Synthesisers2

A friend of mine, Phil Clogg, became interested in what I was doing. Before we knew it we had formed the electronic band “Out of Control”. As the eighties were born, we must have been the first rock-computer based band (duo) in the UK. Nowadays of course virtually all popular music is created on computers. Phil sang, played electric guitar and synthesiser pedal board, which controlled that first synthesiser I built. I handled the computer, its improvisational controls, played the modular synthesiser and did most of the knob twiddling. We played a loud-aggressive form of electronic rock, with a kind of ancient mysteries slant. We never recorded an album but some studio tapes exist, so a mini CD is possible at some point.

A year or two later the computer sequencer was radically upgraded and expanded. It became polyphonic, with 15 simultaneous sequence voltage control outputs for notes or control, plus the original electronic percussion line. The machine code software including some interesting input routines had expanded to well over 3KByte of ROM ! With this unique system, I was able to perform solo concerts. with full sounding computer generated yet fully controllable polyphonic live electronic backing.

An interesting article I read, about the physical modelling of plucked strings (by Kevin Karplus and Alex Strong) using a large mainframe computer, got me excited and pointed the way to where it might just be possible to go next. As I read, my eyes started to glaze over again at the thought of creating a real sounding electronic instrument! I thought this was the future and I thought there was a good chance it could be done on an extended modular synthesiser, since it was really a specialised form of analog computer anyway. Well, about two years of hard struggle later later the box on the left of the picture was completed.

It contained all the extra things I needed; resonating electronic analog delay lines, maths functions etc. With it I was able to produce these various real sounding plucked string sounds. Also, by spending a lot of time creating different new patches, I found other simple instrument models were possible; gongs, bells, drums, flutes, saxophone, clarinet, and they all sounded very real. Controlling them however, was entirely another matter!
Because physical modelling uses the excitation and interaction of electronic circuits and resonators which mimic, to varying degrees, what happens in the real world, it’s possible to put the models together in other sometimes strange configurations. Doing so can produce equally strange sounding results. Recorded or live sound signals can also be fed into the models too with great results. Today physical modelling, to varying degrees, is common. It is available on several commercial computer based synthesisers. There are now software only versions as well, even a modular one. Mostly they are presets, but, as far as I know, over fifteen years later, this analog instrument is still unique. I’m still not aware of a commercial one or one that you can feed sounds into either.

If you would like some further reading, I’m preparing a a full technical section on it with patch diagrams and sound demos. Also I did an article on it for Sound on Sound magazine. There are links in the section to the Sound on Sound site.