Talking about Stevie Wonder and Moog synthesizers, I can`t resist pasting a rather lengthy, but very interesting quote from an interview with Bob Olhsson, working in the studio at Motown 40 years ago:
"When looking at your discography, there’s a radical change in there. You start doing an entirely different kind of music. Is this just where the work led you, or is this something that you wanted to do?
It’s really where the work led me coming out of Motown is, there’s no such thing as a home studio. I got bit by “Wow, we can actually afford to buy a 4-track!”when the Sony 854 came out and the 3340 TEAC the early home studio stuff. I wondered what would it be like to not be under time pressure and do recording because, of course at Motown, the clock was ticking and there was either tremendous pressure to get a release out or tremendous pressure in terms of - you know - $15,000 in salaries on a string session.
So it was a real dream, “Well, gee, what if you could do it at home and not have all that pressure, what could you come up with.” One of the early people that saw that possibility was a person who I met shortly after coming to the Bay area, Stephen Hill. He was an engineer at KQED, and he built a studio to record unusual acoustic and electronic music, because he was into it and I was into it, in that we’d had the second Moog modular synthesizer at Motown.
How did you guys get that?
Somebody sent Brian Holland an acetate of “A Day in the Life” long before it came out, and it pretty much blew everybody’s mind. It was radical enough when it came out, but if you can imagine hearing that almost, between six months and a year before it came out, it was really something.
Mike McLean had been familiar with Moog because he’d been writing up what he was doing in the AES journal. So they went out and bought a Moog modular synthesizer. Now, unfortunately the Moog modular synthesizer wasn’t stable enough to do the same thing twice in a row, and so it was pretty useless! (laughs)
I mean we kind of whacked away at it, trying to get something out of it. used it for some signal processing, a little bit. There was a lot of promise there but it is still absolutely amazing that Wendy Carlos was able to actually produce an album on that thing.
That’s true, yeah
It would never do the same thing twice, so you basically had to set it up, and record it, and keep recording until you lucked out and got what you wanted. At any rate, I’d had an interest in that, and everybody that’d been around Motown had an interest in that, and I’m sure that’s where Stevie got his interest in synthesizers also.
He does a unique thing with them. For one thing, it’s so involved in the bass lines without crowding anything.
Yes, he does. It’s been kind of frustrating to me to have people watch him and jump to conclusions about why he was doing what he was doing and try and duplicate it. Because Stevie is a musicologist. he knows everything that’s been done in American music since 1900 and the main reason he was playing all of his own parts was because he basically was putting together combinations of dead musicians.
You know, what would happen if so and so played this part and so forth. He has both the knowledge and the ability to emulate different people. I mean, it’s just an amazing, amazing ability, so everybody was real into encouraging him to play all his own parts and do all his own thing because if you were him, that was absolutely the best way to do it. But I have serious reservations about that being the best way for everybody else to do it.
Oh sure. And of course, he is unintentionally responsible for a lot of what’s wrong with modern soul music, because they emulate just the thinnest skin of it.
Yeah, and unfortunately, a lot of it is just plain economics. They can get paid the same amount if they use session players or if they do it all themselves, and its turned into being all hype. And I think it’s finally reached the point where it has become necessary to use so much hype that it isn’t a profitable industry anymore.
That’s one of the stultifying things about watching MTV, it’s so hyperbolic that you couldn’t possibly exaggerate it. It’s so meretricious, you couldn’t really explain it to someone who had never seen it.
Yeah, well it’s to the point where they’re really selling TV stars not music. Records are being made like movies and movies are being made like records!"
You can read the whole interview here:
http://www.prosoundweb.com/recording/ta ... o/olmo.php
