I Dream of Wires (2014) Movie Script
Strange sounds can be heard in the streets.
They seep through open windows.
They spill out of the doors of recording studios.
And they rumble inside concert halls.
Sounds that come from another time,
yet strangely otherworldly.
They come from a machine that demands to be touched.
A machine that exists outside the world of computers
and outside the virtuality of the internet.
A machine that demands total dedication,
bordering on obsession.
And, let's not be afraid to say it,
a machine you can fall in love with.
The modular synthesizer is the pinnacle.
It's practically a fetish,
a remarkable device with blinking lights that produces sound.
I thought, "God, I need one of those."
It all came down to the power of the sound,
you heard a sound that literally tears the fabric of the universe.
For almost half a century, modular synthesizers have captivated musicians
and listeners with their mysterious sound and their striking, impressive appearance.
In an age of touchscreens and wireless controllers,
many people find it intimidating. It looks more like an airplane cockpit than a musical instrument.
So what exactly is a modular synthesizer?
To understand the origins of these remarkable devices,
we need to go back to the beginning of the age of electricity.
By the end of the 19th century,
the first power stations, like this one at Niagara Falls,
began generating electricity.
This new scientific marvel became part of almost every aspect
of human life.
It's no surprise that electricity found its way
into the world of music too.
Not just recording it, as the phonograph did,
but creating it,
using electricity as a source of sound.
Real electronic music.
Inventions such as the theremin amazed people with their strange, otherworldly sounds.
In the first half of the 20th century, a host of remarkable electronic instruments
emerged from both laboratories and workshops,
Most of the equipment in the first electronic studios
consisted of repurposed laboratory gear and expensive generators for testing radio devices
In the scientific community, music departments were eager
to explore these new horizons.
By the mid-1950s, in Europe and North America
there were several scattered electronic music studios.
Without a doubt, it was a turning point. It was a new field of music.
The ability to work with sound on a different level, to discover new compositional
approaches, new techniques,
new ways of working.
It was an astonishing, incredibly tempting field.
But there were very few real electronic musical instruments.
Basically, musicians had to make do with very little.
To start, you needed a microphone,
and two tape recorders so that
you could take sound from one, record it
onto the other,
changing it along the way.
My studio back then was a garage, and I had parts
from cars and trams, and various things
that made sounds, hung and laid out inside a piano.
The PBS television station in San Francisco
hired me to write music for The Computer and the Mind of Man, and they loved it, they were thrilled.
I got the money and bought an oscillator.
My first oscillator generated a sine or square wave,
you could switch between them, and it sounded something like this.
No control voltage, nothing like that.
Oscillators were very expensive; around 1958-59 they cost
about four hundred dollars.
Nowadays, I don't know, that would probably be four thousand for just one oscillator.
There was a real need for a ready-made solution,
something that could give a composer a full set of instruments
in one special device.
This mysterious building on the edge of Harlem in New York
once served as a home for secret experiments.
This is where the Manhattan Project began; Albert Einstein had an office
here on the second floor.
They gathered here in secret, not in the physicists' buildings,
keeping their meetings and work under wraps,
so that no one would find out about them. Hence the name Manhattan Project.
After the war, the Columbia University Computer Music Center settled here.
At the time, it was one of the most advanced electronic music studios
on the planet.
And its centerpiece was a machine that promised to give modern composers
the ability to revolutionize music.
Here we have the RCA Mark II, probably the first modern
electronic synthesizer
ever built that still survives today.
It's still here in our office, because it's actually bolted
to the concrete floor.
Moving it would be difficult, and we like having it nearby,
it's an amazing piece.
The Mark II combined a variety of specialized components
that generated, filtered, and shaped
sound with a level of control never seen before.
But it was the only instrument, and only a few serious composers
had a chance to use it.
The Mark II was in many ways similar to the first computers of the 1950s,
including the high price.
The approximate cost, I think,
was one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars.
Which is quite a lot. I think
in today's money that's several million. But by the late 1950s, the widespread adoption
of small, efficient transistors made all kinds of electronic devices
more compact and cheaper to produce.
The birth of a practical music synthesizer was
just a matter of time. At the same time the RCA arrived here,
a man named Robert Moog was studying in the physics department at Columbia.
Robert Moog apparently knew almost nothing
about the music center and the huge synthesizer.
Still, he was already involved in creating electronic instruments,
but much smaller ones.
For several years Moog successfully sold theremin do-it-yourself kits by mail
for assembly. He ran his business from a small shop in the remote town
of Trumansburg, New York.
One of those who owned a Moog theremin
was composer Herb Deutsch. My students' parents showed me a copy of, uh,
I think it was Electronic Times or something like that,
and there was an article called "Build Your Own Theremin".
I read the article and thought, "here it is, the way into a new world,"
and I can do it.
I built my own theremin, which is sitting right next to us now.
And the man who designed that theremin was a guy named Robert Moog.
Later I went to New York State for a music conference,
and there was a room where people were showing the instruments
they had built themselves.
And in that room stood Bob Moog, demonstrating his theremin kits.
The room was empty. He was there completely alone.
Bob and I immediately started talking about the idea of having synthesis
right at our fingertips.
About having a synthesizer right at home.
Something that would let you work with sound, record sound,
and change sound.
He asked the young inventor to build an oscillator for him
that could be controlled with precision.
Armed with Moog's voltage-controlled oscillators,
Deutsch was able to create pure electronic sounds with a level of control
that no laboratory oscillator could match.
And most importantly, Moog attached a traditional piano keyboard
to control pitch.
From the very start he hoped to draw working musicians' attention to his instruments.
And Bob realized this when he bought an organ keyboard just to play around with,
and I said it was good for control, and yes,
if you're going to do this, a keyboard would be a good addition.
It won't stop people from experimenting with sound.
And you'll definitely make a bit more money.
Moog's VCOs quickly caught the attention of music departments at several universities,
and he began developing various auxiliary components that
could be connected together.
Soon Moog's small factory in Trumansburg became a destination
for anyone looking for tools to explore new horizons in music.
In 1965 I was asked to set up an electronic music studio,
even though at that point I couldn't tell a patch cord from a banana,
and I went to Trumansburg, New York, and met Bob.
We hit it off right away. Very soon
we became friends. And my grant from SUNY Albany was enough to buy the first synthesizer.
And, by the way, I still didn't have enough money to buy a power supply, so for about a year
I powered it from a car battery.
Thanks to contacts with
universities and colleges, Moog developed new modules based on the suggestions and needs of musicians,
engineers and composers.
But it was during a visit to the University of Toronto that he was advised
to create a new type of module.
One that would produce one of the most distinctive and recognizable
sounds in modern music.
This is Moog modulars' secret weapon.
Voltage-controlled filters.
When Bob Moog came up with controlling pitch with a VCO,
all that was left was to create a concept for shaping sound so that electronic music
could become truly interesting.
At that time, a gentleman named Gustav Ciamaga was working at
the University of Toronto.
He headed the electronic music laboratory.
He commissioned Bob Moog to build the very first VCF.
Anyone familiar with Moog modulars will recognize the format in which
the filter was released.
But what no one had seen before is the earliest prototype.
This was the first filter Bob Moog ever built.
The filter "sweep" is probably the most recognizable sound
of the analog synthesizer.
Everyone knows this distinctive effect.
Eventually Moog reworked the design, releasing the 904 series filter.
Its original "ladder" transistor circuit gave the filter a very steep frequency cutoff,
resulting in a rich, deep sound.
And although these sounds are familiar to us now,
back then, in the mid-60s, they were revolutionary.
Today voltage-controlled resonant filters
are an essential element of nearly every synthesizer,
but no one can deny that Moog's early filters are true classics.
For many, they remain the best filters of all time.
This magnificent four-pole 24 dB Moog low-pass filter with
a feedback control is worth dying for.
It's fantastic.
It's very beautiful.
The 904 series filters are the best thing that ever happened to sound.
Even Moog himself must have realized he had created something special.
The "ladder" transistor design is the only part of his modular synthesizer
that he patented.
Moog's combination of VCO and VCF,
connected to a piano keyboard familiar to musicians,
became the defining component of his approach to electronic instruments.
It was destined to become known as the East Coast philosophy.
Meanwhile, new unusual sounds were being heard from the opposite
...the other side of the country.
But not from university halls.
The West Coast was undergoing a social revolution.
San Francisco became the epicenter of the counterculture,
a mass rejection of the values and ideals of the postwar generation.
Young people from all over America gathered in neighborhoods like Haight-Ashbury,
where they found the freedom to experiment with a new way of life.
And mind-expanding drugs.
Experiments were happening in art too. Especially in music.
And it was right here that a completely different modular synthesizer was born.
More than forty years later, two founders of the San Francisco
Tape Music Center
came to Mills College in Berkeley, California, to visit an old friend.
This is the very first Buchla synthesizer.
A prototype of what would later become the
Well, I haven't used this machine in quite a while.
There were no blueprints, so half the time I didn't know
what was going on inside.
This instrument was the product of the mind of Don Buchla,
a former NASA engineer drawn into the West Coast counterculture
and its community of artists and musicians.
I remember Don attending tape music festivals, and I remember the experimental
sound movement that existed in those days.
And I think it was that environment that helped Don create his unique aesthetic.
Eventually, he became part of the San Francisco Tape Music Center,
a collective of experimenters and avant-garde composers founded
by Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick.
The Tape Center came about because none of us could
afford to buy equipment on our own.
So I called Morton and said, listen, you've got a garage full of strange
gadgets and a few tape recorders.
And I've got the same kind of attic, so why don't we
put it all in one place?
And we decided to call it tape music (tape music).
Anything you could record on tape and play back through speakers suited us,
and that's how the name San Francisco Tape Music Center came about.
By then there were several composers among us,
musicians came to work with the equipment, there was a lot of talk,
and I knew transistors had arrived, that was big news.
It meant electronics would soon get much cheaper.
a new genre in music would emerge, one that doesn't inherit
the traditions of existing art,
arising from the fact that any person would have the chance to
work with sound, something like home drawing.
This person could become a studio artist, a composer.
There would be a kind of complete freedom of electronic creativity.
We placed an ad in the paper, and a few engineers responded,
but none of them could understand what we were talking about,
we could see they were completely out of their depth.
Besides, we weren't offering any pay, but then Buchla showed up, and Don was
wonderful, simply amazing.
I started explaining that I needed a
specific configuration. I didn't need a keyboard, those typical black-and-white keys,
and I didn't want to make music that already exists.
And everything I had talked about eventually took shape
in an analog computer, an analog computer that generates sounds.
It appeared at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, probably in 1965.
And so he brought it in, and it had a label that read
"San Francisco Tape Music Center Incorporated," and when Ramon and I saw it,
I got angry. I told Don that we didn't want to be in business,
we just wanted to make electronic music.
He said we would sell it,
and I replied, well, if you want to, sell it, you're the inventor,
but we don't want to be part of a business, making money, I mean, seriously...
Sorry, but we didn't go along with it.
Later Buchla renamed the modules under the Buchla and Associates brand,
and eventually they ended up in the hands of other sound researchers
outside the Tape Center.
This is one of the very first Buchlas
from the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Some modules are labeled, and some just have
handwritten prototype labels, as you can see,
so it's a jumble.
The famous red panel, apparently soaked in LSD,
so you could lick it and get a rush of inspiration.
The mysterious electronic sounds of the Buchla
provided the background for many events on the hills of San Francisco.
To hear those strange pulsing sounds right in the middle of some gardens,
while you were high on something, yeah, probably that
blew your mind a little,
for many of those who got to hear the Buchla in that setting.
In the world of modular synthesis, you hear about
the philosophy of the East Coast and the philosophy of the West Coast.
The roots of this lie in the 1960s, when Bob Moog and Don Buchla were both developing
their original systems,
they approached it from somewhat philosophically different angles, which resulted in
two different schools of using synthesizers.
In the world of Buchla and Subotnick, the approach was: let's create
something completely new.
Let's create sounds, let's create music that isn't based on tradition.
And I think that was only possible back then, only in a place like San Francisco
or on the West Coast,
where people were far removed from the many rules, constraints and etiquette
of the East Coast.
In Moog systems, the systems of the East Coast philosophy, rich waveforms are used, such as
sawtooth, square, pulse and noise. Harmonically rich shapes, from which, with the help of
a delicious four-pole filter,
these harmonics are carved out, and feedback creates a sense of "movement"
in the sound over time, making it more interesting.
Buchla used oscillators with different waveforms, but very simple
filters after them.
In most patches on West Coast synthesizers,
there is hardly any filtering at all.
If you want to create a harmonically interesting sound,
you need to use a wave shaper.
You get sine waves layered on top of each other several times,
to get something dense.
This is a completely different approach to synthesis.
It's not subtractive synthesis in the usual sense.
It gives the sound unique qualities that you
cannot recreate with any other system.
However, of these two different devices, it was the Moog modulars that became forever
associated with electronic music.
