Theres a scene in the Moog Movie with Bob and Herb Deutch discussing the history of the development of the synths and should it have a keyboard at all. Vladmir Ussachevsky advocated against keyboards saying that he was afraid it would “force people to think very traditionally”.
Material that shoudln’t be organized according to pitch.
I have sort of reached this feeling, wishing that the Moog didn’t have a keyboard controller. Im not a great keyboard player, can’t really express myself, nor am I very proficient on the keys. Im finding myself thinking about going to the voyager all the time but then I just think about the fact that its a keyboard and I get caught up in keyboard mode and when I start thinking about that and my limitations of technique, I don’t have the desire to go in there and lift the sheet off the Voyager and turn it on.
Maybe Im just jonesing for that Theremin Upgrade or some kind of new controller or SOMETHING.
I haven’t experienced that yet, but couldn’t the Voyager be triggered by anything as long as the controller can produce a gate of known voltage, or the right MIDI values?
Keyboard, wheels, ribbon controllers, touch plates, touch pads, joysticks, paddle controllers, trackballs, foot pedals, foot switches, pull handles, piezo triggers…it’s all the same to me, really. That’s part of not having chops, though. But not having keyboard chops or being able to read music in some twisted perversion takes away all the limitations of not actually being able to play…I know that doesn’t make sense, but I swear it’s true!
I’m with Voltor07. My musical training is in piano, of course, but also in violin and flute, so I’m not wedded to the concept of a keyboard.
Having said that, I find it unlikely that the synthesizer – specifically the Moog – would have taken off as a commercially viable and accessible instrument if Moog had not built it around the keyboard. Keep in mind that Ussachevsky the big names of American electronic music in the 50s and early 60s – Otto Luening, Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt leap to mind – were not the slightest bit inclined to make either their music or the instruments they used accessible to any but a tiny cabal of specialists. Read Babbitt’s “Who Care if You Listen” and listen to Sessions’s music to get a sense of that.
Wow…I wasn’t expecting an accomplished musician to agree with me. Quite the contrary, actually. However, it should be noted that Buchla succeeded in selling touchplate-based synths. But Buchla calls his synths Sound Machines. They aren’t really “musical” instruments. They are just instruments.
Bob built his synths for musicians…even though it took a few more years for him to find his audience, so to speak. Also, Bob took additional time to refine his oscillators so they were stable enough to be used in a musical system. So I guess he decided to take the engineer route instead of the mad scientist route, like Don Buchla.
Bob Moog wasn’t even sure at the beginning about producing a self-contained, non-modular synth
Indeed the Minimoog allowed synthesizers to become a relatively common instrument because it wasn’t an avant-garde, scientific, intimidating tool anymore, it was an instrument to which any keyboardist could relate to and feel comfortable
That said, all sorts of controllers could be imagined now that synthesis is so “mundane” among musicians
I wouldn’t want any fancy controller myself, but then, it depends on the kind of music you’re into… I’m a songwriter, I play piano, I need to play melodies and chords, and when I need something more “sound-design-ish”, well, I don’t feel constrained by the keyboard anyway
Others may feel differently
The new Etherwave version looks fun, for instance
One thing that I think is cool is the stuff that Hal McGhee was doing. I mean really bring a dramatic aspect to playing. I thought about the kinds of things that could be done with the Lightning II. I think something like that could really bring a new level of juice to ones stage presence.
But like I said its the approach that sometimes keeps me from turning my Voyager on. In terms of straight noise I almost think a different controller for me would be more musically interesting to me than the same to scales that I might be able to play from a purely keyboard approach.
Its different on an instrument like the rhodes where you can just throw your hand down in a certian position, not necessarily knowing why the chord sounds interesting in terms of theory, but the sound of the instrument itself lends to less complex chords and smaller intervals so its easier to SOUND Jazzy than to BE jazzy.
Like George CLinton talks about people Faking the Funk…the stuff that I do is definately wannabe jazz…a lowly genre of its own lolol.
They look like they might be the originals! They didn’t sell too well and Atari actually lost more money on those than they did on the 5200 game console! I can’t believe there’s any left at all!
I would expect them to be the originals, they’re for sale on the inventor’s site
See - there’s a technology and concept that should be updated. They ran parallel processors apparently. How much cheaper would the processing be now - yet Hotz has done nothing with it. I’ve no respect for that. The concept was sound, too. I reckon you could knock out a modern one for under a grand with software easily.
RichardK, while you and I would gladly purchase a beast like this for, say, a grand, I wonder how many others would. Back in the '80’s, these things were merely something different. A gimmick, if you will. Who’s to say a new one wouldn’t be looked upon the same way today that they were back then?
Look at all the comments online about the new Taurus pedals. I wouldn’t think twice about dropping 2 grand on these, but for some people, even that’s an unreasonable price, and they “settle” for a set of PK-5’s and a MoPho.
It’s funny how Buchla is often held up as Moog’s foil. Apart from the fact that they came up with pretty much the same – or similar – ideas about voltage controlled synthesis at about the same time, you have to remember that they worked in radically different environments.
Buchla was well within the academic-institutional establishment that pursued the more esoteric experiments in music, while Moog was a businessman. Moog wanted to sell a product; Buchla not so much. Their goals, in many ways, were diametrically opposed. As for interfaces, though, I still want something along the lines of Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer. That’d be way cool.
