On wireless and cables and music and masochists

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Daughter & I got an iPad the other day, so I set it up with a bunch of synthesizers, feeding it MIDI from my Casio PX-110 and Arturia Keylab-61.

It's not even the new iPad pro, but it has plenty of horsepower for doing synthesis and signal processing, etc

And then I see Arturia is selling these. Analog modular synths, patch chords and all.

I mean, cool retro toy and all, but RETRO.

On the other hand... the Moog 3P cost over $50K USD in 2019 money, and the ARP 2600 cost about half of that, but wasn't configurable with different hardware.

The Moog was the instrument Wendy Carlos used for Switched-On Bach, which is the first successful all-synthesizer album.

Anything analog today is going to be more reliable and more stable just because the underlying parts are.

Moog's company recently hand-made 40 replicas of the IIIp, at $35K each. Refurbished 2600's go for over $10K.

But Arturia will sell you for 800 USD/Euro (!) a keyboard, a core synth with basic integrated oscillators, VCF's and VCA's, and a 6U expansion rack to plug in your own modules, for which there is a Eurorack standard and a bunch of different modules for a few hundred USD each.

And a whole bunch of freaking CABLES.

\Or, Arturia will sell you a software ARP 2600, simulated down to the exact electrical characteristics of the analog hardware, for $149.

Or an iPad version of the Minimoog for $20, or PC/Mac version for $150.

And either of them integrates directly into your favorite Digital Audio Workstation software with full production automation.

In 1973, I took a look at the ARP 2600, and the modular synths, and at all those CABLES and analog electronics and threw up my hands, and said, both for composition and performance, this needs a computer and digital.

So I started designing one. Sadly I was seriously underqualified at the time, and so was the state of hardware technology. Hardware multiplier chips had just come onto the market, even ROM memory was grossly expensive, which I needed for waveform generation.

My basic idea was to do additive FM synthesis. But I didn't know of Chowning's ongoing work. (If I had, maybe I'd have transferred to Stanford!).

I didn't know how to get funding (my one proposal was turned down), didn't know what to do with it if I had it (business-wise, or how to get products manufactured).

Then in 1974 Chowning licensed his patents to Yamaha. But I didn't find that out until the release of the Synclavier in 1977, which re-licensed the FM tech from Yamaha.

Then in 1983, the DX-7 was released. Since I had left MIT a couple of years earlier for Symbolics, I wasn't flat broke, so I rushed out and got on the waiting list—after Laurie Anderson, as it turned out. (Dunno why in Boston; different Laurie Anderson? Berkeley School of Music connection?)

Anyway, I now had a synth. A few years later added a rack-mount version with a few modules.