The reason is simple: the presence of a piano keyboard,
familiar to the average musician, which he could work with right away.
Bob was interested in winning success among
commercial musicians.
By "commercial" I mean musicians
who make money from music.
Most avant-gardists don't fall into that category.
The idea of adapting a piano keyboard to a synthesizer was discussed with enthusiasm.
I told him right away, we don't need a black-and-white keyboard.
Because I knew what would come of it.
If I had a keyboard,
I'd be making ordinary music.
That's not what I wanted.
Moogs worked great with a piano keyboard, because
they could easily generate the notes of the Western scale.
For the Buchla, that was extremely difficult.
Doing it with a Buchla was really hard,
they simply weren't built for it, and couldn't
hold their tuning for long.
The classic image of a musician turning a knob with one hand
and playing the keyboard with the other,
immediately gave the Moog modulars the look of a convenient musical instrument.
It looked like a natural progression.
It was as if this electronic musical machine had come out of nowhere, one that could be
played from a piano-like keyboard.
One of the first professional musicians to try
a Moog modular was Bernie Krause.
Together with his partner Paul Beaver,
they saw a potential market in Hollywood
for the new, innovative sounds that could be achieved with the Moog,
and decided to take a chance.
We flew to Trumansburg, where Moog's factory was.
He showed us the whole assembly process, how everything worked.
It was a beautiful instrument, not only from an aesthetic point of view,
but also reliable and working perfectly.
We had a choice, to buy a Moog or a Buchla,
and since the Moog gave more control over the parameters,
we bought the Moog.
Moog realized that these two could bring
his synthesizer to a new market,
and offered them the role of sales agents
on the West Coast.
But at first things went slowly.
In Los Angeles we got nowhere, because
nobody understood what it was.
A year went by in trying. We showed the instrument
to every producer and composer we could find.
And we met with no understanding. They asked us, like, could you
play Monday Monday on it, make a cover version?
Finally we ended up at the Monterey Pop Festival,
with our last bill in our pocket. The rest is history.
A lot of bands came to the Monterey Pop Festival,
with piles of money in their pockets, and they suddenly decided they had to
spend it on shopping.
It's very American to buy things. We sold there, at the festival,
I think ten or twelve synthesizers, each one priced
at fifteen thousand bucks, in 1967.
Back then that was a lot of money.
Because synthesizers from the East, Moog synthesizers, fit so well
into the rock music of the time,
roughly the late '60s, the '70s,
we found ourselves among all these superstars, like Keith Emerson and others.
They were used by pop groups, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Monkees, The Osmonds,
and everyone who wanted
to be on trend and produce those unconventional sounds had
a modular synthesizer.
While Moog kept making its way into the hands of
professional musicians,
Don Buchla stubbornly resisted adding a keyboard controller to his setup.
He had a different idea.
You can get a very powerful sound this way, and
I like it a lot too. You can't do that with a piano keyboard,
that's for sure.
There were two keyboards, well, not keyboards,
I don't know why we call it that, it's not a keyboard.
It's a touch-sensitive voltage source.
We call it a pressure sensor, though that's not quite accurate.
The more skin touches this spot,
the more electricity flows. Pressing harder increases the area of contact.
While Moog had his famous filter,
Buchla also made something for his modular that had a huge impact
on contemporary music.
The analog sequencer became very popular among synthesizer players.
Buchla designed it primarily to replace cutting up tape.
Many of us were already using loops back then, but tape loops.
Yeah.
After Buchla came along, it became clear that we wanted to be able to
do what we had been doing before.
It's an eight-step sequencer, with three voltage controls.
When Moog was starting out, I got to know him well.
He came to my studio to figure out how the sequencer worked.
Because he, as you know, did everything with a keyboard.
And I showed him how I use the sequencer.
He said, "Isn't that just a loop?" and I said, "No, no, I don't use it that way."
I mean, you can use it for loops, yes, it's good for that.
A sequence can be made into a loop. A metronome is essentially a rhythmic loop too.
A loop is measurable. A sequence, in theory, is infinite.
Put together, it's just a bomb.
Subotnick was ready to start using the Buchla, but some members of Tape
Center began to pull away.
I basically lived in the countryside, hanging out
with the redwoods, playing acoustic music, chants, and basically doing everything
you could do out in the open.
To me all that electronic stuff looked like something urban, so I threw it all out.
And I thought, why not go to New York?
I'd do my own music, and that's the only place everyone would get to know about me,
not in San Francisco.
While in New York, Subotnick got a new assignment: to write a fully
electronic album.
For him it was a chance not only to explore the possibilities of the Buchla,
but also to pursue his own concept of studio work.
On Silver Apples of the Moon I had a patch, I had two sixteen-step
sequencers and an eight-step one.
I set the first to sixteen steps, the second to fifteen,
and the eight-step one to seven. In the end it came out to
15 times 16 before the
sequence repeated. So I could make a sequence 18 (slip?) long at 15 by 7 steps, and it worked.
But when it ended, I could use another voltage to
transpose the whole thing
and slightly shift the entire range. And I could
improvise with it until I got something that
thrilled me, about three minutes long, say.
It was something, seriously.
Thanks to this machine I was able to look at myself in a new way and find in myself
things I hadn't suspected before.
Silver Apples of the Moon is considered an important milestone in history:
a wholly electronic album, created, performed and recorded by one person,
essentially "on the knee".
But this legendary work by Subotnick did not have a great influence
on the general public.
Modular synthesizers burst into people's consciousness thanks to
this album.
The real turning point, the reason Moog became as
"Pampers" of synthesizers in the early '70s,
was Switched On Bach. Many people
didn't consider electronic music
real music until something recognizable but made with synthesizers came along.
Switched On Bach was made by Walter, now Wendy Carlos,
a physicist and accomplished pianist who, among other things, was fascinated
by recording technology.
Moog, with its keyboard and its ability to play Western scale notes, was perfectly suited
to Carlos's bold idea:
to play Johann Sebastian Bach's classical works on the most cutting-edge
musical instrument.
Its record came out after Silver Apples.
I was shocked that it was called electronic music.
It could have become very popular, and I said, hmm, wait a minute,
that's exactly what's going to happen, and I don't want that.
Because here we're trying to expand the musical vocabulary, and this work
is squeezing it back down.
It was a very famous recording, and I think the best-selling one
of all time.
My first reaction was, "wow, all these gadgets can produce amazing sounds, so why
use them to create this?"
In other words, it was a great, great exercise in technique.
But...
But I still admitted that it was electronic, and that it was music.
So it was electronic music after all, but
they couldn't... Silver Apples of the Moon was electronic, and Switched On Bach
was electronic too, but these
were two different things, completely different, and in the end
the world went down that path.
Modern popular electronic music can be said to have grown out of it,
but on the East Coast, let's say, there have always been outsiders,
pioneers
of the uncharted, so to speak. Very significant, but not mainstream.
Eventually Moog released its sequencer,
and combined with the ease with which his modular synthesizers worked
with the traditional tempered scale,
music built on sequences, from krautrock to disco, quickly
became part of pop culture.
As for the question of who first created the modular synthesizer,
Usually the answer to that is Moog. But is that really so?
A couple of years before he died, Moog said to us when we were at a conference,
someone asked, like,
who actually built the first synthesizer, and I answered
"Maybe it was Bob."
But he said no, you built it a year before me.
I'm sure of that, because I only made a few modules,
and when the Buchla came out, I was blown away, it put everything you needed
into one ready-made unit.
There's no exact answer to who was first,
but it's crystal clear that it was
Moog that became the most famous.
The reason for that was probably that Moog designed
his system while listening to what
his target audience of professional musicians wanted.
As a result, Moog was able to put a relatively practical
and reliable electronic musical instrument on the market.
That's the strength of Bob Moog.
He turned synthesizers into a brand.
He made the word Moog a synonym for synthesizer.
People often say, oh, you collect Moogs?
I hear that a lot, because they instantly link everything analog or
synthesizer-related with Moog.
It sounds amazing, doesn't it? Rich, deep, endlessly changeable
sound. It's a wonderful machine.
Whether the Buchla or the Moog was first doesn't matter,
soon their competitors began to appear,
quickly releasing their big modular systems.
Like the American ARP 2500,
the British EMS Synthi 100,
and the Japanese Roland System 100M,
and the System 700. They started taking a share of the market from Moog.
All of these systems were built for big studios,
university music labs
and wealthy musicians.
An ordinary person could only dream of them.
For my thirteenth birthday I got
tickets to Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Brain Salad Surgery.
Keith Emerson had a huge synthesizer, and from the wrist controllers
fireworks were shooting out of it,
flashes were going off above the keyboard,
and I thought, wow, what is that thing?
It looked like a car from a Ferrari catalogue,
we were all drooling over Keith Emerson's Moog 55, it was out of reach for us.
At that time, only Keith Emerson could afford something like that,
and we couldn't have hauled all that gear around with us anyway.
All of these things were so far beyond anything an
ordinary person could buy.
Modular equipment was always out of reach,
like big rooms full of lab instruments and all that kind of thing.
Finally, the Moog factory in Trumansburg released the first synthesizer
that became an object of desire for ordinary musicians,
an electronic instrument they could play and actually figure out
without an engineer's help.
In 1970, Moog released an instrument that became the model for
synthesizers for many years to come,
right up to the present day: the Minimoog.
It was the Minimoog that made it an iconic figure.
It was small and easy to use, and, despite its still high price, it was already
within reach of a serious musician.
Its front panel still bore the familiar look of a modular.
Importantly, the Minimoog had the legendary "ladder" filter,
which gave it a sound that instinctively drew in musicians and listeners alike.
It was an elegant instrument that gave the average musician access
to the deep, rich sound of Moog modulars at a lower price and weight.
Of course, it was much lighter. And the older you get, the less you want to lug heavy things around.
But in everything else, it came nowhere near the versatility of its big brother.
Bob wasn't particularly thrilled with the Minimoog's success.
He really didn't like the cutting back of functionality.
I hate to say it, but I think he saw
the creation of the Minimoog as a necessary evil, something like that,
although in the end
he realized it all worked out for the best.
This is the forty-ninth unit, and it still works just as well as it did
many years ago.
The following year ARP also released
a scaled-down version of the mighty ARP 2500, the semi-modular 2600.
The 2600 was an attempt to create a portable, affordable synthesizer with
the flexibility of a modular.
The individual components were already wired together, but
those connections could be redefined using patch cords plugged into the inputs and outputs.
Combined with their sequencer, it was a powerful, portable
and relatively inexpensive alternative to a full modular.
Almost any band in the world could afford a Minimoog or an ARP 2600,
and so these instruments gained popularity in making
pop music and on stage.
The Minimoog and ARP 2600 sold very well among working musicians
who could afford them.
But outside the mainstream there were many musicians who wanted to try
their hand at electronic music,
and who couldn't even afford these stripped-down synthesizers.
I remember there was the only, or at least
one of the few shops in London selling the Minimoog on Tottenham Court Road.
I remember going there to try one and not being able to get a single sound out of it,
like, "how does this thing work?"
They were so expensive that I
had no chance of buying one.
In the seventies, Minimoogs were expensive.
So I started building my own.
I thought, well, I can build one like that, I can make filters just as good and
oscillators, which is what I did.
But at the end of the seventies, something happened
that temporarily took synthesizers out of favor with both musicians and listeners.
In those days, many people were hostile toward synth players,
especially punks,
saying, we just press buttons here,
this isn't real music, as if you could
just press a button, get some noise, and that's it.
They had no idea how much effort it took,
especially in my case, since I built everything myself,
and that it all has to be patched and tuned, and that takes work.
It's not just "press a button." People were throwing things at synthesizers.
People didn't like them because they reminded them of Pink Floyd,
there was some stupid prejudice against psychedelia.
Nonconformity and music go hand in hand.
What drives me crazy is that the wildest
nonconformist musicians you can imagine become incredibly conservative when it comes to their equipment.
Guitarists especially.
Synthesizers are actually far more radical than guitars,
one finger
is enough to play music on them,
and you can get far more brutal and varied noise out of them
than out of any guitar.
I played in a three-piece punk band, guitar, bass and drums,
and we recorded some demos, got a contract, went to the studio,
And in the control room, in the corner, there was a Minimoog.
I had never seen a synthesizer in person before.
Honestly, I wasn't even a fan,
I liked some of Kraftwerk, but I wasn't a particular fan
of electronic music.
But I got interested anyway. I loved gadgets, and I liked how it looked,
the knobs and buttons. I started messing around with it
just like that, without the faintest idea what I was doing.
And I got some phenomenal sounds. I was absolutely blown away by what I heard.
In the rush, on the fly, I reworked my
guitar punk songs into a rather amateurish synth
d-d-d-d-d.
I took it to a record label
and told them I'd come across a synthesizer and I believed that
this was the future.
I wanted to make exactly this kind of music for the rest of my life, seriously.
