats), a Disney subsidiary.
Ugh!


"I am an American. You are a sick asshole!!"

I have seen Mark's name on other Buena Vista shows, I just can't remember the titles.
We all have to eat, even old musicians.

I have kids, what is your excuse for watching Rugrats? ;]

For those who wish to cop their own Moog filter, oscs or other goodness, do check out Tom Gamble's excellent resources available at http://www.xavax.com/efm

Lastly, I offer this simple entreat: For anyone who ever plans to write an article on Dr. Bob, the history of electronic music or what have you, PLEASE resist the temptation to insert a line (as did Mr. Huston) saying something to the effect of "Walter (now Wendy) Carlos." Have some respect for chirst sakes and just say Wendy.

There's a digital version for music DSP nuts in the article by Tim Stilson called "Analyzing the Moog VCF with consideration to digital implementation". You can find the paper somewhere around Stilson's homepage HINT: it's really simple to implement (~10 LOC), you can get my implementation from deja.com by searching comp.dsp.

"Walter (now Wendy) Carlos."

I suppose like many others, the poster still find the whole sex change thing it a bit wierd. I was really into electronic music a (ahem) few years ago and remember when the Carlos's Playboy interview came out. The reaction of a bunch of musician friends was ``Who-o-o-o-a! What the???''.

I still find it a bit, oh, I don't know, amusing when I pull out my vinyl copy of ``Switched On Bach'' by Walter and the CD re-issue which is from Wendy. Anyway... I saw an interview with Wendy on TV a few years ago; pretty interesting.
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If you want to try your hand at building your own analogue synthesizer, Synthfool has links to several DIY sites.

"Unfortunately, the trend is toward user interfaces that are simpler, not more complex. Most people don't care enough about the increased possibilities for expression to sacrifice years of their lives mastering an instrument," says Keislar. "They want to press a button and hear music come out. As a result, such systems are probably destined to remain experimental, even if elegant."

I think that particular quote applies to a lot more than just the design of an electronic musical instrument. It seems to be quite true of almost everything nowadays. Most people would be horrified, for example, to have to learn to use a command line over some kind of WIMP GUI. Or imagine a video recorder which was controlled with a keyboard and cron jobs, for example. Sure, geeks would love it, but people in general wouldn't touch the thing with a barge pole (so to speak), and either it would fail, or someone would make a much more simple design.

Nice article about Moog, I didn't know anything about his history really... I've experimented with a friend's minimoog though, playing with the sounds in that is almost like Kraftwerk in a box. ;-)

I think that particular quote applies to a lot more than just the design of an electronic musical instrument

Actually, for synths, I disagree. At present the trend is for more systems with more and more knobs and other performance controllers. Not only that, but the hardwired configuration of oscillator>filter>amp>effects is being superceded by a much more 'modular' approach to the point where you get to mix and match virtual synth components on the fly, say a vocoded sample, through a software emulation of a Moog low-pass filter, through a beat-triggered digital dealy and into a multi-stage amplifier, with multiple low-frequency osciallators controlling various input parameters.

I wouldnt call that simpler, at all :)

Pax,

White Rabbit

Linux: Think of it as evolution in action...

This .sig is here to make you think, "Him again?"

It won't be up until tomorrow, but you can check out some "conceptual moog drawings" I did about 15 years ago at http://www.tribrothers.com/brian/moog/.

Poot.

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Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...

He got twenty feet down the hall before he heard it playing, and came back in the room to find four of us taking turns whistling while trying not to laugh until he got in the room.

As a computer science major who knew how to do the logic needed for such tasks, I did have the desired effect really running in a few minutes. It turns out that if you reverse it, an ascending tone spinning around the room gives an interesting rocket-elevator effect... Or maybe that's just due to training by the WCCO "Foshay Tower" weather center sound effect...

“I think Microsoft should stay with its father.” - Francis J. Beckwith, PhD, Trinity International University, 4/26/00

...the solo at the end of 'Lucky Man'...

The Chicago Cubs. Turn out the lights, it's over.

Thus I've converted Bowie's .au file to 8KHz 32bit MP3. The full 1.2 MB file (4+ minutes) as well as a quarter meg 60 second snippet are available here.

Hmmm, shouldn't have called the page filename 'Moog' I guess. Oh, 15KB/s maximum bandwidth, from my home ADSL box. Be gentle :)

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I took a class on electronic music back in the late '70s (or was it early '80?). The class used a Moog 2 (if memory serves). Using it was a blast. I had a TEAC 1/4" tape deck that I would record things on then take the tapes to the lab to run through their battery of effects, make loops, run tapes through the Moog filters. Gawd, it was fun. (I still have the tapes I made back then but one of these days the TEAC is gonna up and die on me :-) )

You could do some very interesting things but you had to be willing to get very ``hands-on''. Unlike today, where kids pick up the latest keyboard from Casio and press a button to get the latest stock synthesizer sound. I'd rather that my daughters had the chance to work with a Moog than one of those things. Let 'em twiddle the knobs and create a sound that no one's ever made or heard before. But I'd have to put an addition on the house to have some place to put the beast. I guess a PC with a MIDI port'll have to do until the construction loan goes through.
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Keith IMO was one of the all time greats, but seems to be largely forgotten these days. Back in their time Emerson, Lake, and Palmer were big enough to take the London Symphony Orchestra on tour & spend 2 million bucks making an album. These days, all you ever hear on the radio from ELP is 'Lucky Man' which doesn't give the slightest clue as to how fscking brilliant a keyboardist Emerson was.

