lpetrich
Contributor
Switched-On Bach: How a transgender synth pioneer changed music: "Wendy Carlos’s 1968 album of Bach music for Moog synthesiser brought electronic music into the mainstream and influenced artists from Giorgio Moroder to Daft Punk"
Electric organs were common back then, but they had very simple tone generators, as they are called. The Moog synthesizer had a much more elaborate and general one, one that could be programmed by connecting modules with patch cables. It was all-analog; integrated circuits were in their infancy back then, and the first CPU chip ever, the Intel 4004, did not come out until 1971.
The modules were oscillators, filters, amplifiers, and envelope generators, as they are called. That latter one is for controlling the time behavior of sounds. To make a guitar-like sound, you'd make a fast attack (initial rise) and a slow decay (fall afterwards), with zero sustain (a plucked string doesn't sustain) and a slow release (after one stops pressing the key), so the sound will continue. To get a more guitarlike sound, one can use two of these setups, one for making the initial plucking sound and the other for the continuing sound. To sound like a string section, one has a slow attack, no decay, full sustain, and a slow release. One can also add noise to the sound to imitating the rubbing of bows against strings. Etc.
Wendy Carlos, who was Walter Carlos back then, painstakingly played one part at a time, layering them with a multitrack tape recorder, something that was already a common studio practice. If you've ever wondered how someone like Prince had played many of the instruments on his albums, that's how one does it.
So if you've ever wondered why "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" isn't on it, that's why -- it would be very difficult to record in that fashion.
Switched-On Bach became one of the best-selling classical-music albums of all time, and it was a big influence. Producer Giorgio Moroder bought one and used it in Donna Summer's album I Fell Love. Mick Jagger brought one, but he and his fellow Rolling stones found it rather difficult to use. He then sold it to German electronic-music pioneers Tangerine Dream, who then went on to use it in several albums. TD's albums often have a wispy background-music sort of style, a style now known as ambient music.
Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman got one secondhand from someone who grumbled that it made only one note at a time.
The Moog synthesizer wasn't the first electronic musical instrument, and before all-electronic ones, there were electromechanical ones. The best-known electromechanical one is the electric guitar. Its strings power miniature electric generators: small permanent magnets with coils wrapped around them. That's why electric guitars need magnetic strings like steel ones.
Electric organs were common back then, but they had very simple tone generators, as they are called. The Moog synthesizer had a much more elaborate and general one, one that could be programmed by connecting modules with patch cables. It was all-analog; integrated circuits were in their infancy back then, and the first CPU chip ever, the Intel 4004, did not come out until 1971.
The modules were oscillators, filters, amplifiers, and envelope generators, as they are called. That latter one is for controlling the time behavior of sounds. To make a guitar-like sound, you'd make a fast attack (initial rise) and a slow decay (fall afterwards), with zero sustain (a plucked string doesn't sustain) and a slow release (after one stops pressing the key), so the sound will continue. To get a more guitarlike sound, one can use two of these setups, one for making the initial plucking sound and the other for the continuing sound. To sound like a string section, one has a slow attack, no decay, full sustain, and a slow release. One can also add noise to the sound to imitating the rubbing of bows against strings. Etc.
Johann Sebastian Bach's music was a good choice, because of the style of many of his pieces. He often wrote in a quasi-choral style, where each part has only one note each at a time. That fit in well with a big limitation of the Moog synthesizer: it was monophonic, meaning that it could make only one note at a time.
Wendy Carlos, who was Walter Carlos back then, painstakingly played one part at a time, layering them with a multitrack tape recorder, something that was already a common studio practice. If you've ever wondered how someone like Prince had played many of the instruments on his albums, that's how one does it.
So if you've ever wondered why "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" isn't on it, that's why -- it would be very difficult to record in that fashion.
Switched-On Bach became one of the best-selling classical-music albums of all time, and it was a big influence. Producer Giorgio Moroder bought one and used it in Donna Summer's album I Fell Love. Mick Jagger brought one, but he and his fellow Rolling stones found it rather difficult to use. He then sold it to German electronic-music pioneers Tangerine Dream, who then went on to use it in several albums. TD's albums often have a wispy background-music sort of style, a style now known as ambient music.
Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman got one secondhand from someone who grumbled that it made only one note at a time.