It just captivated me.
And just at the time when electronic music was finding its place
in the musical landscape,
cheap, easy-to-use synthesizers appeared,
mostly from Japan,
at a price an ordinary person could afford.
A friend of a friend was a musician, and he had a 700S,
he showed it to me and I thought, "That's what I need."
And the reason I needed it, the thing that "sold" it to me,
was the repeat function,
which could produce
something like sequences without a sequencer, by means of
retriggering the envelope,
and for me that was the decisive moment, since I'm weak at music, so something that plays a rhythm
would be just the thing.
It was very impressive, and with it you could get really scary noises,
the speakers were simply blown out. I liked it so much
that I thought, we need to get into this.
I was so stunned by the fact that I had a synthesizer
that I didn't even think about anything more complicated.
Depeche Mode started out as a guitar band.
We realized that with synthesizers we could achieve a far more interesting
sound than with guitars,
because our playing was terrible.
This was perfect for what I wanted to express.
You didn't have to be a musician in the usual sense.
Of course, you had to be somebody, but not that much.
And to everyone's delight, digital components were added to synthesizers,
allowing settings to be saved as presets that could be recalled at the press of a button.
The era of preset synthesizers had arrived.
You press a button and it sounds great. Give me two.
I sensed the danger in presets right away.
The problem was with me, not the instruments, because you could still
tweak them into something of your own if you were willing to spend the time.
I noticed our attitude had changed, like,
let's try a different sound, scroll through the presets, and I realized
that this wouldn't work, our minds dry up from boredom, I'm not interested in that.
While small, affordable synthesizers
flooded the market, the big modular Moogs, Buchlas, ARPs and EMSs went back to where they started.
Into the hands of elite experimental composers.
And university music centers.
Besides this, a new technology was being developed,
threatening to take away the modular synthesizers' lead in capabilities
for sound editing.
Some of the methods we use to describe music as
a graphic function,
can also be applied to speech, and we can gain a lot
by studying these simple sounds.
Computers have long been associated with electronic music,
mainly as controllers.
But as computers became smaller
and cheaper, the day when synthesis itself would become fully digital became
just a matter of time.
A completely redrawn waveform would appear on the screen.
A synthesizer that can play bell sounds,
crystal-clear piano, drums, and so on and so forth, and all of it
in one package.
The Synclavier, and later the powerful Fairlight,
quickly replaced modulars as the instrument of choice for elite
commercial musicians.
What I liked about the Fairlight was the sampling capability.
Plus it came with a large library, which helped a lot.
The novelty of sampling, and the ability to play real sounds
struck me.
I'd say that's where the death of analog began.
If the Synclavier was the beginning of the end,
then the real killer of analog was a small, cheap
Japanese synthesizer
the Yamaha DX7. Its arrival hit the synth business like a tsunami.
The DX7 used incredibly complex FM synthesis algorithms to create
its recognizable, if artificial, sound.
There was only one data entry slider on the front panel.
Creating your own patches was an absolute nightmare for the average user,
so it came with hundreds of preprogrammed presets that were rarely even edited.
If you buy one secondhand somewhere now,
the presets are guaranteed to still be there, because nobody actually programmed it.
I can understand working musicians who perform live need
the ability to press a button and get the sound they want.
At the time it sounded pretty good, I mean,
now it's old hat,
but back then it was a real revolution.
I never played a DX7, so I don't have much to say about it, but I hated its sound.
The comfortable human interface went out the window, and it felt completely unnatural
when you sat in front of a DX7, poking at numbers,
moving them up and down with the slider, and, like,
okay,
so, this one sounds good, right?
They dedicated a whole factory to producing the DX7,
and could churn out by the thousands what everyone wanted,
at a very low price.
And everyone immediately needed a DX7 because of its distinctive sound,
and then some other synthesizer comes out, which gets used in some
rock hit,
and now everyone needs that one.
When the Ensoniq Mirage came out, people started selling off all
their gear
and buying them, simply because it was affordable, they couldn't
do anything else.
There were no more high-end instruments on the market creating
real magic.
Now they were trying to do everything for everyone, and the first
primitive workstations began to appear,
and new interesting sounds gave way to cheap junk,
capable of doing a bit of everything, but without any character of its own.
Huge modular systems, once the pride and joy of elite studios,
were often sold for scrap metal.
I bought my first 2600 at a pawn shop for about 250 dollars,
in pretty beaten-up condition. Apparently,
it had been through a lot, but still.
Think of the computers from the early '60s, the size of a house -
that's what they looked like back then. So you could buy a modern
digital Roland
for a thousand dollars. Who even needed those rooms
crammed with modules?
Even at Berkeley at that time there was a room full of analog synths
that nobody needed,
I think there were a couple of ARP 2600s.
And they were simply abandoned, you know, thrown out.
Nobody needed these huge, constantly going out of tune,
and generally unstable contraptions anymore.
The 80s were hard times for modular synthesizers.
Some of them ended up on the scrap heap in the end.
Most just gathered dust in basements and closets,
except for the few that were maintained and rescued by people who cared about them.
But in the late 80s something happened that changed
the fate of analog synthesizers.
Acid house brought analog synths back for real.
People making dance music realized that the sounds you could get from
some of the old machines
were far, far better and more convincing than what
the new toys produced.
With the 909 and the 303, you just had to turn the bass knobs and it was already
very impressive!
A ton of bass!
When people started going back to analog sound,
it turned out that turning real knobs and pulling faders, and all that,
was much more interesting and fun.
I felt that rock music was finished, and I didn't want to have
anything to do with it,
while dance music was electrifying; it seemed like the future of music.
People used Squid 8s, which is a
chord sequencer, and the Mirage,
and the 808s and 909s,
and one guy, I remember, had a Memory Moog, my favorite synthesizer.
From being quite cheap, they became outrageously, unreasonably expensive.
Because everyone around me, like me, started doing what I did,
you know.
People started getting into vintage gear, everyone fell in love with devices like these,
like the TB303 and the TR909,
but when it came to big modules and all that stuff,
they still didn't really understand what they were for.
While dance music producers eagerly snapped up vintage drum machines and
simple analog synths,
modular synthesizers stayed in the shadows.
For those who never lost their craving for modular synths,
this was a chance to finally get their hands on the instruments they had only dreamed of,
and that's how the community of vintage and modular synth enthusiasts began to grow.
I hate the word "obsolete."
It drives me crazy when people say "oh, that's outdated technology."
But it still works, doesn't it?
There was a period, roughly between the DX7 and the rise of acid house,
those few years when
digital ruled and nobody cared about analog sound.
People probably thought I was crazy, I was buying all this hefty gear,
which is so hard to transport, constantly breaks down, and never
stays in tune.
And there was this thing where people would say, "oh, this is a really rare piece,
grab it while you can."
I love analog for its unpredictability, it's like a wobbly
machine,
like a plane or a bicycle that keeps trying to slip out of your hands,
and you have to keep going forward.
You never know what's coming next, and that's part of the fun.
It's different every time.
Jack Danger is responsible for the sonic palette of the influential industrial dance
project Meat Beat Manifesto.
His studio on a hilltop
outside San Francisco is filled with an enviable collection of top-tier and rare vintage
modular synthesizers.
Somewhere around '93, I think, the word "vintage" started being applied to
synthesizers.
I remember seeing them for the first time and thinking they looked strange.
I don't even know why I'm drawn to old gear rather than new.
I just can't, um, buy up absolutely everything.
There was a time when the '70s modulars and all that were replaced by
Fairlight and Synclavier,
so around the early '80s, the prices for this kind of equipment
were pretty tempting.
There you go, Wendy Carlos!
And this is the Roland System 700.
It all started with an interest in drum machines.
Andy and I were in Erasure, recording an album in Hamburg.
I'd already had experience with a lot of drum machines,
but then it suddenly occurred to me that it would be great to use a bunch of small
drum boxes, the kind that would sound the way drum machines are supposed to sound,
unlike drum machines that use samples, like the Linn,
which don't sound like real drums. Well, and it snowballed.
I started buying small drum machines, and then I moved on to synths.
Synthesizers from different manufacturers sound completely different,
for example, I started to tell apart the sound of Korg filters from, say,
the sound of Moog filters.
And I needed as much variety as possible.
I still have cheat sheets like these, just in case.
There are no rules, you know, no inputs and outputs with labels saying
that you can't plug this cable
into that jack. Everything is done
by trial and error.
The first thing I bought, by the way, new, was the Roland System 100M.
That was in '83 or '84, back then.
That's when I started learning to use modulars.
At first I used cheat sheets of settings all the time,
like, here's how you make a trumpet sound: you take
this patch, plug it in here, and turn this knob to
a quarter to eight,
and that's it. It doesn't sound anything like a trumpet.
As interest in vintage modulars grew,
so did the shortage of these instruments, which was just one of their drawbacks.
One of the biggest problems with vintage gear is reliability.
I mean, forget about tuning and similar problems,
you could be just sitting there and boom, something breaks, and it drives you up the wall.
For me, old electronics are junk.
What amazes me is that they managed to put all this together, working with
all these lousy components.
If you open up an old Moog,
it looks like a dusty pile of junk that even bums wouldn't pick up for the scrap metal.
By the early '90s,
Modular geeks who bought unneeded systems cheaply from basements,
ran into the real cost of owning vintage gear: expensive repairs and upkeep.
Collectors often come to us for repair and maintenance
of their equipment,
and the older it gets, the harder it is to find the parts it needs,
and to keep it working.
So the question is keeping old analog gear alive and putting it to use in today's world.
Even if you have the money and the patience to maintain vintage modular systems,
the shortage of components will always be an insurmountable problem.
In the end, despite the efforts of those who cared for them,
modular synthesizers seemed doomed.
But where there's a will, there's a way.
And so, one devoted modular synth fan decided
to take matters into his own hands.
Frankly, I was more interested in the hardware than the music;
music was just a way to use the hardware.
Equipment is what my interest in this is centered on,
so that's what I'll do. I'll work on equipment,
the thing I'm good at.
Bruce Duncan, the man who created Modcan,
became the first in decades to release a modern full-fledged
modular system.
Like many enthusiasts of the mid-90s,
Bruce built modules for his own vintage systems.
But then he took a step forward.
It started as a hobby, and when my modules got good enough
to sell,
I just made a website, and people started flooding me with emails wanting to buy some of
what I'd made.
There was no business calculation, no plan or anything like that; it was
just a hobby.
Although Bruce's Modcan became the first new module manufacturer,
he didn't stay alone for long.
When I started MOTM, I took a stack of drafting paper,
back when we still used drafting tables, and started thinking about what Bob Moog had been missing.
I made a list of everything he didn't have in the late 60s
and early 70s
that we did have.
I looked at the schematics of the old Moog modulars and snorted.
He did the best he could; after all, this was 1968.
On Valentine's Day in 1998, I opened my website,
and put two modules up for sale, a power supply and a noise generator.
That's where it all started.
That same year, Roger Errick launched his site,
synthesizers.com, offering ready-made systems that looked like Moog modular synthesizers.
Like a Ferrari assembly kit, you got the look and feel of the real thing,
but without the high price and upkeep.
It all seemed too good to be true, for a while
many people thought it was a scam.
But soon everyone realized that the mythical giant modular,
the one they once saw Keith Emerson playing, could live in their home studio
for a fairly reasonable price.
By the late '90s, full-size modular synthesizers
that looked and worked like Moogs became very popular,
mostly thanks to people wanting to fulfill their childhood dreams.
These machines were new, equipped with cutting-edge electronics, yet
they looked familiar and comfortable.
Still, for many, even these new modulars
remained an impossible burden,
too big and impractical, still out of reach for the average musician.
By the mid-2000s, many electronic musicians
chose a device that most of them already had.
Our generation was probably the first
to have a hundred-dollar gadget you could play games on.
And, unexpectedly, it could replace an entire studio.
When I went to university, a computer turned out to be able to be a studio.
Yes, I think everyone used them at some point, at least
everyone I know,
because back then it was like science fiction come true, fitting your whole studio
into a computer,
since that seemed to be what everyone had been waiting for.
Everyone does everything with one device, with their laptop.
And that's great, and it sounds good, no doubt about it.
You've got a software CS80 that sounds great,
and there's no real CS80, and no 20 thousand dollars to
buy one, you know how it is.
I started using Logic, Reason, Pro Tools,
doing everything on the computer, and then I had to work a lot with Excel,
and that's when I decided that when making music, I no longer wanted to
touch a computer.
there's a state where you think, okay, I'm tired, or I'm
not getting anywhere with the track, whatever, I'll go
kill some time on Facebook,
see what my friends are doing. And it's always like that.
Maybe people decided that digital gear has no soul,
unlike analog, which is simpler, something you can actually
touch with your hands.
I sit at the computer and think, yeah, it sounds great,
and the controls are convenient,
I like the control and flexibility I have, but I
don't feel any inspiration.
