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Synthesizers are musical instruments, electronic, which are able to produce various sounds and sound effects by originating and manipulating signals generated by oscillators or similar sources of frequencies. These electrical signals are making the sound, which differs from samplers and similar machines that have either recorded sounds or signals inputted through a microphone or other device and then manipulated by modulation sections. The first apparatus that can be called a synthesizer was created as a byproduct of telephone machine developments by Elisha Gray, sometime in the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century. It was called a musical telegraph, where a single note oscillator was creating the sound. Since that time several scientists worked on synthesizers, mainly making them out of analog computers and lab equipment with some early electric music instruments parts thrown in. Notable is the ANS synthesizer, created by Evgeny Murzin in the mid twentieth century, which was used in Russian cinematography, for instance the movie Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky. Buchla Music Easel by the company Buchla was the first modular synthesizer available on the market and then Robert Moog produced the first synthesizer that made an impact on the music world. Presented at the AES convention in
the sixties, the first modular synthesizer that set standards for the future entered the world of music production. First came the Monkees with the number one hit album "Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd." and then the whole world followed. The revolution came with the unbelievably popular and still a synthesizer icon, the Minimoog, also made by Robert Moog. The innovative design included a pre-patched interface, removing the need for patch cables. It had an built-in keyboard and for direct voice manipulation a modulation wheel and a pitch wheel, along with the VCO, VCF and VCA signal flow. These design solutions made the world standard that is still kept with many keyboards and synthesizers to this very day. From this moment on, many companies started their own developments of synthesizers, most prominent the manufacturers of the first ever polyphonic synthesizer that was practical and usable, the Sequential Circuits Company with the Prophet-5, another synthesizer legend. Other polyphonic keyboards did predate the Prophet, like the GX-1 and CS-80 by Yamaha, or the Four Voice by Oberheim, but these were heavy, large, costly and their tuning used to go very awry, which incidentally is in recent times the reason for their renewed popularity. Then the sampling technology arrived, with the Fairlight CMI, the first true digital polyphonic sampling synthesizer. Shortly thereafter Synclavier was introduced by New England Digital and Kurzweil released in 1983 the K250, a polyphonic digital music synthesizer with the capability to reproduce multisounds outfitted with a velocity capable keyboard. FM synthesizers like the Yamaha DX-7 followed, then Roland, the company who lagged always behind, boomed with the D-50, when Korg introduced the first workstation synthesizer M-1 and the whole industry toppled over. |
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