If you really want to hear the Moog tortured and played to its limit, check out any of their first 5 albums - ELP, Tarkus, Pictures at an Exhibition, Trilogy, or Brain Salad Surgery.

You're here because you know something...you can't explain but you feel it...that there's something wrong with the world. --Morpheus, from The Matrix

The Beatles introduced a new Moog in the majestic "Because," on "Abbey Road," the last album they recorded.

Actually the first use of a synth in rock was, believe it or not, the Monkees. On their album "Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones, Ltd." [released 11/67] the songs "Daily Nightly" & "Star Collector" used one. In fact the Beatles borrowed this very synth from them to use on "Abby Road". Check with any reputable rock historian to verify.

Well, apart from the Monkees NOT being rock.... Actually the first use of a synthesized sound in popular music in the 60s was the Beach Boys including a Theremin in their hit "Good Vibrations".

Whether or not YOU want to consider the Monkees rock, that is what catagory most music books list them as. Not to mention that you obviously haven't heard more than their hits or you would not spout such ignorance. And no I'm not a teeny bopping Monkees fan, I just know how to give credit where credit is due. AND I had said it was the first use of a SYNTH, not synthesized sound.

So my statement still stands.

no fun - no future - no sig.

I'd like to see a return of music to the days before the synthesizer took over, when music required skill and talent to create and produce.

Yeah, let's go back to the old days. On the same line of thought, let's make computing as hard as it used to be decades ago, when you had to be an engineer to be able to use a computer.. instead of these dead-simple point-and-click things.

It's not that I don't, in general, agree with your views about electronic music. You have to remember, though, that you don't have to listen to it, even though those millions of sheep do. It's like Microsoft software: neither brilliant nor spectacular, but simply good not be a financial success. Such it is with this "music" produced today.

&cam;

Aren't they just 'pushing buttons'? I suppose when it comes to trolls, though, that they're just 'pushing buttons' to try to push other people's buttons.

Then you haven't lived! :) Personally, while they are (well were) unique, I find his drums distracting, but his music is just plain amazing. He is truly a genius, regardless of whether you actually like his music or not.

:wq!

Kraftwerk, Can, Pere Ubu... If we're going to talk about krautrock route, then let's not forget Neu and Faust. Lovely music. It's good to see their infulence is still around in the likes of Stereolab and Tortoise.

I'd like to see a return of music to the days . . . when music required skill and talent to create and produce.

You should check out "less popular" (i.e. not overhyped by record labels trying to make money off mediocre-at-best "bands") groups like Kraftwerk, Apoptygma Berzerk, MDFMK (KMFDM), Spahn Ranch, Front Line Assembly... I could go on... but this isn't my field of expertise, and five minutes on Napster will give you a halfway decent taste for what I'm talking about (or would if 99% of the MP3s on there weren't so poorly ripped and/or encoded).
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"this is the post jamie era, where we code all night, read tons of e. e. cummings poems, and of course listen to aphex twin."

~asd_under

And regarding that crack about the "time-honoured rules of music": All such rules came about after experimentation. Are you saying that musical innovation should stop now that we have found a solution?
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The other side is crowded. The dead have nowhere to go.
--from serial experiments lain

OK, so by those rules we should go back and rip all of the dissonance out of Bernstein's "West Side Story", one of the acclaimed classics of twentieth-century music and art, because it's radical and not immediately pleasing to the ear and therefore, by some outdated and baffling pseudo-Maoist process of elimination, "Not For The People".

We should also have stopped all the white British boys listening to "that nasty darkie music" thirty years ago - whoo, wave bye-bye to ninety percent of the last thirty years worth of Western popular music. Some of those blues songs don't even have proper II - V - I cadences, dammit! Oh, and while you're at it, you better forget about those Coltrane and Miles albums too, because why's anyone going to sign them? After all, sometimes they aren't even playing proper contrapuntal harmonies...

This concept of "music for the people" has been tried before. Stalin tried it in Soviet Russia, and look at all the marvellous music they had during his tenure. Erm, Shostakovich. And Shostakovich. (And Shostakovich remained in the USSR only under protest).

I refer you also to the mass exodus of composers from Germany and Austria during the Nazi era, whereupon similar restrictions were placed upon art considered to be "decadent". Hence Schoenberg ended up kicking back in L.A.