When it comes to music, I still
want to play music, and it's very hard, you know,
to feel like you're actually playing,
using a computer.
It's a nightmare, really.
All this computer music is a nightmare,
because you can edit everything. People stopped just making music,
they keep fiddling until they've wiped out every flaw and imperfection,
until they've wiped out all the interest.
Despite their flaws, software synthesizers on the computer were the
best choice for many people.
However, the new hardware format will create a new approach to modular synthesizers,
synthesizers,
a chance for people to get acquainted with them.
There was a period when I was writing music and at the same time designing
hardware.
But very quickly I realized I was a better developer than a musician.
The company opened in 1992, and it consisted of just one person.
I had an oscilloscope at home,
a soldering iron, and all that.
Many people were looking for something new, and, well,
modular synths weren't exactly anything new,
everyone knows there's Moog, EMS, and others.
But I said we should try to make them accessible.
Doepfer developed a new form factor for modular synthesizers, now
known as Eurorack.
Instead of adopting the standard five units in height, like Moog,
he used only three, which made the system very compact.
I remember the first time we demonstrated the A-100, in Frankfurt.
When he told the dealers that he was going to make modular synthesizers,
wanting to bring them back to the market,
they replied, "yeah, sure, just stick them somewhere out of the way at the show".
Everyone was saying, hey, modular synths, nobody's going to want that, let's
put our MIDI keyboards and all that stuff up front.
Well, guess where everyone at the show went,
they all made their way to the back, to the modular gear.
Because a lot of people, those who remembered them from back in the day,
were genuinely thrilled by it.
And I said, see, I told you so!
Around 2000 or so, I said, that's it, we get it.
People are interested.
Back in the early 2000s, when Eurorack and Moog-style 5U modules started to
gain popularity,
Don Buchla released his 200e, based on the 200 series from the 1970s.
It was nothing more than an attempt to revive the analog sound.
I learned electronic music exclusively on Moog instruments,
although of course I knew about Buchla.
But I only saw one in person when I bought this one.
I never tried one myself until I bought mine.
What drew me to this system, as opposed to the traditional ones,
like the ones sold on synthesizers.com,
was the design philosophy, the density of the modules.
Each of these oscillators is a dual oscillator,
the filters are triple, and envelope generators come four at a time,
that's it.
Thanks to this density in the modules, you get
extensive functionality
in a small size, a small footprint.
That's, so to speak, one of the advantages of Buchla's philosophy.
Modular synths have truly experienced a comeback,
but for the first decade they remained a fairly niche market,
sustained mainly by a small but devoted community.
But in recent years, modular synths have started to reach the edges
of the mainstream.
The annual NAMM show in Anaheim, California, draws more than 100,000 visitors,
who come to try out the latest musical instrument releases.
Alongside guitar amps and karaoke systems, there are booths
with modular synthesizers.
Since Doepfer developed his format,
the number of companies making Eurorack-compatible modules
has been steadily growing.
It's a very creative format where you can take whatever you want,
plug it in, try it out,
and if you don't like it, sell that module
and get another one.
Right now there are 45 to 50 different module manufacturers on the market,
even if some of them only make one or two modules.
That has a huge influence on choice and direction.
There are guys who make modules
that, honestly, I look at and can't figure out how to use.
There's something for everyone. I'm always amazed at the number of
new users
who come in and breathe life into all these strange ideas
dreamed up by different people.
Sometimes you come across really odd people designing their own modules,
and it's a real joy to see.
Because most of them really
pour themselves into their ideas and push the technology forward.
It's not just about making money.
I'm really glad for music as a whole, and for the culture that is slowly, little by little
gaining popularity.
It's a positive sign that people are using their minds to create music,
and to think about it.
I have a lot of respect for Dieter Doepfer for his contribution to the revival of the
modular synthesizer industry.
He isn't bothered at all by other people making
Eurorack modules.
He believes it only expands possibilities and strengthens the industry.
Strong competition for sales only has a positive effect.
People were excited. We put together
I think about twenty-five modules, and sold them all in less than a day.
I was impressed, it was something else.
The first module I made for Make Noise was basically
a mod of a mod; I made it for myself. I didn't think anyone would want to
buy them.
And they all sold out in
about 12 hours. It was crazy, really cool.
New manufacturers are popping up, taking on what others have stumbled over.
And by the way, they do it cheaply. They're not trying to, like, get into people's pockets
who have already bought vintage gear and will happily shell out big money.
They're essentially doing it for young people, essentially trying to get them off plugins.
Eurorack is the perfect environment for experimentation.
In part it's a boutique industry, and small runs mean you can sometimes
come up with something very unusual.
You can come up with some cool, high-tech gadget, and
share it
with a big audience. And that's great.
I like that it's all a mix of different companies,
different logos, it looks kind of
punk, which is cool.
Guys can make this in their garage, without a giant
Japanese corporation
behind them that would fund the development of an instrument which, by the time it reaches production,
gets cut down and trampled to the level of plain crap by some
board of directors.
Anyone can just throw something together, and boom, it's done.
Although modulars have made their way onto well-known exhibition floors,
for an ordinary person, the easiest way to try
modular synthesizers
is to attend one of the informal meetups that are often organized
by local enthusiasts.
At this meetup in Berkeley, California, attendees, whether
with their own gear or without,
can chat, swap knowledge, or meet the developers in person.
Eric Barbour, founder of Metasonix,
is one of the well-known developers working in the Eurorack format.
And not just because of his bright yellow panels.
His vacuum-tube-based designs are no gimmick.
Out of work, he decided to put his
unusual engineering experience to use.
Doesn't anyone need a forty-five-year-old engineer?
With a very unusual set of skills? Vacuum tubes. Ominous.
I like Metasonix.
For us, it's the perfect choice,
because even some noise
never gets lost in the sound.
They have this fat, distorted character that
you can't get rid of.
My filters sound different, my oscillators sound different.
You can't make them not sound different.
The number of modules available now is staggering.
And for people who get carried away, they can develop a harmful habit.
Every day some new crazy modules come out that people just can't live without.
Sometimes I think, "who buys all this stuff?"
Of course, I started with two small racks, but that didn't last long.
You buy one case and end up with a lot of empty space,
and you think, damn, now I've got to fill it with something.
A personality type that wants
to fill the cabinet, to collect things. I understand where they come from.
If I'd had access to Eurorack like this when I started, I'd probably
have lost all my social life and all my contacts
with the outside world by now, for sure.
Some people like collecting synthesizers the way others like collecting
porcelain figurines.
I don't see any difference between them.
I know that a good chunk of what I've made ends up as furniture,
I suppose some people just like the blinking lights.
You could probably make a patch that
makes no sound at all but blinks very pleasingly.
It's like a conveyor belt of new modules,
feeding the appetite.
I don't have a cool car or anything like that, but I have all these synth modules.
The world of modular synthesizers
is mostly boys playing with gear.
I often tell people to save a little money
for shoes for their kids.
It's really addictive, a real black hole.
You know, it's time to stop buying gear and start using it.
Good luck to those hermits who have a two-hundred-unit system at home.
Just hit the record button already.
I've never gotten so into anything in my life.
It's just like... I don't even know what to say,
it's just madness.
More. I need more,
and when I buy a new case for the studio, I sometimes tell myself,
look, there's no room left in this studio for another case,
for me this is a way to keep myself in check. Because if I don't limit myself,
I probably won't be able to stop, and that scares me.
While affordable Eurorack systems have finally made modular
accessible to a wide audience,
the market for exclusive systems still exists.
Just as in the early days of Moog and Buchla,
modern manufacturers often build direct relationships with their customers.
Working together with them to create unique, custom systems.
Some even deliver them in person.
Now that's a synth, damn.
The modern modular synthesizer renaissance began with the desire
of longtime enthusiasts
to finally master a machine that was once available only in dreams.
Then the Eurorack standard drew in a new group of users,
a generation raised on laptops and digital instruments,
looking for something new, and, ironically, finding it in what
seemed to be outdated technology.
When I first encountered Eurorack, it turned out to be much
more accessible,
financially too. It was something I could actually
build, and it opened up new doors.
And, of course, what's really cool is the stability.
If you have experience with regular synthesizers,
you're not used to thinking about replaceable components,
but with modulars it's different, you can interact with someone.
You learn to think differently. Instead of buying some effect,
you can take a different type of VCA,
with a linear and exponential curve, swap out one small
module in your
system, and that can fundamentally change your sound,
or even your whole approach.
Cool, though I have no idea what it does.
Well, you see, it's not so bad, in a way there's
a charm to it.
As far as I can see, the Euro format lets you get much more.
There are more modulation options than you can
actually use. That's it.
For example, the Roland System 100M.
I think this is one of the most interesting things to happen in the last
five years.
Modulars still have to make their way back into public awareness.
Mainstream culture resists their arrival.
But how long will that last?
Check this one out, I really like playing with it.
Firmly convinced that these amazing devices deserve
...wider market, Andreas Schneider is trying to draw attention to them
...retail shops across Europe.
This is just the beginning. People come in and say they just want to look around, and I always tell them,
you can touch everything and play with anything you like.
Would you like to see more?
Interested in seeing more, in seeing a modular?
Okay, come with me, I'll show you.
I used to bring them to shops, and the shops couldn't handle them.
They'd say, oh, that's just old analog junk. It's easier for us to sell
digital stuff,
because these need support, you have to show people
that they have to be connected with patch cables, and how to do it.
Otherwise they won't sell.
Wow, what's going on here?
So I said, fine, anyone who's interested can come in, and I'll explain it to them
all myself.
That's what I did, and I opened my own shop.
His famous shop, Schneider's Buero,
serves as the link between the public and small manufacturers of modules
and other rare musical equipment.
It's a legendary, wonderful place.
It's not just a shop, it's a gathering place for the community,
and that's great.
Andreas is very well known in the analog world, at least here in Europe.
He has all the qualities I don't have.
I think I'm a good developer and organizer,
I can organize production and all that,
but when it comes to connecting with people,
Andreas is far better than I am.
Who plays these instruments?
Who makes the music? And I found out that all these people,
former DJs, or just music lovers,
without knowing the difference between B-flat and
C and so on,
or what kind of sound that is, don't talk about music, they live it.
They live for music, and want to immerse themselves in it even more, and so do I.
Look around the corner, look at the world outside.
It's dirty, messy, even the greenery here is chaotic.
That's how it looks from my point of view.
You need to build your own chain,
and if you've removed something from the chain,
it won't be the same as it was.
All these things affect one another, they talk
to each other, a conversation builds up between them.
This is what a modular synthesizer is.
Each module has its own purpose, and by connecting them together,
you create a dialogue between them.
Nearly half a century after their creation,
modular synthesizers are finding their place in our cultural landscape once again.
But to finally earn the public recognition that, in the opinion of
many, they deserve,
modular synthesizers will have to leave the studios and take their
place on stage.
Where audiences can enjoy the sight of countless knobs,
switches and cables, and express
understanding rather than confusion.
Half a century ago, when Robert Moog and Don Buchla developed
the modular synthesizer,
they gave us an incredible sound-creating instrument, one capable of changing
music forever.
But were we ready to make
use of that gift?
We let modulars slip away from us,
too quickly for the technology
to become comfortable and easy to use.
Now, thanks to those who never stopped caring for them,
those who kept them alive
and those who recreated them, in both familiar and striking new forms,
it has become clear that modular synthesizers have risen again.
And now their golden age is arriving.
They have brought the magic back to the synth world,
magic lost to Korg, Yamaha, Roland,
and to the samey, meaningless sampler-and-scratch nonsense.
The idea is to start with one very simple sound,
with an oscillator,
and change everything about it, and none of
it is predetermined; you control every aspect of the sound,
and I really love
this idea, the ability to create something from scratch.
When you assemble a modular, choosing the options you need,
it opens the door to a completely new world.
You aren't constrained by the limits of a device that
someone else invented for you;
you think about what should be in the device for you.
I can upgrade my system by buying a new filter for a couple hundred
bucks or so,
and no two will be alike.
I understand why it's so cool.\NI understand why it's so easy to get hooked on it,
and now you have a choice.
Want digital oscillators?\NHere you go.
Want everything fully analog?\NYou can take that route.
People prize modulars for their endless possibilities,
and the incredible sonic palette they can create.
I used to believe that sooner or later, software
synths would be just as good as the real thing.
I don't believe that anymore.
What we're seeing is an explosion of ideas,\Na revolution is happening right now.
I think we humans get far more pleasure than we're willing to admit.
It's nice. It's nice to cost a city,
cars, musical instruments, and powerful sound systems.
And we do a lot of it simply for the enjoyment of the process.
When a generation sees the examples of the previous generation, it
wants to take part in it too.
To dance with it, to use it.
And I think each generation should, without any mercy,
steal the very best from the previous generation.
That's their duty, that's their obligation.
