What is That Thing and Where Can I Get One?
August 21, 2010 – Fifth Anniversary Tribute
Seva David Ball, Preservationist on BMF GRAMMY Grant Reflects on Bob’s Impact on His Life
My introduction to the Moog was at Christmas 1968, of course through Switched-On Bach by Carlos. I thought, what is that organ record sounding thing, then when I wandered into the stereo room, finding the record jacket was an Acme Anvil moment. I didn’t even remove the shrinkwrap from the record because I didn’t want the picture to get dirty. Occasionally I’d sneak my fingers under the cellophane and touch the Picture of the Moog.
No kidding.
Seva David Ball, Age 12, Florida State University, 1968 (courtesy Seva Ball
My parents taught college and a colleague of theirs was an alumnus of Florida State. She foolishly offered to take me with her because they had a Moog IIIp. The die was cast, I turned into fluid, poured into the mold, then the mold was broken. The accompanying picture illustrates this moment of pre-hormonal ability of focus, sans prefrontal cortex development, where an experience is so indigenously saturating that after I exited the building, the feeling was as if I’d traveled with Dr. Who and really had no idea what planet or timeline I was entering. That’s what the Moog did for me, what Bob Moog did for me in this unleashing of Pandora with absolute value. It’s all a plus sign.
Soon I had built my studio, replete with a IIIp, MiniMoog, and a PolyMoog, and drilled down into the soft surreal forms I’d heard in my head; now able to realize them. Vintage Moog, classical training, surrealistic music dreams: finally. Search iTunes if you want to find out what happened.
At some point I wrote to Bob Moog and asked if he had any room for my skills in his business in North Carolina; this was before the rebirth of Moog Music, and he simply replied “we have no need for someone with your skillset at this time”. It was the most wonderful rejection letter ever, and certainly the only one I have framed. Now, I sit every day with tapes of Bob Moog and witness small splintered fractal subsets of audio, windows into that time as he was building, creating, innovating, his Moog Synthesizer. I remain as grateful as any human is capable of feeling, to him, Bob Moog, for giving me tools which set me free, musically, beyond my wildest imaginings.
Seva
August 2010
Keep an eye out for Seva’s upcoming post on some of the 40+ tapes that he has been restoring this summer.
Click here to see more about Seva’s work with the reel-to-reel tapes from Bob’s Archive.
Seva Explores the Abominatron Tape, part 2
Seva David Ball is the the preservationist for the restoration of 40 reel-to-reel tapes in Bob’s archives, a project which is generously funded by two grants from the GRAMMY Foundation. Seva is an audio engineer whose accomplishments include serving as associate founder of Waves, mastering Dolly Parton’s only live DVD, and being the preservationist on David Lewiston’s archives of over 650 tapes for the Library of Congress. He is the owner of Soundcurrent Mastering in Knoxville,TN. As he restores the tapes, Seva will be blogging a bit about each one, and including sound samples.
While the GRAMMY Foundation provides generous funding, they do not cover all of the costs associated with the extensive project. If you are inspired by historical material that we are preserving, please consider making a donation to the Foundation to help us continue our efforts.
In this blog post, Seva explores a tape that was donated to us by pioneering synthesist Herb Deutsch, who collaborated with Bob on the first prototype modular. In this 84 minute tape, Bob methodically explains the functions of the modular. We are excited to include five snippets of that tape here. Many thanks to Herb Deutsch for this historical treasure.
Abominatron Tape Transfer, Part 2
Seva David Ball
As alluded to in my first entry, when Dr. Moog was working on the prototype modular synthesizer in the early sixties, he had set in motion a very large number of design parameters, terminologies, and infrastructures. Things such as using ‘feet’ as designation for which pitch range within the oscillator would work, just as in pipe organs, i.e. 32′, 16′, 8′, 4′, 2′, 1′, all measured in feet to indicate the base length of the pipe in that rank. A pipe half the length of another gives a tone one octave higher (and twice the frequency, being inversely proportioned). Another example now in widespread use is “Voltage Control”, which was probably the most impressive part of the vocabulary to me (when I learned of it, I was 12) because it literally took the place of my hand turning a knob. Even with my limited understanding, this principle of voltage control was a cloudless sky for me; it unlocked the entire potential. The synthesizer had three main components: Sources, Controllers, and Modifiers, and voltage control made it all work.
