Jack of all trades? The synthesiser
As the synthesiser became available to the masses descriptions of its
abilities became exaggerated, it was going to make performers redundant,
replace whole orchestras in film music, and cupboards were going to be full of traditional
instruments and children given keyboards as their introduction to music
making.
As with all fears an element of truth existed in this view. In certain
circumstances the synth could be used in place of (or in addition to) a traditional
instrument, certainly not as a second violin in a string quartet, but possibly
as e.g. a contrasting texture to a bass guitar.
The role of the synthesiser in film has several interesting features, it
was fortunate that the sounds produced most easily on the synth invoked
associations with mechanical sounds, weapons, flight, wind sounds etc. all
ideal for sci-fi and combat movies. The
extension into video games was a natural progression. Far from reducing the employment of musicians
the opportunities for making capital expanded enormously. As for our children many have learnt the
basics of music making on relatively cheap keyboards. The quality of teaching
and the development of technique depend a great deal on the educator but
considering the numbers of children involved one has to accept that there are
advantages to learning how to perform on any
instrument over no instrument.
The primary concern of these blogs is to consider composing techniques,
but before moving away from performing with a synth it may be useful to
consider the work of a jazz keyboard player who has explored the world of
synthetic sounds, Joe Zawinul. He gave
an interview to the music engineering magazine Sound on Sound and his insights make
fascinating reading, two short extracts provide an oversight which may
encourage reading the whole article.
I can play with a drum machine, and I can make a drum machine sound like
a real drummer because of how I play around it. It's an art. You cannot be a
slave... It's an art to play to sequencers or drum machines, and even some of
the really famous guys can't do it.
And on composing:
(Its) about sound. And synthesizers are even more difficult, because
there's a greater menu. It's much easier to choose the best dish out of five ...
than out of 400."
Understanding the basics of synthetically produced sounds will
illustrate why the synth has been largely employed in a relatively limited way
when its potential is enormous. The rate
of change in sound production is such that composers often move onto new ideas
before exploring fully the possibilities of “older” technology. The summary is deliberately short and may be
skipped by those with even a basic knowledge of the synth.
Synthesisers start
with the production of a tone produced by a sine wave generator, combining
several sine waves with pitch control produces more musical tones. Tone
generation is produced by an oscillator which may select a variety of waveforms
such as sawtooth, triangle, square or pulse.
The filter removes
parts of the frequencies generated, after
filtering, a bright sawtooth wave can be altered to a warmer sound with reduced
treble. Resonance and drive may also be used to alter the tone to replicate
instrumental sounds.
The module known as an
envelope controls the levels for the beginning,
middle, and end portions of the sound.
The
signal may require a modulator, the LFO (low
frequency oscillator) is frequently employed to affect the main signal to add
vibrato or create filter sweeps. Selecting the LFO waveform dramatically
affects the range of vibrato etc.
In
addition to the sound production there are global controls for overall
loudness, glide or portamento and the bend range particularly useful for
emulating small pitch fluctuations.
Noise
can be added to produce percussive sounds and replicate natural sounds.
That
is sufficient detail for the moment, varieties and developments will be
considered in conjunction with particular pieces of music.
The
use of sine waves alone is not going to produce particularly pleasing results,
Stockhausen worked with combinations of sine waves processing them with
reverberation in his desire to create new sonorities
the following link
provides a wealth of information about the technical aspects of sine wave
manipulation in the Stockhausen Studies (and some of the human responses to the
work carried out).
On a personal level I
find the music compelling, it is never predictable and demonstrates what many
musicians understand, working within constraints assists the composing process.
Early pioneers of the
synthesiser also included jazz musicians, Herb Deutsch worked alongside Bob
Moog and his account of developing the attack on a tone via a door bell makes a
wonderful story:
There are video clips
on YouTube concerning Herb Deutsch which demonstrate the pitfalls of the
instrument, particularly with tuning, but which pioneer ever expected an easy
ride?
The two approaches
(Stockhausen and Deutsch) take us into interesting territory, was the synth
going to be used as an instrument with certain acceptable sounds appropriate
for melody or bass or as a source of new material to open up extensive possibilities
for contemporary serious music?
The MIDI table offers
an insight of one solution to being faced with a near infinite number of possible
choices. Various companies developed the
sounds in these categories; I used a Roland Sound Canvas for many years and
learnt a great deal even from applying basic alterations to the sounds. Before
selected banks were provided a great deal of donkey work was required, and
saving sounds required careful planning.
The EMS VCS 3 belongs to this pre-table period, though similar synths
are now available as software versions which make recalling patches easy. This account from the Vinyl factory of the
VCS 3 is entertaining:
It was so quirky that
most musicians couldn’t even fathom how to coax actual melodies out of it,
prompting some to label it as a bulky, expensive effects unit. Those that
persevered were rewarded, and the bizarre-sounding synthesizer was a bottomless
treasure trove of peculiar pops, clangs and whines. The fact that you could
play it with a joystick, a la Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones (the keyboard was
sold separately), only added to its charm.
The phrase “how to coax actual melodies out of it”
speaks
volumes about the way certain musicians approached this synthesiser.
As companies
developed their own particular synthesiser sounds individual musicians became
associated with those textures, e.g. Herbie Hancock made use of the ARP Odyssey on “Chameleon”.
Keyboard players
would find the limits imposed with monophonic synthesisers troubling but synths
like the CS-80 opened up polyphonic play.
In terms of composition polyphony cuts both ways. There is always the temptation with a
polyphonic presentation of being lazy, and the repeated use of a lush texture
can ruin a good idea. Similarly the
stacking of several voices (possibly through a chain of instruments) can make
an immediate impact but fail to sustain interest. We are back to the old
repetition and variation problem.
With the advent of
the Fairlight CMI sampling became a source of new sounds, however the range of
sounds was limited by the length of the samples taken. As PCM synthesis became
a new standard in sound production, it tackled, but did not overcome the
problem of authenticity with instrumental sounds.
Another development
which was to stimulate the imagination of serious contemporary composers was FM
synthesis. This method modulates the
frequencies of combinations of sound waves to create a new wave rich in
harmonic content. For performers one
great advantage was that the digital nature of the instrument ensured that
tuning was no longer a problem. The main challenge for musicians was in the
programming, and once again engineers produced banks of sounds that were a
mixed blessing to the world of music.
Thankfully now there
is a software version of the DX keyboard, FM8 in which one can either alter
sounds on a basic level (Easy/Morph) or at a more complex level (Master), or of
course one can open a ‘new sound’ which is a single sine wave and explore at
one’s pleasure.
Having put in place
some of the basics of the synthesiser and mentioned some of its exponents I
will conclude this blog with a hint of some of the uses in contemporary music
using Jonathan Harvey’s own notes on “Inner Light 3”
One
of the tapes other roles is to transform one instrument's waveform into another's,
often in the course of a journey round the concert hall. For instance, a
trumpet sound leaves the orchestra, changes progressively into a clarinet in
mid-flight, so to speak, and returns to the stage area where the orchestral
clarinet takes it up. The spatial engulfment of quadraphony and the dreamlike
reverberation of orchestral events are, together with the alpha wave treatment,
further aspects of the 'superhuman' role of the tape. There is nothing new in
regarding the mechanical as superhuman; everyone in Western tradition who has
ever thought of the organ as a bearer of sacred meaning, or in the East of the
gong in such a light has done the same.
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