A film by Robert Fantinatto and Jason Amm\N"I Dream of Wires"
English translation:\NJediroman
They seep through open windows.
They spill out of the doors of recording studios.
And they rumble inside concert halls.
Sounds that come from another time,
yet strangely otherworldly.
They come from a machine that demands to be touched.
A machine that exists outside the world of computers
and outside the virtuality of the internet.
A machine that demands total dedication,
bordering on obsession.
And, let's not be afraid to say it,
a machine you can fall in love with.
The modular synthesizer is the pinnacle.
It's practically a fetish,
a remarkable device with blinking lights that produces sound.
I thought, "God, I need one of those."
It all came down to the power of the sound,
you heard a sound that literally tears the fabric of the universe.
For almost half a century, modular synthesizers have captivated musicians
and listeners with their mysterious sound and their striking, impressive appearance.
In an age of touchscreens and wireless controllers,
many people find it intimidating. It looks more like an airplane cockpit than a musical instrument.
So what exactly is a modular synthesizer?
To understand the origins of these remarkable devices,
we need to go back to the beginning of the age of electricity.
By the end of the 19th century,
the first power stations, like this one at Niagara Falls,
began generating electricity.
This new scientific marvel became part of almost every aspect
of human life.
It's no surprise that electricity found its way
into the world of music too.
Not just recording it, as the phonograph did,
but creating it,
using electricity as a source of sound.
Real electronic music.
Inventions such as the theremin amazed people with their strange, otherworldly sounds.
In the first half of the 20th century, a host of remarkable electronic instruments
emerged from both laboratories and workshops,
Most of the equipment in the first electronic studios
consisted of repurposed laboratory gear and expensive generators for testing radio devices
In the scientific community, music departments were eager
to explore these new horizons.
By the mid-1950s, in Europe and North America
there were several scattered electronic music studios.
Without a doubt, it was a turning point. It was a new field of music.
The ability to work with sound on a different level, to discover new compositional
approaches, new techniques,
new ways of working.
It was an astonishing, incredibly tempting field.
But there were very few real electronic musical instruments.
Basically, musicians had to make do with very little.
To start, you needed a microphone,
and two tape recorders so that
you could take sound from one, record it
onto the other,
changing it along the way.
My studio back then was a garage, and I had parts
from cars and trams, and various things
that made sounds, hung and laid out inside a piano.
The PBS television station in San Francisco
hired me to write music for The Computer and the Mind of Man, and they loved it, they were thrilled.
I got the money and bought an oscillator.
My first oscillator generated a sine or square wave,
you could switch between them, and it sounded something like this.
No control voltage, nothing like that.
Oscillators were very expensive; around 1958-59 they cost
about four hundred dollars.
Nowadays, I don't know, that would probably be four thousand for just one oscillator.
There was a real need for a ready-made solution,
something that could give a composer a full set of instruments
in one special device.
This mysterious building on the edge of Harlem in New York
once served as a home for secret experiments.
This is where the Manhattan Project began; Albert Einstein had an office
here on the second floor.
They gathered here in secret, not in the physicists' buildings,
keeping their meetings and work under wraps,
so that no one would find out about them. Hence the name Manhattan Project.
After the war, the Columbia University Computer Music Center settled here.
At the time, it was one of the most advanced electronic music studios
on the planet.
And its centerpiece was a machine that promised to give modern composers
the ability to revolutionize music.
Here we have the RCA Mark II, probably the first modern
electronic synthesizer
ever built that still survives today.
It's still here in our office, because it's actually bolted
to the concrete floor.
Moving it would be difficult, and we like having it nearby,
it's an amazing piece.
The Mark II combined a variety of specialized components
that generated, filtered, and shaped
sound with a level of control never seen before.
But it was the only instrument, and only a few serious composers
had a chance to use it.
The Mark II was in many ways similar to the first computers of the 1950s,
including the high price.
The approximate cost, I think,
was one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars.
Which is quite a lot. I think
in today's money that's several million. But by the late 1950s, the widespread adoption
of small, efficient transistors made all kinds of electronic devices
more compact and cheaper to produce.
The birth of a practical music synthesizer was
just a matter of time. At the same time the RCA arrived here,
a man named Robert Moog was studying in the physics department at Columbia.
Robert Moog apparently knew almost nothing
about the music center and the huge synthesizer.
Still, he was already involved in creating electronic instruments,
but much smaller ones.
For several years Moog successfully sold theremin do-it-yourself kits by mail
for assembly. He ran his business from a small shop in the remote town
of Trumansburg, New York.
One of those who owned a Moog theremin
was composer Herb Deutsch. My students' parents showed me a copy of, uh,
I think it was Electronic Times or something like that,
and there was an article called "Build Your Own Theremin".
I read the article and thought, "here it is, the way into a new world,"
and I can do it.
I built my own theremin, which is sitting right next to us now.
And the man who designed that theremin was a guy named Robert Moog.
Later I went to New York State for a music conference,
and there was a room where people were showing the instruments
they had built themselves.
And in that room stood Bob Moog, demonstrating his theremin kits.
The room was empty. He was there completely alone.
Bob and I immediately started talking about the idea of having synthesis
right at our fingertips.
About having a synthesizer right at home.
Something that would let you work with sound, record sound,
and change sound.
He asked the young inventor to build an oscillator for him
that could be controlled with precision.
Armed with Moog's voltage-controlled oscillators,
Deutsch was able to create pure electronic sounds with a level of control
that no laboratory oscillator could match.
And most importantly, Moog attached a traditional piano keyboard
to control pitch.
From the very start he hoped to draw working musicians' attention to his instruments.
And Bob realized this when he bought an organ keyboard just to play around with,
and I said it was good for control, and yes,
if you're going to do this, a keyboard would be a good addition.
It won't stop people from experimenting with sound.
And you'll definitely make a bit more money.
Moog's VCOs quickly caught the attention of music departments at several universities,
and he began developing various auxiliary components that
could be connected together.
Soon Moog's small factory in Trumansburg became a destination
for anyone looking for tools to explore new horizons in music.
In 1965 I was asked to set up an electronic music studio,
even though at that point I couldn't tell a patch cord from a banana,
and I went to Trumansburg, New York, and met Bob.
We hit it off right away. Very soon
we became friends. And my grant from SUNY Albany was enough to buy the first synthesizer.
And, by the way, I still didn't have enough money to buy a power supply, so for about a year
I powered it from a car battery.
Thanks to contacts with
universities and colleges, Moog developed new modules based on the suggestions and needs of musicians,
engineers and composers.
But it was during a visit to the University of Toronto that he was advised
to create a new type of module.
One that would produce one of the most distinctive and recognizable
sounds in modern music.
This is Moog modulars' secret weapon.
Voltage-controlled filters.
When Bob Moog came up with controlling pitch with a VCO,
all that was left was to create a concept for shaping sound so that electronic music
could become truly interesting.
At that time, a gentleman named Gustav Ciamaga was working at
the University of Toronto.
He headed the electronic music laboratory.
He commissioned Bob Moog to build the very first VCF.
Anyone familiar with Moog modulars will recognize the format in which
the filter was released.
But what no one had seen before is the earliest prototype.
This was the first filter Bob Moog ever built.
The filter "sweep" is probably the most recognizable sound
of the analog synthesizer.
Everyone knows this distinctive effect.
Eventually Moog reworked the design, releasing the 904 series filter.
Its original "ladder" transistor circuit gave the filter a very steep frequency cutoff,
resulting in a rich, deep sound.
And although these sounds are familiar to us now,
back then, in the mid-60s, they were revolutionary.
Today voltage-controlled resonant filters
are an essential element of nearly every synthesizer,
but no one can deny that Moog's early filters are true classics.
For many, they remain the best filters of all time.
This magnificent four-pole 24 dB Moog low-pass filter with
a feedback control is worth dying for.
It's fantastic.
It's very beautiful.
The 904 series filters are the best thing that ever happened to sound.
Even Moog himself must have realized he had created something special.
The "ladder" transistor design is the only part of his modular synthesizer
that he patented.
Moog's combination of VCO and VCF,
connected to a piano keyboard familiar to musicians,
became the defining component of his approach to electronic instruments.
It was destined to become known as the East Coast philosophy.
Meanwhile, new unusual sounds were being heard from the opposite
...the other side of the country.
But not from university halls.
The West Coast was undergoing a social revolution.
San Francisco became the epicenter of the counterculture,
a mass rejection of the values and ideals of the postwar generation.
Young people from all over America gathered in neighborhoods like Haight-Ashbury,
where they found the freedom to experiment with a new way of life.
And mind-expanding drugs.
Experiments were happening in art too. Especially in music.
And it was right here that a completely different modular synthesizer was born.
More than forty years later, two founders of the San Francisco
Tape Music Center
came to Mills College in Berkeley, California, to visit an old friend.
This is the very first Buchla synthesizer.
A prototype of what would later become the
Well, I haven't used this machine in quite a while.
There were no blueprints, so half the time I didn't know
what was going on inside.
This instrument was the product of the mind of Don Buchla,
a former NASA engineer drawn into the West Coast counterculture
and its community of artists and musicians.
I remember Don attending tape music festivals, and I remember the experimental
sound movement that existed in those days.
And I think it was that environment that helped Don create his unique aesthetic.
Eventually, he became part of the San Francisco Tape Music Center,
a collective of experimenters and avant-garde composers founded
by Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick.
The Tape Center came about because none of us could
afford to buy equipment on our own.
So I called Morton and said, listen, you've got a garage full of strange
gadgets and a few tape recorders.
And I've got the same kind of attic, so why don't we
put it all in one place?
And we decided to call it tape music (tape music).
Anything you could record on tape and play back through speakers suited us,
and that's how the name San Francisco Tape Music Center came about.
By then there were several composers among us,
musicians came to work with the equipment, there was a lot of talk,
and I knew transistors had arrived, that was big news.
It meant electronics would soon get much cheaper.
a new genre in music would emerge, one that doesn't inherit
the traditions of existing art,
arising from the fact that any person would have the chance to
work with sound, something like home drawing.
This person could become a studio artist, a composer.
There would be a kind of complete freedom of electronic creativity.
We placed an ad in the paper, and a few engineers responded,
but none of them could understand what we were talking about,
we could see they were completely out of their depth.
Besides, we weren't offering any pay, but then Buchla showed up, and Don was
wonderful, simply amazing.
I started explaining that I needed a
specific configuration. I didn't need a keyboard, those typical black-and-white keys,
and I didn't want to make music that already exists.
And everything I had talked about eventually took shape
in an analog computer, an analog computer that generates sounds.
It appeared at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, probably in 1965.
And so he brought it in, and it had a label that read
"San Francisco Tape Music Center Incorporated," and when Ramon and I saw it,
I got angry. I told Don that we didn't want to be in business,
we just wanted to make electronic music.
He said we would sell it,
and I replied, well, if you want to, sell it, you're the inventor,
but we don't want to be part of a business, making money, I mean, seriously...
Sorry, but we didn't go along with it.
Later Buchla renamed the modules under the Buchla and Associates brand,
and eventually they ended up in the hands of other sound researchers
outside the Tape Center.
This is one of the very first Buchlas
from the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Some modules are labeled, and some just have
handwritten prototype labels, as you can see,
so it's a jumble.
The famous red panel, apparently soaked in LSD,
so you could lick it and get a rush of inspiration.
The mysterious electronic sounds of the Buchla
provided the background for many events on the hills of San Francisco.
To hear those strange pulsing sounds right in the middle of some gardens,
while you were high on something, yeah, probably that
blew your mind a little,
for many of those who got to hear the Buchla in that setting.
In the world of modular synthesis, you hear about
the philosophy of the East Coast and the philosophy of the West Coast.
The roots of this lie in the 1960s, when Bob Moog and Don Buchla were both developing
their original systems,
they approached it from somewhat philosophically different angles, which resulted in
two different schools of using synthesizers.
In the world of Buchla and Subotnick, the approach was: let's create
something completely new.
Let's create sounds, let's create music that isn't based on tradition.
And I think that was only possible back then, only in a place like San Francisco
or on the West Coast,
where people were far removed from the many rules, constraints and etiquette
of the East Coast.
In Moog systems, the systems of the East Coast philosophy, rich waveforms are used, such as
sawtooth, square, pulse and noise. Harmonically rich shapes, from which, with the help of
a delicious four-pole filter,
these harmonics are carved out, and feedback creates a sense of "movement"
in the sound over time, making it more interesting.
Buchla used oscillators with different waveforms, but very simple
filters after them.
In most patches on West Coast synthesizers,
there is hardly any filtering at all.
If you want to create a harmonically interesting sound,
you need to use a wave shaper.
You get sine waves layered on top of each other several times,
to get something dense.
This is a completely different approach to synthesis.
It's not subtractive synthesis in the usual sense.
It gives the sound unique qualities that you
cannot recreate with any other system.
However, of these two different devices, it was the Moog modulars that became forever
associated with electronic music.
