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Ralph Dyck’s prototype digital sequencers, which then evolved into the Roland MC-8 MicroComposer.
The Blog
“history”
Link 12178252362:
Automatic Gramophone and the Like, 1937 ›
This invention relates to gramophones wherein records are automatically fed one at a time from a stack onto a turntable where, after being played, on on side or on both sides they are automatically rejected into a discard magazine.
Silly ancestor. Whilst automatic vinyl feeding and rejection mechanisms are clever and all that, two turntables and a crossfader is far more fun.
Audio 9449488877:
There’s a tendency these days to disregard anything pre-Beatles as redundant history, that the Fabs created the heavens and earth around late 1966. Not so. Raymond Scott was creating music of refreshing vitality and technological innovation, while at the same time living the life as one of the biggest names in television. But the two were never connected until after his death. Thankfully, love and dedication has brought his story and his music to attention via a website, reissue programme, and a documentary made by his son Stan Warnow. Deconstructing Dad is both a personal father-son narrative without being yucky, and an overview of Scott’s live and work that’s not rote retrospection. It’s totally worth seeking out. So, remember that Kraftwerk were the sound of the future before anyone else could got there? Well here’s Scott, sounding like the future. This could be an out take from Kraftwerk’s Radio Activitat but it was made over a decade before, in fact even before the Beatles themselves created life on earth as we thought we knew it.
“Raymond Scott was a very creative guy, but an absolute madman! When I first worked for him in the 1950s, he had built a sequencer with relays, motors, steppers, and electronic circuits. I had never seen anything like it.” — Bob Moog.
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Audio 7188780056:
Raymond Scott demonstrating his Circle Machine sequencer:
…Now I would like to demonstrate a practical use of The Circle Machine. The problem: To create a sound that goes with the sequence of a TV spot in which the storage battery is dying because the electrolyte is rapidly evaporating, ending in a short circuit. The following demonstration starts with a Circle Machine impression of a dying battery. To keep the sounds generic in this commercial, The Circle Machine is also used in a punctuation manner. Here is our Ford ‘AutoLite Sta-Ful’ battery commercial…
Photo 7164815865:
Jomox XBase09 drum machine (ca. 1999) with standard alder wood panels, on red Formica table. Photo accompanies my recent blog post on the history of wood paneling in synthesizer design.
From the awesome aforementioned article on synth wood paneling history at Sounding Out:
The paradox of dressing up an electronic machine made partly of toxic materials and processes with a sustainable-wood exterior is a fitting metaphor—like a contemporary fig leaf—for how we outwardly express environmentalist concern, despite plenty of contradictions in practice. Wood-adorned electronic devices, in all their glorious contradictions, are especially resonant in this cultural moment; see Asus’s EcoBook, Karvt’s lineup of custom wood skins for MacBooks, and, my favorite, Flashsticks: handmade wood USB “sticks” that combine “the high tech world of computing with the simplicity of the world of nature.” The story of Flashsticks’ handmade creation is a case study in eco-contradiction: the website implies that no trees were harmed in the making of their USB sticks—the company uses locally-sourced, “fallen wood from the previous winter’s storms”—yet we do not hear of the toxic materials that may comprise the drive itself.
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“Surely, the most popular Geloso product was the tape recorder mod. G.255 which was introduced in 1957. Most Italian families owned one of these.”
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Ray Hammond - The Musician and the Micro (1982) ›
The computer will liberate the music in all of us. There is no longer the need for years of piano practice, agonized months of violin scrapings and the deliberate cultivation of finger-tip calluses. The computer will take over the mechanical parts of the job and allow us to make melody, to sing, allowing the music to pour forth.
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American composer Henry Cowell (Mar. 11, 1897 - 1965), who incidentally also invented the first ever electronic rhythm machine, the Rhythmicon, was a tireless experimenter with musical form and method - at least until he was imprisoned for immoral acts related to homosexuality (he was in reality a bi-sexual) and served four years in San Quentin… After his release he tried to appear conventional in all life’s aspects: he married, toned down his radical politics - and gave up many of his avant-garde musical ideas.
Here we celebrate Cowell with this shot of his hands by the great Imogen Cunningham…
