I guess my background is similar to a lot of people who fell in love with music from a young age. I grew up in a house filled with music, my mom played piano for the church choir, and I started taking piano lessons at age 6.
Like a lot of kids, there were days I hated practicing. My mom would put this kitchen timer on top of the piano until I finished my requisite 30 minutes. I think I liked the idea of being a musician a lot more than actually playing the instrument.
I was okay, I guess, but not nearly as good as my twin sister, Sarah. She really came into her own on the piano and was the kid who was always winning talent shows and playing for school functions. She was gracing audiences with "The Spinning Song" while I was struggling to make it out of the first volume of Teaching Little Fingers to Play.
We switched teachers over the years as some moved away or others weren't the right fit. There was Mrs. Showalter, the preacher's dowdy wife, who moved when the church fired her husband. There was Mrs. Ward, who played organ at the church. We had Mr. Stewart, a cocktail pianist and junior high music teacher, a flamboyantly gay man in a very conservative Bible-belt town, who moved to Florida and died soon afterward. There was John Yurick, who has since become a good friend, an accomplished musician and composer who taught at the local music store.
The thing was, when I started really getting into music, I wanted to play the guitar. Guitar was what rock and roll musicians played. The Beatles didn't have a piano player.
My mom told me I was too young to play the guitar and that I could do that after I'd played piano for several years.
So I resigned myself to the keyboard for awhile, looking for any hint of its rock and roll soul.
I noticed that "Lady Madonna" seemed pretty focused around the piano, as were a lot of Paul McCartney's contributions to The Beatles. I learned that some people even called Billy Preston "The Fifth Beatle." Then there was David Bowie banging away on "Rock and Roll Star" and other tracks from the Ziggy Stardust record. I thought I even heard some organ on those Santana records my brothers played.
About this time I checked out a book from the public library called Musical Instruments of the World. It was really fascinating and had drawings and descriptions of every instrument I could ever imagine: balalaikas, citterns, Sicilian bagpipes, nose flutes, and erhus. They even had a section on "Modern Rock Music," that explained how an amplifier worked and the different pieces of a drum set. I was deeply gratified to find the keyboard instruments included as well, with a long-haired gentleman in platform shoes standing behind a Hammond B-3 and Fender Rhodes. But there was another instrument there, too, something I didn't recognize, with all kinds of knobs and weird cables connecting parts of it. It was called a "synthesizer."
When I read about the synthesizer, it sounded magical. Its sounds were produced entirely electronically, so it was a really modern instrument. Because of this, the authors told me, a synthesizer was capable of producing the sound of any other instrument. I read about the synthesizer made by Robert Moog, whose name I assumed, as I guess some of you have just now, rhymed with "fugue." It does not. It rhymes with "vogue."
So I started looking for synthesizers in the music I was listening to. I found bits and pieces, but nothing I could really hear that well. So the next time I was at the library, I strolled over to the bins where they kept the LPs and began digging. I found it in the classical section. It was called Switched on Bach by Walter Carlos Williams.
The record was already over a decade old, but the cover was fascinating. It showed a gentleman in full Baroque attire standing in front of cabinets housing panels of electronic modules and cables connecting various pieces. It looked like it should be used by NASA. I wrongfully assumed that the gentleman was Mr. Williams, unaware that Mr. Williams had begun living as Ms. Williams by the time Switched on Bach came out and had made the complete jump biologically by the time I held the album in my hands, financed largely by the record's success.
I took it home and listened to it. It was engrossing. It was classical music, familiar, accessible — but made with weird electronic sounds. There were tinkling sounds and buzzing sounds and swooping, gyrating sounds. There were thick, round sounds and piercingly thin sounds. It was all very interesting.
But it wasn't rock and roll.
So I kept my eyes and ears open, looking for the appearance of one of these fabled instruments.
Then something wonderful happened. It was called "MTV."
Synthesizers were all over MTV. The very first video I saw on the channel was "Words," by Missing Persons, and the singer, Dale Bozio, stood in front of a platform where a musician worked behind a bank of keyboards. But they weren't the only ones. There was Duran Duran and Human League and Flock of Seagulls and Depeche Mode and Devo. There was Prince, that enigmatic purple-clad sprite whose music was my sexual awakening, due in no small part to the catchy synth hooks that dominated the music, played live by "Lisa" and "Dr. Fink."
I had to have one.