The reason is simple: the presence of a piano keyboard,
familiar to the average musician, which he could work with right away.
Bob was interested in winning success among
commercial musicians.
By "commercial" I mean musicians
who make money from music.
Most avant-gardists don't fall into that category.
The idea of adapting a piano keyboard to a synthesizer was discussed with enthusiasm.
I told him right away, we don't need a black-and-white keyboard.
Because I knew what would come of it.
If I had a keyboard,
I'd be making ordinary music.
That's not what I wanted.
Moogs worked great with a piano keyboard, because
they could easily generate the notes of the Western scale.
For the Buchla, that was extremely difficult.
Doing it with a Buchla was really hard,
they simply weren't built for it, and couldn't
hold their tuning for long.
The classic image of a musician turning a knob with one hand
and playing the keyboard with the other,
immediately gave the Moog modulars the look of a convenient musical instrument.
It looked like a natural progression.
It was as if this electronic musical machine had come out of nowhere, one that could be
played from a piano-like keyboard.
One of the first professional musicians to try
a Moog modular was Bernie Krause.
Together with his partner Paul Beaver,
they saw a potential market in Hollywood
for the new, innovative sounds that could be achieved with the Moog,
and decided to take a chance.
We flew to Trumansburg, where Moog's factory was.
He showed us the whole assembly process, how everything worked.
It was a beautiful instrument, not only from an aesthetic point of view,
but also reliable and working perfectly.
We had a choice, to buy a Moog or a Buchla,
and since the Moog gave more control over the parameters,
we bought the Moog.
Moog realized that these two could bring
his synthesizer to a new market,
and offered them the role of sales agents
on the West Coast.
But at first things went slowly.
In Los Angeles we got nowhere, because
nobody understood what it was.
A year went by in trying. We showed the instrument
to every producer and composer we could find.
And we met with no understanding. They asked us, like, could you
play Monday Monday on it, make a cover version?
Finally we ended up at the Monterey Pop Festival,
with our last bill in our pocket. The rest is history.
A lot of bands came to the Monterey Pop Festival,
with piles of money in their pockets, and they suddenly decided they had to
spend it on shopping.
It's very American to buy things. We sold there, at the festival,
I think ten or twelve synthesizers, each one priced
at fifteen thousand bucks, in 1967.
Back then that was a lot of money.
Because synthesizers from the East, Moog synthesizers, fit so well
into the rock music of the time,
roughly the late '60s, the '70s,
we found ourselves among all these superstars, like Keith Emerson and others.
They were used by pop groups, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Monkees, The Osmonds,
and everyone who wanted
to be on trend and produce those unconventional sounds had
a modular synthesizer.
While Moog kept making its way into the hands of
professional musicians,
Don Buchla stubbornly resisted adding a keyboard controller to his setup.
He had a different idea.
You can get a very powerful sound this way, and
I like it a lot too. You can't do that with a piano keyboard,
that's for sure.
There were two keyboards, well, not keyboards,
I don't know why we call it that, it's not a keyboard.
It's a touch-sensitive voltage source.
We call it a pressure sensor, though that's not quite accurate.
The more skin touches this spot,
the more electricity flows. Pressing harder increases the area of contact.
While Moog had his famous filter,
Buchla also made something for his modular that had a huge impact
on contemporary music.
The analog sequencer became very popular among synthesizer players.
Buchla designed it primarily to replace cutting up tape.
Many of us were already using loops back then, but tape loops.
Yeah.
After Buchla came along, it became clear that we wanted to be able to
do what we had been doing before.
It's an eight-step sequencer, with three voltage controls.
When Moog was starting out, I got to know him well.
He came to my studio to figure out how the sequencer worked.
Because he, as you know, did everything with a keyboard.
And I showed him how I use the sequencer.
He said, "Isn't that just a loop?" and I said, "No, no, I don't use it that way."
I mean, you can use it for loops, yes, it's good for that.
A sequence can be made into a loop. A metronome is essentially a rhythmic loop too.
A loop is measurable. A sequence, in theory, is infinite.
Put together, it's just a bomb.
Subotnick was ready to start using the Buchla, but some members of Tape
Center began to pull away.
I basically lived in the countryside, hanging out
with the redwoods, playing acoustic music, chants, and basically doing everything
you could do out in the open.
To me all that electronic stuff looked like something urban, so I threw it all out.
And I thought, why not go to New York?
I'd do my own music, and that's the only place everyone would get to know about me,
not in San Francisco.
While in New York, Subotnick got a new assignment: to write a fully
electronic album.
For him it was a chance not only to explore the possibilities of the Buchla,
but also to pursue his own concept of studio work.
On Silver Apples of the Moon I had a patch, I had two sixteen-step
sequencers and an eight-step one.
I set the first to sixteen steps, the second to fifteen,
and the eight-step one to seven. In the end it came out to
15 times 16 before the
sequence repeated. So I could make a sequence 18 (slip?) long at 15 by 7 steps, and it worked.
But when it ended, I could use another voltage to
transpose the whole thing
and slightly shift the entire range. And I could
improvise with it until I got something that
thrilled me, about three minutes long, say.
It was something, seriously.
Thanks to this machine I was able to look at myself in a new way and find in myself
things I hadn't suspected before.
Silver Apples of the Moon is considered an important milestone in history:
a wholly electronic album, created, performed and recorded by one person,
essentially "on the knee".
But this legendary work by Subotnick did not have a great influence
on the general public.
Modular synthesizers burst into people's consciousness thanks to
this album.
The real turning point, the reason Moog became as
"Pampers" of synthesizers in the early '70s,
was Switched On Bach. Many people
didn't consider electronic music
real music until something recognizable but made with synthesizers came along.
Switched On Bach was made by Walter, now Wendy Carlos,
a physicist and accomplished pianist who, among other things, was fascinated
by recording technology.
Moog, with its keyboard and its ability to play Western scale notes, was perfectly suited
to Carlos's bold idea:
to play Johann Sebastian Bach's classical works on the most cutting-edge
musical instrument.
Its record came out after Silver Apples.
I was shocked that it was called electronic music.
It could have become very popular, and I said, hmm, wait a minute,
that's exactly what's going to happen, and I don't want that.
Because here we're trying to expand the musical vocabulary, and this work
is squeezing it back down.
It was a very famous recording, and I think the best-selling one
of all time.
My first reaction was, "wow, all these gadgets can produce amazing sounds, so why
use them to create this?"
In other words, it was a great, great exercise in technique.
But...
But I still admitted that it was electronic, and that it was music.
So it was electronic music after all, but
they couldn't... Silver Apples of the Moon was electronic, and Switched On Bach
was electronic too, but these
were two different things, completely different, and in the end
the world went down that path.
Modern popular electronic music can be said to have grown out of it,
but on the East Coast, let's say, there have always been outsiders,
pioneers
of the uncharted, so to speak. Very significant, but not mainstream.
Eventually Moog released its sequencer,
and combined with the ease with which his modular synthesizers worked
with the traditional tempered scale,
music built on sequences, from krautrock to disco, quickly
became part of pop culture.
As for the question of who first created the modular synthesizer,
Usually the answer to that is Moog. But is that really so?
A couple of years before he died, Moog said to us when we were at a conference,
someone asked, like,
who actually built the first synthesizer, and I answered
"Maybe it was Bob."
But he said no, you built it a year before me.
I'm sure of that, because I only made a few modules,
and when the Buchla came out, I was blown away, it put everything you needed
into one ready-made unit.
There's no exact answer to who was first,
but it's crystal clear that it was
Moog that became the most famous.
The reason for that was probably that Moog designed
his system while listening to what
his target audience of professional musicians wanted.
As a result, Moog was able to put a relatively practical
and reliable electronic musical instrument on the market.
That's the strength of Bob Moog.
He turned synthesizers into a brand.
He made the word Moog a synonym for synthesizer.
People often say, oh, you collect Moogs?
I hear that a lot, because they instantly link everything analog or
synthesizer-related with Moog.
It sounds amazing, doesn't it? Rich, deep, endlessly changeable
sound. It's a wonderful machine.
Whether the Buchla or the Moog was first doesn't matter,
soon their competitors began to appear,
quickly releasing their big modular systems.
Like the American ARP 2500,
the British EMS Synthi 100,
and the Japanese Roland System 100M,
and the System 700. They started taking a share of the market from Moog.
All of these systems were built for big studios,
university music labs
and wealthy musicians.
An ordinary person could only dream of them.
For my thirteenth birthday I got
tickets to Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Brain Salad Surgery.
Keith Emerson had a huge synthesizer, and from the wrist controllers
fireworks were shooting out of it,
flashes were going off above the keyboard,
and I thought, wow, what is that thing?
It looked like a car from a Ferrari catalogue,
we were all drooling over Keith Emerson's Moog 55, it was out of reach for us.
At that time, only Keith Emerson could afford something like that,
and we couldn't have hauled all that gear around with us anyway.
All of these things were so far beyond anything an
ordinary person could buy.
Modular equipment was always out of reach,
like big rooms full of lab instruments and all that kind of thing.
Finally, the Moog factory in Trumansburg released the first synthesizer
that became an object of desire for ordinary musicians,
an electronic instrument they could play and actually figure out
without an engineer's help.
In 1970, Moog released an instrument that became the model for
synthesizers for many years to come,
right up to the present day: the Minimoog.
It was the Minimoog that made it an iconic figure.
It was small and easy to use, and, despite its still high price, it was already
within reach of a serious musician.
Its front panel still bore the familiar look of a modular.
Importantly, the Minimoog had the legendary "ladder" filter,
which gave it a sound that instinctively drew in musicians and listeners alike.
It was an elegant instrument that gave the average musician access
to the deep, rich sound of Moog modulars at a lower price and weight.
Of course, it was much lighter. And the older you get, the less you want to lug heavy things around.
But in everything else, it came nowhere near the versatility of its big brother.
Bob wasn't particularly thrilled with the Minimoog's success.
He really didn't like the cutting back of functionality.
I hate to say it, but I think he saw
the creation of the Minimoog as a necessary evil, something like that,
although in the end
he realized it all worked out for the best.
This is the forty-ninth unit, and it still works just as well as it did
many years ago.
The following year ARP also released
a scaled-down version of the mighty ARP 2500, the semi-modular 2600.
The 2600 was an attempt to create a portable, affordable synthesizer with
the flexibility of a modular.
The individual components were already wired together, but
those connections could be redefined using patch cords plugged into the inputs and outputs.
Combined with their sequencer, it was a powerful, portable
and relatively inexpensive alternative to a full modular.
Almost any band in the world could afford a Minimoog or an ARP 2600,
and so these instruments gained popularity in making
pop music and on stage.
The Minimoog and ARP 2600 sold very well among working musicians
who could afford them.
But outside the mainstream there were many musicians who wanted to try
their hand at electronic music,
and who couldn't even afford these stripped-down synthesizers.
I remember there was the only, or at least
one of the few shops in London selling the Minimoog on Tottenham Court Road.
I remember going there to try one and not being able to get a single sound out of it,
like, "how does this thing work?"
They were so expensive that I
had no chance of buying one.
In the seventies, Minimoogs were expensive.
So I started building my own.
I thought, well, I can build one like that, I can make filters just as good and
oscillators, which is what I did.
But at the end of the seventies, something happened
that temporarily took synthesizers out of favor with both musicians and listeners.
In those days, many people were hostile toward synth players,
especially punks,
saying, we just press buttons here,
this isn't real music, as if you could
just press a button, get some noise, and that's it.
They had no idea how much effort it took,
especially in my case, since I built everything myself,
and that it all has to be patched and tuned, and that takes work.
It's not just "press a button." People were throwing things at synthesizers.
People didn't like them because they reminded them of Pink Floyd,
there was some stupid prejudice against psychedelia.
Nonconformity and music go hand in hand.
What drives me crazy is that the wildest
nonconformist musicians you can imagine become incredibly conservative when it comes to their equipment.
Guitarists especially.
Synthesizers are actually far more radical than guitars,
one finger
is enough to play music on them,
and you can get far more brutal and varied noise out of them
than out of any guitar.
I played in a three-piece punk band, guitar, bass and drums,
and we recorded some demos, got a contract, went to the studio,
And in the control room, in the corner, there was a Minimoog.
I had never seen a synthesizer in person before.
Honestly, I wasn't even a fan,
I liked some of Kraftwerk, but I wasn't a particular fan
of electronic music.
But I got interested anyway. I loved gadgets, and I liked how it looked,
the knobs and buttons. I started messing around with it
just like that, without the faintest idea what I was doing.
And I got some phenomenal sounds. I was absolutely blown away by what I heard.
In the rush, on the fly, I reworked my
guitar punk songs into a rather amateurish synth
d-d-d-d-d.
I took it to a record label
and told them I'd come across a synthesizer and I believed that
this was the future.
I wanted to make exactly this kind of music for the rest of my life, seriously.
It just captivated me.
