Synthesisers1

In the early seventies there was a revolution going on in music making. An all electronic instrument, the sound synthesiser, was making a new sound world available to musicians. When I heard what these instruments could do, I was hooked. I wanted one! The trouble was that they were expensive; far too expensive for me. But, I was determined and I did have some electronic knowledge... so the only answer was to build one.

The first one was based on a design from an electronics magazine (right). It worked but it wasn’t satisfactory, so I ended up modifying it extensively until I was happy with it. Then, hmmm..., my eyes started to glaze over as I started to think bigger!

This was the result. Completed in the following year, it was a large modular synthesiser that looked a bit like the big Moog series C synthesisers that were available at the time. It has over 20 separate waveform generating and processing modules, plus the keyboard, all of which can be plugged together with patch cords. Patching permutations are huge and so is the range of synthetic electronic sounds that can be produced. It can also be used to process any recorded sound fed into it. The synthesiser has served me well as my main workhorse for over 20 years and features regularly in my electronic music compositions.

At the end of the seventies big computers had spawned new affordable tiny microprocessor boards; precursors to famous early micro-computers like the PET, BBC, ORIC & LYNX. I bought one with the idea of constructing a simple, computer based, note sequencer with one. The picture (right) shows result. The micro (in the base panel) is a Synertec SYM1; an 8 bit processor running at 1MHz with 4KB RAM, plus complete operating system in a 4KB ROM (obviously before Bill Gates!), a keypad and a six digit display. My software ran to 2KB of machine code. The box above contains a small dedicated synthesiser (top panel) and a simple 5 voice electronic percussion unit (lower panel).

With this I could enter various separate patterns of notes and drum beats manually into the keypad and have them playback from a master table in any order with optional numbers of repeats, at any tempo. The notes could be to any musical or non musical scale. There was real time playback control also; hold a pattern, cycle, advance to the next etc. The machine was a revelation.