I remember the very first synthesizer I saw. It was a Moog Rogue (that rhymes, in case you have forgotten) and it was at Don Elkins' Music on Valley Drive, where I went for my piano lesson every week. It was 32 keys in a black case with white lettering, a few simple knobs and sliders labelled with strange words: "Oscillators," "Modulation," "Contour Filter." I had no idea what it sounded like and it wasn't connected to any sort of amplifier in the store, so you couldn't even try the thing out. Yet in my mind, it was all electronic sex and rock and roll glory. Some kids wanted to be Batman; I wanted to own a Moog Rogue.
Some time after our school music teacher even brought in a friend, a local DJ, who demonstrated the Minimoog for us in the school cafetorium. I sat riveted. The encounter was brief, but it stuck with me.
There were mail order companies in those days that sold synthesizers. I'm not sure where I got the address for one — maybe in Keyboardist magazine. The catalogs would come in the mail to me and they were just pages upon pages of incomprehensible science projects. They were DIY kits for synth home hobbyists and you could buy and put together yourself these modular synthesizers of any possible size you could imagine. I couldn't imagine where to begin among the list of puzzling modules: VCOs, VCFs, LFOs, ring modulators, and so on. Then you'd have to get an amplifier of some sort to plug the thing in. And a "keyboard controller" that made no sound on its own. Oh, and I found out that these "analog" synths were "monophonic": they could only play one note at a time. My confusion grew.
Somewhere around this time I started playing guitar and saxophone, and my obsession with owning a synthesizer faded. I owned an electric guitar long before I owned a synth, and I was regularly playing saxophone in bands of various styles.
The MIDI revolution happened in the late 1980s and 90s, and once I went to music school, owning a MIDI keyboard than had access to banks of sounds was no big deal. I bought a cheap Casio and used it happily to play with sampled sounds and banks of soft synths. It was not quite the same thing, but it served my needs.
Then a couple of years ago, my cousin Zack asked me to play saxophone with his band. "And some keys." This was without ever hearing me play. I suppose he trusted that I knew what I was doing. So I started shopping around, asking questions, and looking into buy a synth — or maybe an organ. I wasn't sure yet.
I ended up with this very cool Casio XW-P1. Now, most people associate that name with cheap keyboards (see above comment) and this one is a budget synth. (I was less than broke when I bought it.) But it's the real deal: sampled sounds, plus digital synthesis that could be played with. It's been a great little workhorse. I like it so much that when it got stolen last fall, I bought another one.
It's completely opened me up creatively and I've started playing with the on-board sequencer and arpeggiator. I've discovered that timbre can be as great of a source for creativity as rhythm or harmony. I can spend hours at a time making new sounds, lost in my own little world.
Then the inevitable happened: I bought another one. It was called a Synthstation 25 and really it was just a little mini-keyboard controller I bought used for $19. You plug your phone into it and start a $2 app and all of the sudden you have a drum machine, a sequencer, and an analog-modeling synth at your fingers.
Then I got another one at Christmas. It's an Arturia MiniBrute and it's an actual analog synthesizer. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with the differences between "analog" and "digital," suffice it to say that digital is basically playing with computers and analog is basically playing with raw electricity.) It can make some pretty bitchin' sounds, man.
Then I got a Nord Electro 4, which isn't exactly what most people think of as a synthesizer, but has great organ and piano sounds, as well as samples of an old Mellotron — a type of pre-digital sampler that used little bits of tape.
I also got a little $50 Korg Monotron, which is basically a single oscillator and filer with a ribbon controller. It makes all kinds of delicious bleeps and bloops.
I'm really not a gear head, but these instruments just keep opening up new worlds for me. It's like being a painter and discovering that there are new colors you haven't ever seen, or even colors you can invent yourself.
All of which has brought me to this fateful day.
I'm wrapping up this blog post, then I'm making a payment to purchase my very first modular synthesizer. It's not been built yet. I've ordered it from a well-known company that specializes in this sort of thing. I spoke to the owner and chose each module myself: the power supply, the two oscillators, the two contrasting filters, the LFO — all of it. I even chose the case it comes in, which has blank spots, by the way, so I can keep adding to it.
I've not quite crossed the threshold yet into building my own modules, though on slow afternoons I imagine myself hunkered in my basement with a soldering iron, piecing together transistors and resistors, bringing the sounds to life for the very first time.
I also put a bid on someone's old Moog Rogue online.
Someone else can be Batman.
