How did you first develop your interest in synthesizers?

[SciNote]

Here's something that I don't believe I have seen on here before. How did you first develop your interest in, or get exposed to, synthesizers?

For me, I would say it goes back to a music class I had in junior high school. We're talking 1976-77 here. We'd listen to various songs, and the teacher would go over different characteristics of them, including what kind of synths were used, if there were any. I remember being fascinated by him saying that this kind of repetitive, sweeping, plucking type sound (which was quite common back then) was produced using a Moog synthesizer that cost $1300 at the time. Mini-Moog? I'm not sure, as I don't remember him stating the model.

This interest got me into building my own VERY basic synths. Radio Shack used to sell these educational bread-board electronics kits, where they'd have a book of circuits, and you'd build them by connecting wires to components on the board using spring clips. Some of these circuits were for sound effects like birds chirping and race cars, so I experimented with those, changed the values of different capacitors and resistors to see what sounds I could come up with, and then I would build those circuits on my own board and put them in my own housing (my father helped me with some of this), and then build a very rudimentary keyboard for it. These were very basic -- no real filter or envelope generators -- though I remember that changing a capacitor would muffle the sound on certain circuits (Low Pass Filter?), but would also change the pitch of the tone at the same time.

When I showed an interest in playing keyboards for real, my parents bought me a home organ, which is kind of a synthesizer itself, but it also had something called an "Orbit Synthesizer" on top, which had various pitches of sine-wave tones, a few instrument presets, and adjustable sliders for attack, sustain (which was really release), and pitch modulation speed and depth.

I later had an electronic music class in high school, which looking back, was quite an impressive offering at the time, which was 1979-80. The lab had an Arp Odyssey, an Arp Omni II, and I believe an ElectroComp synth. There was also a sequencer for the Odyssey, an analog echo chamber, and a 4-track Teac real-to-real tape deck for making multi-track recordings. This is where I really learned about how analog synths work.

My parents eventually got me a more advanced home organ, and then years later, I sold it to start using a stack of individual keyboards, with one of the first ones being a DX-7. I was in the later years of high school, and then into college, when New Wave music became popular, and indeed, it was my favorite type of music at the time.

[synthomatic]

I'd always enjoyed the sound of synthesizers since first hearing the recordings of Wendy (Walter) Carlos and synth pop bands especially New Musik. Then about ten years ago out of curiosity I bought a MIDI cable and connected an old electronic keyboard to a computer. When I heard the keyboard playing some MIDI file I'd downloaded I was instantly hooked and then began reading lots of books on sound and synthesizers and building up a small home studio.

[crochambeau]

When I was nine years old my mom bought me a new Yamaha CS-01II, which provided backdrop spaceship sounds to my imaginary universe.

The bug stuck.

[SciNote]

Yep, I could imagine playing around with a CS-01II would do it! Playing around with the equipment can really whet the appetite. When I was in high school and took that electronic music class, I remember that the teacher said that we were required to log a minimum of 25 hours of "lab time" (time outside the realm of the scheduled class used to work on various recordings for class assignments) to pass the class. Well, I logged over 100 hours!

There's just something intoxicating about having a box of components that are the building blocks of just about any sound you'd want to build, and then having a multi-track recorder to lay down tracks and make full-sounding, multi-part recordings.

As far as music that may have piqued my interest, what's funny is that one of the main songs for me originally turned out to not be a synthesizer, after all. It's "Strawberry Letter Number 23", by the Brothers Johnson. For years -- indeed, for decades -- I always thought that fast riff in the middle was a synth, and I was curious about how the sound was produced and impressed with the speed that the player was playing the notes (as this was before I actually learned how to play keyboard). I'm almost embarrassed to admit that it was only a few years ago that I found out that this riff was done on a guitar.

[frequency]

I was 11 and my friend had a Jean Michel Jarre tape which he'd play over and over. When we did sleep overs we'd darken the room and play Oxygene and Equinox. It fired up my imagination and I've been a synth lover ever since!