Pink Floyd synths?

The Moog Forum Moog Music General Topics Forum
1

Does anybody know or know of a web page that has information on what keyboards Rick Wright used on certain Pink Floyd albums?

2

Pink Floyd used several different keyboards and synths on their records. They used the EMS VCS3 and Synthi A, Minimoog, Farfisa Orgran, Hammond Organ, Fender Rhodes piano and Steinway acoustic piano. I was writing this and decided to look it up online and found this.

http://thinkfloyd.free.fr/disco/echoes.htm

3

Wow, thats exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the great link

4

you’d have a look here too :

http://www.angelfire.com/home/FloydWaters/richardwright/equip.html

Cheers.

5

That link is also quite awesome, thanks for posting it. :slight_smile:

6

Ignore the uninformed Mellotron comments. They are rugged and stable.

In 15 years of 'Tron use I’ve not experienced any tuning problems. Wild global variations in pitch are another issue altogether!!

:wink:

7

Thanks MisterModular and THM!

I must admit that my synth interest was introduced by The Pink Floyd!

It’s nice to see the actual synths used on each album.

BTW, I’ve seen many photos (70’s) of Rick Wright’s setup on stage and there are several MiniMoogs at hand! :slight_smile:

But does this beg the question, “Who needs presets!” :question:

8

Me too.
Pink Floyd, and also JM Jarre in a French TV show (back in 1978 or so).
Cheers.

Imho Rick (Wright) played a very underestimated role in the band. Evrybody knows Roger Waters and David Gilmour, but Rick was less known nevertheless he was the resident Pink Floyd keyboard player…
Imagine the music of Pink Floyd without the amazing organ and synth lines mainly brought by Rick Wright (I admit Roger and David played here and there a synth line too, but it meant nothing compared to the input of Rick Wright)…
I hope they do once more a world tour all together - the performance on Live8 last year was great, isn’t it !? It looked like they never stopped playing together - however they have never been playing anymore all four together since 1981 (!).

9

FYI: On the ‘Darkside of the Moon’ DVD (The making of…), David Gilmour explains how to create the sequence from ‘On the Run’ using an EMS VCS3 synth. The DVD also shows Roger Waters in the studio using an EMS Synthi A (a suitcase version of the VCS3) on that track.

  • G
10

That’s correct.
Also small excerpts of the same video’s are present on the “Live at Pompeii” DVD.

11

I hope they do once more a world tour all together

I hope they do one (at least) more album together!

12

Here is an interesting link from the DVD mentioned above:

http://www.whitwell.ndo.co.uk/musicthing/video/floyd_synthi.wmv

It was actually an EMS Synthi-AKS that was used heavily on “On The Run”.

13

Thanks for the link. Yes, a Synthi AKS was used on the track, but a VCS3 Mk2 can perform the same duties if married to a KS keyboard-sequencer, the two synths having essentially the same circuit in a different panel layout. A VCS3 Mk1, a VCS3 Mk2 on its own or with a DK series keyboard can’t.

Incidentally, the patch used for ‘On The Run’ can be achieved by plugging in a EMS-Synthi Keyboard Prestopatch rather than all that tedious mucking about with the pins on the matrixboard.

14

Though the Prestopatch (early units lack it) only restores the configuration of the pins. You still have to adjust all the relavent knob positions.

15

True… You also still have to calibrate the octave scaling on the keyboard unit, but a Synthi AKS + Prestopatch setup is probably the closest EMS ever came to a minimoog rival !

16

Slightly OT:

“On The Run” can easily be recreated on the Voyager using the OTR file on SquareWave:

Files/How’d they Do That?/Floyd - On The Run.zip

The file contains the OTR MIDI sequence, OTR Voyager patch and a ReadMe file that explains the Voyager’s performance controls.

  • Greg