On this tape, Bob explains that the voltages add together to control the oscillator, plus an internal voltage (selected by the Pitch Range switch=32, 16, 8, 4, etc) adds or subtracts eight-tenths of a volt, shifting the pitch up or down one octave. (Eventually there was a standard of 1volt/1octave but I will not pretend to know the precise evolution of this standard). He gives several examples of using low frequency oscillators (LFO) to provide (musical) vibrato and other forms of exotic vibrato (Frequency Modulation can yield classic space sounds or really new klang with mirrored sum-and-difference tones).
Voltage Control had already been part of Bob’s breadboard projects and his 1964 prototype. It was only a matter of months before others requested new ways for Voltage Control to be utilized. Vladimir Ussachevsky asked for a device to create an attack-decay-sustain-release voltage (ADSR) which was used to control an amplifier (VCA) so that pressing a note would create a tone with dynamic shaping. Gustav Ciamaga ordered a voltage controlled filter (VCF) in 1965, and this created the tone shaping everyone refers to as that Moog Sound (especially with Bob’s 4-pole filter design).
Bob took piano for many years as a young person, and could readily play, although he was very modest about his ability. He made a nearly innocent statement that others with more musicianship could get “some good things” out of the instrument, and I included a clip of this sincerely prophetic statement.
Better Musicianship:
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In this proto-incarnation of the modular synthesizer — the Abominatron, as Bob called it — there were two VC devices: oscillators and amplifiers. (There’s a clip where he Gives It The Name, at least on tape). The astonishing part of all this to me remains the fact that this first modular synthesizer, this Abominatron, was POLYPHONIC. I’ve attached some audio clips from this tape, including the Intro Fanfare, where Bob plays a polyphonic greeting before he speaks, followed by a clip where Bob names the prototype.
Polyphonic Fanfare:
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Abominatron
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Another polyphonic section is when he first demonstrated voltage control for simple vibrato, but he plays a polyphonic example, “As I Walked Out in the Streets of Laredo”, in a two-part invention style, quite removed from Marty Robbin’s 1959 dreamy single. To my knowledge this song (and the Intro Fanfare) is the first recording of a polyphonic modular synthesizer. It is so beautiful that the inventor of the instrument is also a musician, and one who could play at the drop of a hat, and that we have this document, this recording, of Dr. Moog doing exactly that.
Modulate and Polyphonic:
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A great thing about “audio letters” is you can stop recording any time and continue when convenient. Most of the time a click or pop signifies such a break, and in one such place Bob says “it’s 2 days later now” since his previous recording, and he reveals the spectacular news that Jacqueline Harvey of the AES (Audio Engineering Society) had called to invite him to have a booth at the October 1964 AES meeting in the Commercial Exhibits area (which at that time was hardly the large tradeshow floor familiar today; the main purpose of the meeting was for presentation of papers and so forth). There’s an audio clip where he reveals this news to Herb Deutsch, and went on to say that it was a “tremendous opportunity for me to get this going, sooner than I thought”, but he also recognized being at the AES show had the potential for him to makethat it was also a “an a– of myself”. That didn’t happen. The opportunity for success immediately began to realize itself. Clearly, we all know he succeeded beyond his expectations and would initiate a paradigm shift in the use of electronics in music as instruments.
AES Invite:
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Seva Reports on Transferring the “Abominatron” Tape
Introduction: Seva David Ball is the the preservationist for the restoration of 40 reel-to-reel tapes in Bob’s archives, a project which is generously funded by two grants from the GRAMMY Foundation. Seva is an audio engineer whose accomplishments include serving as associate founder of Waves, mastering Dolly Parton’s only live DVD, and being the preservationist on David Lewiston’s archives of over 650 tapes for the Library of Congress. He is the owner of Soundcurrent Mastering in Knoxville,TN.
