Synthesizer
Related: drum machine - electronica - Emulator - keyboards - Moog - music technology - Roland - synth - sampling
"In actuality, the most inventive way to use a synthesizer is to misuse it. That's what we've done. That's what a lot of techno musicians do now. The French call it deconstruction." --Irmin Schmidt quoted in Modulations (2000)
Moog synthesizer
First synth hit
[...] In 1975, an edited version of "Autobahn" was a top 10 hit. It wasn't the first synth hit --that honor belongs to Gershon Kingsley's hissing "Popcorn," performed by studio group Hot Butter-- but it wasn't a pure novelty either. --Jon SavageSynthmuseum
Analog Days : The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (2002) - Frank Trocco, Trevor Pinch, Robert Moog
Analog Days : The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (2002) - Frank Trocco, Trevor Pinch, Robert Moog [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
In Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Harvard University Press; October 30, 2002; $29.95), Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco tell the story of the invention of the Moog electronic synthesizer, the people who created it, and its impact upon music and popular culture. The book focuses on what Pinch and Trocco call the "analog days"--the early years of the synthesizer, between 1964 and the mid-1970s, before the technology went digital. The authors trace the development of the Moog synthesizer from its first conception as a huge modular instrument for studio use though to the Minimoog--the first portable keyboard instrument typical of today's synthesizers. As they relate the history, Pinch and Trocco show how electronic sounds, once considered marginal or weird, entered our mainstream culture, producing a revolution in the way that music is produced and consumed. Harvard Press pressrelease via
Though ubiquitous today, available as a single microchip and found in any electronic device requiring sound, the synthesizer when it first appeared was truly revolutionary. Something radically new--an extraordinary rarity in musical culture--it was an instrument that used a genuinely new source of sound: electronics. How this came to be--how an engineering student at Cornell and an avant-garde musician working out of a storefront in California set this revolution in motion--is the story told for the first time in Analog Days, a book that explores the invention of the synthesizer and its impact on popular culture. --Trevor Pinch, Frank Trocco
see also: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/PINANA.html
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