Moog image courtesy of Kevin Lightner
excerpt from the introduction
...Now synthesizers are everywhere. They are used in almost every genre of music--from country and western to techno. Japanese multinationals such as Yamaha, Roland, Korg, and Casio dominate the commercial market; the synthesizer has become a truly global instrument.1 In Sri Lanka, one of the poorest countries on the planet, we have seen a Roland synthesizer played at a beach hotel during a traditional wedding. With electronic dance music dominating the clubs, the driving beat of the synthesizer is once more back in vogue.
In 1964 when Bob Moog and Don Buchla first put together their prototype synthesizers, electronic sounds were limited to a few special effects in Hollywood or to the esoteric music of composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. Working with synthesizers was seen strictly as a weird and marginal activity. But the revolution in sound that started in Trumansburg thirty-five years ago produced more than just a new musical instrument. Today we are saturated by electronic sounds. Gadgets scream, beep, and growl at us, signaling that our cars have been stolen (or more likely not stolen), that our computers have booted up, or that someone on a TV show is about to become a millionaire. The sound cards in our computers use a technology that is directly descended from the first commercially successful digital synthesizer, the Yamaha DX7 produced in 1983.2 The patent on the form of synthesis used, known as frequency modulated (FM) synthesis, was for years among Stanford University's highest earning intellectual properties.
The advent of the synthesizer is one of those rarest of moments in our musical culture, when something genuinely new comes into being. Although ingenious inventors have come up with many ways of making and controlling sound and created many precursors to the synthesizer, nearly all of these inventions have remained merely museum oddities.3 When one thinks of the important new instruments of the twentieth century, one thinks of the electric guitar. The synthesizer is the only innovation that can stand alongside the electric guitar as a great new instrument of the age of electricity. Both led to new forms of music, and both had massive popular appeal. In the long run the synthesizer may turn out to be the more radical innovation, because, rather than applying electricity to a pre-existing instrument, it uses a genuinely new source of sound--electronics. It is the radicalness of the instrument that has allowed the synthesizer to evolve into the digital age. By using a purely electronic source of sound, a synthesizer (now available as just one chip) can be built into any electronic device where sound is needed. The form that today's synthesizers take means they are the instruments par excellence of the digital age. Behind every MP3 file downloaded from the Internet lies some form of synthesizer.
But this book is not about the digital age. Rather, we tell the story of how this all came to be: how the electronic music synthesizer was invented, the people who invented it, and its impact on music and popular culture.4 We write about what we call the "Analog Days"--the early years of the synthesizer, between 1964 and the mid-1970s, when the technology was analog.5 Rather than using 1s and 0s, the bits of the digital age, the early sounds were made with continuous variables such as changing voltages.
Robert Moog is the best known of the synthesizer pioneers, and much of this book is about him and the Moog synthesizer. But Moog was not the only inventor to develop a synthesizer in the early 1960s. Working out of a West Coast storefront around the same time, with a similar technology but a totally different vision of electronic music, was Don Buchla, an experimental musician and instrument designer. Buchla, unlike Moog, rejected the use of the conventional keyboard to control this new source of electronic sound. In the end, keyboards won out, at least for most uses.6 The synthesizer, by the mid-1970s, had become a portable instrument with a keyboard controller. Why Moog's vision triumphed is one of the questions this book sets out to answer.
We would probably not have heard of the Moog synthesizer at all if it had not been forWendy Carlos, who laboriously assembled electronic music in the studio and produced the sensational album Switched-On Bach (1968). This record made Moog and Carlos famous, was responsible for introducing many other musicians to the Moog, and led to a whole genre of "switched-on" records, including Switched-On Bacharach (1969), Switched- On Nashville (1970), and Switched-On Santa (1970). But rock and pop music was where the Moog synthesizer found its true home. Groups like the Byrds, the Doors, and the Beatles used their Moogs as part of the sixties' search for new psychedelic sounds. We also pay attention to lesser known people, such as the few women synthesists who worked in this predominantly male world.
During the early years of the synthesizer, a pivotal part was played by the Minimoog, produced in 1970. One of the first portable keyboard synthesizers, the Minimoog has since become a classic. In the United States it was the first synthesizer to be sold in retail music stores and to be bought in significant numbers by young rock musicians. When Bob Moog was awarded the 2001 Polar Prize by the King of Sweden for his contributions to music, it was for his invention of the Minimoog. The Moog would have remained a studio instrument, an oddity, if it were not for the efforts of musicians like Keith Emerson, who used it for live performances with his progressive rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Eventually the synthesizer reached mainstream black music, most notably when Stevie Wonder took it up in the early 1970s and introduced the Moog sound to yet a new audience.
The Moog was put to innovative uses in making radio and television commercials and sound effects and electronic scores for films. Other companies, such as ARP (pronounced "arp") in the United States and EMS in the UK, started synthesizer production. By the mid-1970s ARP had become the dominant manufacturer, with a 40 percent share of the $25 million market.7 ARP synthesizers were featured in the blockbuster sci-fi movies Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (both 1977). With their spectacular range of sound effects, EMS synthesizers were favorites among European art and progressive rock bands. They were used famously by Brian Eno and Pink Floyd.
As we follow the evolution of the synthesizer from the acid dawn of the sixties through the summer of love and into the harsher commercial world of the seventies, we will see that not only did the synthesizer change but so too did the range and sorts of sounds it made. Today in the digital world there is a longing to get back to what was lost; an "analog revival" is taking place. Synthesizers that were invented thirty years ago are still manufactured unchanged and are purchased by modern musicians for many genres of music, including electronic dance music, where analog sounds are much sought after. Old or "vintage" synthesizers command high prices, and Bob Moog has become a cult hero for many young musicians.8We end the book by asking why analog days are here again.