Obeying the "time-honoured rules of music" is a fallacy. Robots obey the time-honoured rules of music. If all humanity had done was obey the time honoured rules of music, we'd either all be in church getting our weekly hit of Bach and his endless bloody chorales, or on our knees in a monastery listening to the Brothers Benedictine getting funky in the Aeolian mode. The parallel of what you recommend in the visual arts was called "socialist realism" back when anyone was listening and did it produce one-fifth of the memorable or touching artwork that people prone to "creative urges", such as, ooh, Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, or Michelangelo did? No. The only place socialist realist art is to be found nowadays is on the front of history textbooks about Nazi economic policy. Or the Nazi control of the academic and artistic institutions of Germany and Austria after the Anschluss.

To restrict music to a set of arbitrary guidelines of public taste and rules regarding "how music should sound" smacks, quite literally, of either rank stupidity, academic fanaticism of one form or another, or both. The Beatles broke every damn rule in the book, both in terms of how they produced their records and how the songs work on the most basic levels. Listen to "Good Day Sunshine" sometime, and then go and look up an analysis of it ("Revolution In The Head" by Ian MacDonald would be a good start). Let go of those rules. Feel how good it sounds.

You're not just proposing that we junk all the synthesisers and sequencers. You're also proposing that we stick rigidly to the rules. The end product of that will be an endless stream of clone bands with two guitarists, a bassist, and a drummer, that all sounds precisely like Oasis. We call it "Britpop"

If an artist doesn't take risks, he/she cannot take his audience anywhere new. Everyone will know precisely what they're going to get when they put a record on, will be able to cross-reference any given new work to a catalogue of old releases and make correlations. Doesn't that sound wonderful and orderly. And safe. And dead.

Being an artist and being subject to "creative urges" has no relation to any notions of the "tortured artist". I suspect that that romance and indulgence is the source of the resentment that inspired you to make that post.

As for Aphex Twin, well, fair enough, *you* don't like him. But it sounds like you're judging him on the basis of one track you've heard, which I would guess would be the "Come To Daddy" single. If you're ignorant and unimaginative enough to make a decision on a sample set of one, then I pity you. But I genui

Read the rest of this comment...

Yeah, the bulk of the music out these days is overproduced crap put out by uninspired corp execs, and yes a lot of it is perpetrated with a synth. Is it the Snyth's fault? Nope, the synth is a tool. Whether its tool for evil or good is up to the user. I reccomend exploring some of Tangerine Dream's work--Miracle Mile is personal fav--, Vangelis, Kraftwerk, of course Jean Michaeil Jarre. I also like the Moog Cookbook's take on various pop tunes.

And you can blame most of it on Rebirth.

And what do the tools have to do with the person? There are monumentally talented artists out there making music with synths, just like there are talented artists making non-synthesized music. No matter how anyone makes their music, the talented musicians who actually *understand* the dynamics of sound and music are in the minority. None of them appear on the charts, because they're interested in music, not marketing.

Not that I'm disagreeing with you on the Brittany Spearme thing. Most "mainstream" music today is crap. :)

If you think trackers have no talent, try Hunz or mellow-d (or heck, anyone in FM).

Using a tracker lets you concentrate on making the music... it's the closest thing to using a real instrument as far as I'm concerned.

I'm reminded of the phrase, "it's a poor worksman who blames his tools."

:wq!

I sincerely hope that you're trolling in this post and you aren't at all serious!

Okay, well, I was trolling, but it's an opinion I've heard many times before and still gets my goat. And yes, I'm a huge dance music fan, and I do write it myself (well, try anyway) so I'm not a complete bigot. Although the techno nazi is still alive and kicking where I live :)

Especially in detroit, stuff coming out from Underground Resistance, Planet E, Transmat and Metroplex are as close to undiscovered genius as you can get, involving a great deal of raw creativity and expression.

Agreed - I've got Juan Atkin's MasterMix Vol 1. here at work on MP3, and a few bits of Detroit at home - Jeff Mills, Fumiya Tanaka etc. Personally I'm more of a hard techno and acid techno fan, but I like it all. And there is some amazing stuff being produced nowadays, a hell of a lot more creative than simple 4 to the floor stuff.

And, having tried to write some of this stuff myself I can agree that it's a lot more difficult than it looks - you need a solid understanding of how synths work and how music is made to get anything decent. And my personal opinion is that dance music as a whole is far closer musically to "classical" music than anything else we hear today. After all, most guitar-based bands have a fairly simple structure - a drummer, 2 leads, 1 bass and a vocalist (or variations on this theme) whereas dance music can have dozens of separate layers built up on top each other.

Yeah, the TB-303 can produce some truly amazing sounds, especially with a little bit of effects magic slapped on afterwards. I'm mainly into acid techno stuff, and some of the 303 sounds on that are truly unbelievable, covering a lot of the aural spectrum from bassy growls to soft pad-type sounds to metallic rings.

The trouble is, they are a complete nightmare to program and use. My old housemate had one, and I used to spend a fair bit of time playing with it, but it takes a long time just to get used to the step mode way of entering rhythms and then trying to tweak the filter and accent. Saying that though, I think the accent feature of the 303 is why it has lasted so well - it's quite different from most synths - the decay on the accent is unique AFAIK.

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