And just at the time when electronic music was finding its place
in the musical landscape,
cheap, easy-to-use synthesizers appeared,
mostly from Japan,
at a price an ordinary person could afford.
A friend of a friend was a musician, and he had a 700S,
he showed it to me and I thought, "That's what I need."
And the reason I needed it, the thing that "sold" it to me,
was the repeat function,
which could produce
something like sequences without a sequencer, by means of
retriggering the envelope,
and for me that was the decisive moment, since I'm weak at music, so something that plays a rhythm
would be just the thing.
It was very impressive, and with it you could get really scary noises,
the speakers were simply blown out. I liked it so much
that I thought, we need to get into this.
I was so stunned by the fact that I had a synthesizer
that I didn't even think about anything more complicated.
Depeche Mode started out as a guitar band.
We realized that with synthesizers we could achieve a far more interesting
sound than with guitars,
because our playing was terrible.
This was perfect for what I wanted to express.
You didn't have to be a musician in the usual sense.
Of course, you had to be somebody, but not that much.
And to everyone's delight, digital components were added to synthesizers,
allowing settings to be saved as presets that could be recalled at the press of a button.
The era of preset synthesizers had arrived.
You press a button and it sounds great. Give me two.
I sensed the danger in presets right away.
The problem was with me, not the instruments, because you could still
tweak them into something of your own if you were willing to spend the time.
I noticed our attitude had changed, like,
let's try a different sound, scroll through the presets, and I realized
that this wouldn't work, our minds dry up from boredom, I'm not interested in that.
While small, affordable synthesizers
flooded the market, the big modular Moogs, Buchlas, ARPs and EMSs went back to where they started.
Into the hands of elite experimental composers.
And university music centers.
Besides this, a new technology was being developed,
threatening to take away the modular synthesizers' lead in capabilities
for sound editing.
Some of the methods we use to describe music as
a graphic function,
can also be applied to speech, and we can gain a lot
by studying these simple sounds.
Computers have long been associated with electronic music,
mainly as controllers.
But as computers became smaller
and cheaper, the day when synthesis itself would become fully digital became
just a matter of time.
A completely redrawn waveform would appear on the screen.
A synthesizer that can play bell sounds,
crystal-clear piano, drums, and so on and so forth, and all of it
in one package.
The Synclavier, and later the powerful Fairlight,
quickly replaced modulars as the instrument of choice for elite
commercial musicians.
What I liked about the Fairlight was the sampling capability.
Plus it came with a large library, which helped a lot.
The novelty of sampling, and the ability to play real sounds
struck me.
I'd say that's where the death of analog began.
If the Synclavier was the beginning of the end,
then the real killer of analog was a small, cheap
Japanese synthesizer
the Yamaha DX7. Its arrival hit the synth business like a tsunami.
The DX7 used incredibly complex FM synthesis algorithms to create
its recognizable, if artificial, sound.
There was only one data entry slider on the front panel.
Creating your own patches was an absolute nightmare for the average user,
so it came with hundreds of preprogrammed presets that were rarely even edited.
If you buy one secondhand somewhere now,
the presets are guaranteed to still be there, because nobody actually programmed it.
I can understand working musicians who perform live need
the ability to press a button and get the sound they want.
At the time it sounded pretty good, I mean,
now it's old hat,
but back then it was a real revolution.
I never played a DX7, so I don't have much to say about it, but I hated its sound.
The comfortable human interface went out the window, and it felt completely unnatural
when you sat in front of a DX7, poking at numbers,
moving them up and down with the slider, and, like,
okay,
so, this one sounds good, right?
They dedicated a whole factory to producing the DX7,
and could churn out by the thousands what everyone wanted,
at a very low price.
And everyone immediately needed a DX7 because of its distinctive sound,
and then some other synthesizer comes out, which gets used in some
rock hit,
and now everyone needs that one.
When the Ensoniq Mirage came out, people started selling off all
their gear
and buying them, simply because it was affordable, they couldn't
do anything else.
There were no more high-end instruments on the market creating
real magic.
Now they were trying to do everything for everyone, and the first
primitive workstations began to appear,
and new interesting sounds gave way to cheap junk,
capable of doing a bit of everything, but without any character of its own.
Huge modular systems, once the pride and joy of elite studios,
were often sold for scrap metal.
I bought my first 2600 at a pawn shop for about 250 dollars,
in pretty beaten-up condition. Apparently,
it had been through a lot, but still.
Think of the computers from the early '60s, the size of a house -
that's what they looked like back then. So you could buy a modern
digital Roland
for a thousand dollars. Who even needed those rooms
crammed with modules?
Even at Berkeley at that time there was a room full of analog synths
that nobody needed,
I think there were a couple of ARP 2600s.
And they were simply abandoned, you know, thrown out.
Nobody needed these huge, constantly going out of tune,
and generally unstable contraptions anymore.
The 80s were hard times for modular synthesizers.
Some of them ended up on the scrap heap in the end.
Most just gathered dust in basements and closets,
except for the few that were maintained and rescued by people who cared about them.
But in the late 80s something happened that changed
the fate of analog synthesizers.
Acid house brought analog synths back for real.
People making dance music realized that the sounds you could get from
some of the old machines
were far, far better and more convincing than what
the new toys produced.
With the 909 and the 303, you just had to turn the bass knobs and it was already
very impressive!
A ton of bass!
When people started going back to analog sound,
it turned out that turning real knobs and pulling faders, and all that,
was much more interesting and fun.
I felt that rock music was finished, and I didn't want to have
anything to do with it,
while dance music was electrifying; it seemed like the future of music.
People used Squid 8s, which is a
chord sequencer, and the Mirage,
and the 808s and 909s,
and one guy, I remember, had a Memory Moog, my favorite synthesizer.
From being quite cheap, they became outrageously, unreasonably expensive.
Because everyone around me, like me, started doing what I did,
you know.
People started getting into vintage gear, everyone fell in love with devices like these,
like the TB303 and the TR909,
but when it came to big modules and all that stuff,
they still didn't really understand what they were for.
While dance music producers eagerly snapped up vintage drum machines and
simple analog synths,
modular synthesizers stayed in the shadows.
For those who never lost their craving for modular synths,
this was a chance to finally get their hands on the instruments they had only dreamed of,
and that's how the community of vintage and modular synth enthusiasts began to grow.
I hate the word "obsolete."
It drives me crazy when people say "oh, that's outdated technology."
But it still works, doesn't it?
There was a period, roughly between the DX7 and the rise of acid house,
those few years when
digital ruled and nobody cared about analog sound.
People probably thought I was crazy, I was buying all this hefty gear,
which is so hard to transport, constantly breaks down, and never
stays in tune.
And there was this thing where people would say, "oh, this is a really rare piece,
grab it while you can."
I love analog for its unpredictability, it's like a wobbly
machine,
like a plane or a bicycle that keeps trying to slip out of your hands,
and you have to keep going forward.
You never know what's coming next, and that's part of the fun.
It's different every time.
Jack Danger is responsible for the sonic palette of the influential industrial dance
project Meat Beat Manifesto.
His studio on a hilltop
outside San Francisco is filled with an enviable collection of top-tier and rare vintage
modular synthesizers.
Somewhere around '93, I think, the word "vintage" started being applied to
synthesizers.
I remember seeing them for the first time and thinking they looked strange.
I don't even know why I'm drawn to old gear rather than new.
I just can't, um, buy up absolutely everything.
There was a time when the '70s modulars and all that were replaced by
Fairlight and Synclavier,
so around the early '80s, the prices for this kind of equipment
were pretty tempting.
There you go, Wendy Carlos!
And this is the Roland System 700.
It all started with an interest in drum machines.
Andy and I were in Erasure, recording an album in Hamburg.
I'd already had experience with a lot of drum machines,
but then it suddenly occurred to me that it would be great to use a bunch of small
drum boxes, the kind that would sound the way drum machines are supposed to sound,
unlike drum machines that use samples, like the Linn,
which don't sound like real drums. Well, and it snowballed.
I started buying small drum machines, and then I moved on to synths.
Synthesizers from different manufacturers sound completely different,
for example, I started to tell apart the sound of Korg filters from, say,
the sound of Moog filters.
And I needed as much variety as possible.
I still have cheat sheets like these, just in case.
There are no rules, you know, no inputs and outputs with labels saying
that you can't plug this cable
into that jack. Everything is done
by trial and error.
The first thing I bought, by the way, new, was the Roland System 100M.
That was in '83 or '84, back then.
That's when I started learning to use modulars.
At first I used cheat sheets of settings all the time,
like, here's how you make a trumpet sound: you take
this patch, plug it in here, and turn this knob to
a quarter to eight,
and that's it. It doesn't sound anything like a trumpet.
As interest in vintage modulars grew,
so did the shortage of these instruments, which was just one of their drawbacks.
One of the biggest problems with vintage gear is reliability.
I mean, forget about tuning and similar problems,
you could be just sitting there and boom, something breaks, and it drives you up the wall.
For me, old electronics are junk.
What amazes me is that they managed to put all this together, working with
all these lousy components.
If you open up an old Moog,
it looks like a dusty pile of junk that even bums wouldn't pick up for the scrap metal.
By the early '90s,
Modular geeks who bought unneeded systems cheaply from basements,
ran into the real cost of owning vintage gear: expensive repairs and upkeep.
Collectors often come to us for repair and maintenance
of their equipment,
and the older it gets, the harder it is to find the parts it needs,
and to keep it working.
So the question is keeping old analog gear alive and putting it to use in today's world.
Even if you have the money and the patience to maintain vintage modular systems,
the shortage of components will always be an insurmountable problem.
In the end, despite the efforts of those who cared for them,
modular synthesizers seemed doomed.
But where there's a will, there's a way.
And so, one devoted modular synth fan decided
to take matters into his own hands.
Frankly, I was more interested in the hardware than the music;
music was just a way to use the hardware.
Equipment is what my interest in this is centered on,
so that's what I'll do. I'll work on equipment,
the thing I'm good at.
Bruce Duncan, the man who created Modcan,
became the first in decades to release a modern full-fledged
modular system.
Like many enthusiasts of the mid-90s,
Bruce built modules for his own vintage systems.
But then he took a step forward.
It started as a hobby, and when my modules got good enough
to sell,
I just made a website, and people started flooding me with emails wanting to buy some of
what I'd made.
There was no business calculation, no plan or anything like that; it was
just a hobby.
Although Bruce's Modcan became the first new module manufacturer,
he didn't stay alone for long.
When I started MOTM, I took a stack of drafting paper,
back when we still used drafting tables, and started thinking about what Bob Moog had been missing.
I made a list of everything he didn't have in the late 60s
and early 70s
that we did have.
I looked at the schematics of the old Moog modulars and snorted.
He did the best he could; after all, this was 1968.
On Valentine's Day in 1998, I opened my website,
and put two modules up for sale, a power supply and a noise generator.
That's where it all started.
That same year, Roger Errick launched his site,
synthesizers.com, offering ready-made systems that looked like Moog modular synthesizers.
Like a Ferrari assembly kit, you got the look and feel of the real thing,
but without the high price and upkeep.
It all seemed too good to be true, for a while
many people thought it was a scam.
But soon everyone realized that the mythical giant modular,
the one they once saw Keith Emerson playing, could live in their home studio
for a fairly reasonable price.
By the late '90s, full-size modular synthesizers
that looked and worked like Moogs became very popular,
mostly thanks to people wanting to fulfill their childhood dreams.
These machines were new, equipped with cutting-edge electronics, yet
they looked familiar and comfortable.
Still, for many, even these new modulars
remained an impossible burden,
too big and impractical, still out of reach for the average musician.
By the mid-2000s, many electronic musicians
chose a device that most of them already had.
Our generation was probably the first
to have a hundred-dollar gadget you could play games on.
And, unexpectedly, it could replace an entire studio.
When I went to university, a computer turned out to be able to be a studio.
Yes, I think everyone used them at some point, at least
everyone I know,
because back then it was like science fiction come true, fitting your whole studio
into a computer,
since that seemed to be what everyone had been waiting for.
Everyone does everything with one device, with their laptop.
And that's great, and it sounds good, no doubt about it.
You've got a software CS80 that sounds great,
and there's no real CS80, and no 20 thousand dollars to
buy one, you know how it is.
I started using Logic, Reason, Pro Tools,
doing everything on the computer, and then I had to work a lot with Excel,
and that's when I decided that when making music, I no longer wanted to
touch a computer.
there's a state where you think, okay, I'm tired, or I'm
not getting anywhere with the track, whatever, I'll go
kill some time on Facebook,
see what my friends are doing. And it's always like that.
Maybe people decided that digital gear has no soul,
unlike analog, which is simpler, something you can actually
touch with your hands.
I sit at the computer and think, yeah, it sounds great,
and the controls are convenient,
I like the control and flexibility I have, but I
don't feel any inspiration.