The tapes in the Bob’s archive span the years of 1964-1983, with work by pioneering synthesists such as Herb Deutsch, JonWeiss, Chris Swanson, Emmanuel Ghent, Wendy Carlos, Isao Tomita, Roger Powell, Joel Chadabe, John Eaton, William Hoskins, LaMonte Young and many more. Perhaps no tape in the collection is more seminal than the tape that Herb Deutsch donated to the Bob Moog Foundation in August. This 84 minute recording, which we here at the Bob Moog Foundation affectionately refer to as the “Abominatron” (as that is how Bob refers to the prototype modular), was recorded in 1964 in preparation for sending the prototype to experimental jazz musician Herb Deutsch. Herb, a professor of music (then and now!) at Hofstra University, collaborated with Bob for a year prior, giving him ideas, direction and input on a new instrument that they would call the “Electronic Music Composition System” — later to become known as the Moog synthesizer.
In the summer of 1963, Herb spent three weeks working side by side with Bob in his basement workshop in Trumansburg, New York, where Bob lived and was ran R.A. Moog, Co. Herb was to be Bob’s first musician-muse, and that first instrument was built largely to Herb’s specifications. Bob spent a couple of months perfecting the prototype and in the fall of 1964, prepared it to send to Herb. Along with the instrument, Bob sent a tape thoroughly explaining the various controls, perameters and capabilities of the instrument.
It is with deepest gratitude that we thank Herb for sharing the tape with us, and for allowing us to share it with you. By the end of 2010, we hope to produce a CD of the tape to share with all of you. We will be working on that project in the coming months.
From Seva:
This tape is logged as number 000, as it is really the very first chronological tape in the collection, and computer people (myself) start counting with zero! There’s another practical reason here: I’d already begun assigning tape numbers when Herb Deutsch graciously made this tape available to the Bob Moog Foundation, and since it is directly related to the pre-history of the commercial modular synth, I assigned it catalog number 000.
To set a frame of reference: I played my first Moog synthesizer at the age of 12 in 1970. It was a huge IIIp with dual sequencer complement at Florida State University (John Boda was the primary guy there) and I learned that the Moog was essentially a monophonic instrument (one note at a time). Last month I listened to the tape that Bob Moog made in 1964 as an audio letter to accompany his prototype synthesizer, which was being sent to Herb Deutsch. I was slack-jawed when I listened to the tape as Bob explained about the controls on the prototype device, and then played polyphonic sounds on this modular Moog synthesizer! This was 1964! I really couldn’t believe it, that this early prototype for the modular synthesizer was actually polyphonic. To my knowledge, this has not been revealed in any historical book on electronic music, the development of the modular synthesizer, or even as an anecdotal story told by those who were there. Absolutely amazing!
Listening to Bob talk about the controls on the prototype modular gave me a very clear insight on exactly how precedent is set. Bob would talk about the Range control, the Voltage control patch, the octaves as 8′, 4′, 2′, etc.: terms which are used on synthesizers to this very day, on Moog synthesizers made in this very year of 2009, and they have not changed. Therefore the precedent was set, the die was cast, the inventor was giving names to the controls that would echo through almost every single synthesizer made from that point forward. It simply blew my mind. Plus the recording had real-life stuff showing up in the middle of it, such as telling Herb to “call after 9 PM because the rates were low”. Ah yes, the days when the Bell System was still intact!
There’s much more to this tape, including what is probably the first two part invention ever recorded on a Moog synthesizer. And that, without overdubs. In the middle of the tape, a click indicated Bob had turned off the recorder; when it bumped back on, he said “something remarkable had just happened”, that he was “going to have a booth at the AES” (in 1964), and that he only had 4 weeks to get ready!
This is just part one of blogging about this tape; don’t fret, I’ll post at least one entry about this very remarkable audio document. Since I played my first Moog at 12, I hope you get that I’m seriously thrilled about this adventure into Bob’s tapes and ask everyone to chip in to help fund the Foundation’s important work, i.e., make a contribution. More soon!
