Synthesis is the process of creating sound electronically using either analog or digital
circuitry. And synthesizers, synths for short, are the instruments that do that.
The history of synths goes back to when scientists first started experimenting with electricity in
the 19th century. Early pioneers like Elisha Gray realized you could control sound from a
self-vibrating electromagnetic circuit and began playing around with different methods to do so.
As long as you could use a current to create a vibration and had a way to amplify it, you could
generate sound. One early invention was Thaddeus Cahill's Teleharmonium. Considered to be the first
additive synthesizer, it was a massive, seven ton machine invented around 1901 and installed
in the basement of the Metropolitan Opera House. It produced electricity via these large motors and
then converted them into sound via telephone receivers. But it was shut down when it kept
accidentally bleeding into U.S. naval radio transmissions. Whoops. The early 1900s saw the
development of a plethora of electric instruments due to the invention of the vacuum tube amplifier,
from electric pianos and guitars to Hammond organs to theremins and the Ondes Martenot.
But it wasn't until the 1950s that we began to see instruments more closely resembling what
we'd recognize as synths today. The most revered is RCA's Mark II. It took up, and still does,
even if not in working order, an entire room at Columbia University, and was programmable via
a kind of player piano system where you'd input instructions which would trigger certain modules.
The sound was generated by oscillators. In 1961, the composer Milton Babbit used the Mark II for
his 'Composition for Synthesizer.' If you haven't heard it, well, you're in for a dystopic treat.
The 60s is when synths really began to take off. A german engineer named Harold Bode,
already known for his electric organs, began making instruments with transistors instead of
vacuum tubes and developed a modular concept where different elements could be connected as needed to
produce sounds. This concept was then picked up by a former theremin designer named Robert Moog
and an experimental composer named Herbert Deutsch to create the first popular synth,
the Moog Modular Synthesizer. They added a keyboard to make it more marketable and
the era of synths had finally arrived. The Beatles ordered one; the Stones bought one;
and an all synth performance of Bach became one of the best selling classical albums of the decade.
In 1970, Moog released the Mini Moog Model D based on the most used modules from its now
7 year older, bigger brother. It was small, compact performance-oriented, and portable.
Musicians could take it on tour. And thanks to the introduction of the pitch wheel,
for the first time keyboardists could bend notes like guitar players. Along with the ARP 2600,
the Mini Moog was one of the earliest semi-modular monophonic synths,
meaning all of the routing options were determined behind the front panel,
no patch cables required, with everything you needed in one small compact package.
It was not intimidating and had the flexibility to allow for a lot of sound manipulation.
Because of its ease of use, the layout of the synth became the blueprint for the oncoming
wave of synthesizers with an underlying signal flow that went from left to right.
Global parameters like tune and glide, aka portamento, on the left, then your oscillators,
then a mixer to blend your sounds, the filter with its modulators, and finally the amplifier
envelope to the output. In this way, you can almost visualize your signal flow in action.
By the late 70s and throughout the 1980s, thanks to the invention of the microprocessor,
synths had a digital makeover. Components became more affordable to produce and so
polyphony became a reality for the masses. Enter Sequential Circuits' best seller, the Prophet 5,
the first fully affordable, programmable, polyphonic synthesizer. Oberheim followed
with the OBX in 1982. PPG developed the first wavetable synthesizers which stored samples
digitally in scannable tables for incredibly vast new timbres heard on records from Depeche Mode and
Tangerine Dream. Then in 1983, Yamaha released the iconic DX7, featuring a new method of synthesis
called 'linear FM' that relied on digitally generated simple sine waves to create harmonically
complex sounds like crystalline bell leads, piano-like timbres, funky basses, and rich pads.
And finally, pulse code modulation, or PCM sampling, took things up a notch. Kurzweil
pioneered realistic sampled recreations of real instruments. In fact, they're credited with the
first truly realistic piano sample instrument on their K250. And it didn't cost an arm and a leg,
like the Fairlight CMI and the New England Digital Synclavier. The Ensoniq ESQ-1
in 1987, the Roland D-50, the E-MU SP 1200, and the Korg M1 in 1988 followed. That same year, the
Japanese company Akai, with the help of American engineer Roger Linn paved the way for hip-hop beat
makers to slice, flip, and chop existing records into completely new pieces of art with their MPC.
Pete Rock, J Dilla and other artists would display prodigal mastery of samplers,
inspiring generations of producers and artists. Head to soundfly.com for a free
preview of our latest course, Advanced Synths and Patch Design for Producers,
and learn more about how you can get access to all of our premium courses for one monthly fee.