I was first introduced to the synthesizer as an instrument through my dad's
Switched-On Bach LPs as a kid. The imagery of the enormous rack of knobs and cords looking like something out of a '50s sci-fi movie fired my imagination, and the sounds were captivating. But it took a long time to turn into anything more than an intrigued curiousity - because, unfortunately, being born in the mid-'80s I did most of my growing up in the '90s, in the dark days when ROMplers and preset keyboards and General MIDI dominated the landscape of electronic music from horizon to horizon.
It wasn't until we finally got a PC (I'd grown up on Macs) in the late '90s and I started playing old DOS shareware with music provided by the Yamaha OPL3 FM chip (or, rather, the crappy clone of it that our sound card had) that I realized that it was possible for me to create my own sounds, so I dug around on the Internet (still a mind-boggling new revolution type thing at the time) until I found a couple of programs for instrument editing and music sequencing on the OPL chips. Unfortunately, I couldn't wrap my head around FM, there weren't (at the time) any good explanations of how it worked online, and I mostly just wound up with a bunch of farts and screeches. (Which, sadly, put me on par with about half of all DOS game musicians, very few of whom ever bothered to learn their way around their own equipment!)
But one thing I
did find out online was that the OPL chips were greatly simplified descendants of the technology in a synthesizer keyboard called the Yamaha DX7. "Naturally," I thought to myself, "what I need is to get my hands on one of these. My poor luck in making useable sounds must be due to the simplistic nature of the OPL chips, so if I get the real deal, I will assuredly have a much easier time of it creating my own sounds!" In retrospect I can look back and have a good hearty laugh over that, but I have no idea what would've happened if I'd been exposed to the DX7's user interface at an impressionable age. I would probably either have sworn off music and technology altogether and run off to live in a cave, or have wrapped my warped, damaged mind around it and become an even more hopeless junkie than I am now. At any rate I'd probably at least have stuck to my piano lessons.
But I didn't get a DX7 then, because I had no income of my own and couldn't talk my parents into buying me one (even though this was a magical time when you could get a secondhand DX7 for $30-60 on eBay!) when we had (*
sigh*) a perfectly good preset ROMpler digital piano already. Instead, I got deep into my other obsession, vintage computers, which had the advantage that you could get them for pretty much nothing just by putting a free ad in the local rag. It was in this hobby, while mucking around with a Commodore 64 I got from a family friend, that I re-encountered the wonders of subtractive synthesis courtesy of the legendary SID chip. A little digging around on the Internet introduced me to
GoatTracker, and I was hooked - even with only three single-oscillator voices, even with only one filter between them, I finally had the capability to create my own sounds and make music with them.
For quite some time, my musical endeavors remained strictly on the computer. Besides GoatTracker, there was the similar but more primitive NerdTracker II, which did for the NES pAPU what GoatTracker did for the SID, ModPlug Tracker, which introduced me to sampled sounds and the practice of just grabbing every single halfway-decent sample in every MOD I got my hands on, and finally Jeskola Buzz, where I was introduced to the world of softsynths. I started inching my way back to the idea of getting into hardware synthesizers proper when my parents, who wouldn't spot me $60 for a DX7, wound up getting me a MIDI controller keyboard and G-Force Minimonsta for Christmas! Turns out that even an emulation Minimoog is a friggin'
inspiration - I went absolutely nuts with it, and became obsessed with the idea of getting a genuine analog synthesizer of my own.
Of course, I still had little income to speak of (working part-time at a grocery store for $8/hr.,) and even then a Minimoog commanded a hefty price. It wouldn't be until even later that I finally got a job that left me with enough disposable income that I could afford to start blowing semi-serious money on toys. Finally, in the fall of 2012, a good twelve years after I had first tried to get my hands on a DX7, I nabbed myself a couple of old MIDI modules - a Roland MT-32 and a Yamaha TX81Z - and started messing around with them. The following spring, I put an ad out on Craigslist and heard from an old keyboardist who had an Oberheim Matrix-6 and a Roland JX-10 gathering dust in his basement. From then on, I was inescapably hooked...