When it comes to music, I still
want to play music, and it's very hard, you know,
to feel like you're actually playing,
using a computer.
It's a nightmare, really.
All this computer music is a nightmare,
because you can edit everything. People stopped just making music,
they keep fiddling until they've wiped out every flaw and imperfection,
until they've wiped out all the interest.
Despite their flaws, software synthesizers on the computer were the
best choice for many people.
However, the new hardware format will create a new approach to modular synthesizers,
synthesizers,
a chance for people to get acquainted with them.
There was a period when I was writing music and at the same time designing
hardware.
But very quickly I realized I was a better developer than a musician.
The company opened in 1992, and it consisted of just one person.
I had an oscilloscope at home,
a soldering iron, and all that.
Many people were looking for something new, and, well,
modular synths weren't exactly anything new,
everyone knows there's Moog, EMS, and others.
But I said we should try to make them accessible.
Doepfer developed a new form factor for modular synthesizers, now
known as Eurorack.
Instead of adopting the standard five units in height, like Moog,
he used only three, which made the system very compact.
I remember the first time we demonstrated the A-100, in Frankfurt.
When he told the dealers that he was going to make modular synthesizers,
wanting to bring them back to the market,
they replied, "yeah, sure, just stick them somewhere out of the way at the show".
Everyone was saying, hey, modular synths, nobody's going to want that, let's
put our MIDI keyboards and all that stuff up front.
Well, guess where everyone at the show went,
they all made their way to the back, to the modular gear.
Because a lot of people, those who remembered them from back in the day,
were genuinely thrilled by it.
And I said, see, I told you so!
Around 2000 or so, I said, that's it, we get it.
People are interested.
Back in the early 2000s, when Eurorack and Moog-style 5U modules started to
gain popularity,
Don Buchla released his 200e, based on the 200 series from the 1970s.
It was nothing more than an attempt to revive the analog sound.
I learned electronic music exclusively on Moog instruments,
although of course I knew about Buchla.
But I only saw one in person when I bought this one.
I never tried one myself until I bought mine.
What drew me to this system, as opposed to the traditional ones,
like the ones sold on synthesizers.com,
was the design philosophy, the density of the modules.
Each of these oscillators is a dual oscillator,
the filters are triple, and envelope generators come four at a time,
that's it.
Thanks to this density in the modules, you get
extensive functionality
in a small size, a small footprint.
That's, so to speak, one of the advantages of Buchla's philosophy.
Modular synths have truly experienced a comeback,
but for the first decade they remained a fairly niche market,
sustained mainly by a small but devoted community.
But in recent years, modular synths have started to reach the edges
of the mainstream.
The annual NAMM show in Anaheim, California, draws more than 100,000 visitors,
who come to try out the latest musical instrument releases.
Alongside guitar amps and karaoke systems, there are booths
with modular synthesizers.
Since Doepfer developed his format,
the number of companies making Eurorack-compatible modules
has been steadily growing.
It's a very creative format where you can take whatever you want,
plug it in, try it out,
and if you don't like it, sell that module
and get another one.
Right now there are 45 to 50 different module manufacturers on the market,
even if some of them only make one or two modules.
That has a huge influence on choice and direction.
There are guys who make modules
that, honestly, I look at and can't figure out how to use.
There's something for everyone. I'm always amazed at the number of
new users
who come in and breathe life into all these strange ideas
dreamed up by different people.
Sometimes you come across really odd people designing their own modules,
and it's a real joy to see.
Because most of them really
pour themselves into their ideas and push the technology forward.
It's not just about making money.
I'm really glad for music as a whole, and for the culture that is slowly, little by little
gaining popularity.
It's a positive sign that people are using their minds to create music,
and to think about it.
I have a lot of respect for Dieter Doepfer for his contribution to the revival of the
modular synthesizer industry.
He isn't bothered at all by other people making
Eurorack modules.
He believes it only expands possibilities and strengthens the industry.
Strong competition for sales only has a positive effect.
People were excited. We put together
I think about twenty-five modules, and sold them all in less than a day.
I was impressed, it was something else.
The first module I made for Make Noise was basically
a mod of a mod; I made it for myself. I didn't think anyone would want to
buy them.
And they all sold out in
about 12 hours. It was crazy, really cool.
New manufacturers are popping up, taking on what others have stumbled over.
And by the way, they do it cheaply. They're not trying to, like, get into people's pockets
who have already bought vintage gear and will happily shell out big money.
They're essentially doing it for young people, essentially trying to get them off plugins.
Eurorack is the perfect environment for experimentation.
In part it's a boutique industry, and small runs mean you can sometimes
come up with something very unusual.
You can come up with some cool, high-tech gadget, and
share it
with a big audience. And that's great.
I like that it's all a mix of different companies,
different logos, it looks kind of
punk, which is cool.
Guys can make this in their garage, without a giant
Japanese corporation
behind them that would fund the development of an instrument which, by the time it reaches production,
gets cut down and trampled to the level of plain crap by some
board of directors.
Anyone can just throw something together, and boom, it's done.
Although modulars have made their way onto well-known exhibition floors,
for an ordinary person, the easiest way to try
modular synthesizers
is to attend one of the informal meetups that are often organized
by local enthusiasts.
At this meetup in Berkeley, California, attendees, whether
with their own gear or without,
can chat, swap knowledge, or meet the developers in person.
Eric Barbour, founder of Metasonix,
is one of the well-known developers working in the Eurorack format.
And not just because of his bright yellow panels.
His vacuum-tube-based designs are no gimmick.
Out of work, he decided to put his
unusual engineering experience to use.
Doesn't anyone need a forty-five-year-old engineer?
With a very unusual set of skills? Vacuum tubes. Ominous.
I like Metasonix.
For us, it's the perfect choice,
because even some noise
never gets lost in the sound.
They have this fat, distorted character that
you can't get rid of.
My filters sound different, my oscillators sound different.
You can't make them not sound different.
The number of modules available now is staggering.
And for people who get carried away, they can develop a harmful habit.
Every day some new crazy modules come out that people just can't live without.
Sometimes I think, "who buys all this stuff?"
Of course, I started with two small racks, but that didn't last long.
You buy one case and end up with a lot of empty space,
and you think, damn, now I've got to fill it with something.
A personality type that wants
to fill the cabinet, to collect things. I understand where they come from.
If I'd had access to Eurorack like this when I started, I'd probably
have lost all my social life and all my contacts
with the outside world by now, for sure.
Some people like collecting synthesizers the way others like collecting
porcelain figurines.
I don't see any difference between them.
I know that a good chunk of what I've made ends up as furniture,
I suppose some people just like the blinking lights.
You could probably make a patch that
makes no sound at all but blinks very pleasingly.
It's like a conveyor belt of new modules,
feeding the appetite.
I don't have a cool car or anything like that, but I have all these synth modules.
The world of modular synthesizers
is mostly boys playing with gear.
I often tell people to save a little money
for shoes for their kids.
It's really addictive, a real black hole.
You know, it's time to stop buying gear and start using it.
Good luck to those hermits who have a two-hundred-unit system at home.
Just hit the record button already.
I've never gotten so into anything in my life.
It's just like... I don't even know what to say,
it's just madness.
More. I need more,
and when I buy a new case for the studio, I sometimes tell myself,
look, there's no room left in this studio for another case,
for me this is a way to keep myself in check. Because if I don't limit myself,
I probably won't be able to stop, and that scares me.
While affordable Eurorack systems have finally made modular
accessible to a wide audience,
the market for exclusive systems still exists.
Just as in the early days of Moog and Buchla,
modern manufacturers often build direct relationships with their customers.
Working together with them to create unique, custom systems.
Some even deliver them in person.
Now that's a synth, damn.
The modern modular synthesizer renaissance began with the desire
of longtime enthusiasts
to finally master a machine that was once available only in dreams.
Then the Eurorack standard drew in a new group of users,
a generation raised on laptops and digital instruments,
looking for something new, and, ironically, finding it in what
seemed to be outdated technology.
When I first encountered Eurorack, it turned out to be much
more accessible,
financially too. It was something I could actually
build, and it opened up new doors.
And, of course, what's really cool is the stability.
If you have experience with regular synthesizers,
you're not used to thinking about replaceable components,
but with modulars it's different, you can interact with someone.
You learn to think differently. Instead of buying some effect,
you can take a different type of VCA,
with a linear and exponential curve, swap out one small
module in your
system, and that can fundamentally change your sound,
or even your whole approach.
Cool, though I have no idea what it does.
Well, you see, it's not so bad, in a way there's
a charm to it.
As far as I can see, the Euro format lets you get much more.
There are more modulation options than you can
actually use. That's it.
For example, the Roland System 100M.
I think this is one of the most interesting things to happen in the last
five years.
Modulars still have to make their way back into public awareness.
Mainstream culture resists their arrival.
But how long will that last?
Check this one out, I really like playing with it.
Firmly convinced that these amazing devices deserve
...wider market, Andreas Schneider is trying to draw attention to them
...retail shops across Europe.
This is just the beginning. People come in and say they just want to look around, and I always tell them,
you can touch everything and play with anything you like.
Would you like to see more?
Interested in seeing more, in seeing a modular?
Okay, come with me, I'll show you.
I used to bring them to shops, and the shops couldn't handle them.
They'd say, oh, that's just old analog junk. It's easier for us to sell
digital stuff,
because these need support, you have to show people
that they have to be connected with patch cables, and how to do it.
Otherwise they won't sell.
Wow, what's going on here?
So I said, fine, anyone who's interested can come in, and I'll explain it to them
all myself.
That's what I did, and I opened my own shop.
His famous shop, Schneider's Buero,
serves as the link between the public and small manufacturers of modules
and other rare musical equipment.
It's a legendary, wonderful place.
It's not just a shop, it's a gathering place for the community,
and that's great.
Andreas is very well known in the analog world, at least here in Europe.
He has all the qualities I don't have.
I think I'm a good developer and organizer,
I can organize production and all that,
but when it comes to connecting with people,
Andreas is far better than I am.
Who plays these instruments?
Who makes the music? And I found out that all these people,
former DJs, or just music lovers,
without knowing the difference between B-flat and
C and so on,
or what kind of sound that is, don't talk about music, they live it.
They live for music, and want to immerse themselves in it even more, and so do I.
Look around the corner, look at the world outside.
It's dirty, messy, even the greenery here is chaotic.
That's how it looks from my point of view.
You need to build your own chain,
and if you've removed something from the chain,
it won't be the same as it was.
All these things affect one another, they talk
to each other, a conversation builds up between them.
This is what a modular synthesizer is.
Each module has its own purpose, and by connecting them together,
you create a dialogue between them.
Nearly half a century after their creation,
modular synthesizers are finding their place in our cultural landscape once again.
But to finally earn the public recognition that, in the opinion of
many, they deserve,
modular synthesizers will have to leave the studios and take their
place on stage.
Where audiences can enjoy the sight of countless knobs,
switches and cables, and express
understanding rather than confusion.
Half a century ago, when Robert Moog and Don Buchla developed
the modular synthesizer,
they gave us an incredible sound-creating instrument, one capable of changing
music forever.
But were we ready to make
use of that gift?
We let modulars slip away from us,
too quickly for the technology
to become comfortable and easy to use.
Now, thanks to those who never stopped caring for them,
those who kept them alive
and those who recreated them, in both familiar and striking new forms,
it has become clear that modular synthesizers have risen again.
And now their golden age is arriving.
They have brought the magic back to the synth world,
magic lost to Korg, Yamaha, Roland,
and to the samey, meaningless sampler-and-scratch nonsense.
The idea is to start with one very simple sound,
with an oscillator,
and change everything about it, and none of
it is predetermined; you control every aspect of the sound,
and I really love
this idea, the ability to create something from scratch.
When you assemble a modular, choosing the options you need,
it opens the door to a completely new world.
You aren't constrained by the limits of a device that
someone else invented for you;
you think about what should be in the device for you.
I can upgrade my system by buying a new filter for a couple hundred
bucks or so,
and no two will be alike.
I understand why it's so cool.\NI understand why it's so easy to get hooked on it,
and now you have a choice.
Want digital oscillators?\NHere you go.
Want everything fully analog?\NYou can take that route.
People prize modulars for their endless possibilities,
and the incredible sonic palette they can create.
I used to believe that sooner or later, software
synths would be just as good as the real thing.
I don't believe that anymore.
What we're seeing is an explosion of ideas,\Na revolution is happening right now.
I think we humans get far more pleasure than we're willing to admit.
It's nice. It's nice to cost a city,
cars, musical instruments, and powerful sound systems.
And we do a lot of it simply for the enjoyment of the process.
When a generation sees the examples of the previous generation, it
wants to take part in it too.
To dance with it, to use it.
And I think each generation should, without any mercy,
steal the very best from the previous generation.
That's their duty, that's their obligation.
A film by Robert Fantinatto and Jason Amm\N"I Dream of Wires"
English translation:\NJediroman