Music Technology and Me, Part II

After starting my first after-school job, I was disappointed to find how hard it was to save money.  My $3.85/hour wasn’t exactly accruing the kind of cash I would need to buy my dream studio.  But I would still ride my bike half of my weekdays and usually one weekend day to the neighborhood pizza shop and work towards my first real synthesizer.

The day I could finally afford my first synth arrived in 1990.  Some of my friends could drive by then, and we made a habit of checking out music shops and pawn shops to see what gear they had around.  Even one of the mall stores then had a great selection.  I remember playing an Oberheim Matrix-12, Matrix-6, Roland Alpha Juno, JX-10, and a JX-8p all in one sitting there.  I didn’t even look at the price tags, though.

There was one pawn shop that tended to have a great selection of old gear on Westheimer in Houston.  We walked in one day, and right in front of my eyes was a Roland Juno-60.  I had never seen one before, but the price seemed somewhat reasonable at the time: $425.  I asked for some headphones and began to put the Juno through its paces.

The Roland Juno-60

I instantly fell in love with the Juno.  It is a single oscillator synthesizer with an analog self-oscillating filter, a heavenly chorus, and an arpeggiator.  Even though the oscillator was digitally controlled, to me it sounded rich and warm.  The sub-oscillator could also give the impression of a two-osc synthesizer, and to make things even better that sub-oscillator has a woody, open square wave sound to it that complements the saw and pulse waves on the regular oscillator.  Plus, that chorus!  I did not have $400 at the time, but I was getting close.  I had to find a way to make the Juno-60 mine.

I remember a Sunday afternoon after seeing the Juno, my family all went out for burgers with my grandfather who was visiting us from the Texas valley.  The hamburger restaurant happened to be very close to the pawn shop, so I begged my parents to let me see the synth just for a few minutes while we were nearby.  I think my mom told my grandfather I almost had enough money to buy it, and he offered to pay the rest of the bill right then and there.  The Juno came home with me.

Another view of the Juno-60

I wonder how many hours I spent in my bedroom with headphones on playing that Juno.  I still love the way it sounds and use it practically every time I fire up my studio.  The Juno was a little torn up and rough, but everything worked perfectly on it.  I still am amazed at how great it can sound; you just don’t find many single-oscillator synthesizers that can cut through a mix like the Juno-60 can.  I’m glad it’s still with me.

Even though my grandfather is no longer with us, the Juno is.  I still think about him every once and a while when I play it.

Music Technology and Me, Part I

As far back as I can remember, raw synthesized sounds always intrigued me.  I remember riding in the car with my parents in our red Oldsmobile listening to the radio, hearing sounds like vocoded voices and raw bass lines probably generated by a Minimoog.  Somehow, I had to be able to harness those sounds for myself.

My first electronic instrument, a Casio MT-45 preset synthesizer

For a birthday (I’m going to guess 8th) my parents bought me a Casiotone MT-45, my first electronic keyboard.  I wound up spending countless hours with it, but since it was a preset machine it never lived up to the promise of what I always wanted: a professional analog synthesizer.  But the old Casio did travel with me pretty much everywhere, and I eventually bought myself a Casio SK-1, the first cheap sampling keyboard.  I also eventually bought a Casio SK-5, which was able to store more than just one sampled sound at a time and had orange rubber drum pads on the front.

The Casio SK-1. This was about $100 when it came out and had the ability to sample with an internal microphone. It also had a rudimentary additive synthesis routine built-in.

My dad tended to frequent pawn shops around the time I was in junior high school, and one day he came home with two old cassette decks and some speakers for me.  I actually already had my own Radio Shack 4-channel mono mixer, which I was using to mix the three keyboards together.  Now, with the two cassette decks, I could overdub until my heart was content with my three cheesy keyboards!  Interestingly, the two tape decks had slightly different speeds, so unless I was careful to record and to play back from the same deck, the recordings would eventually decay in pitch over time.  If the keyboards were tunable, that wouldn’t be a problem, but of course they were not.  So there are some unintended microtonal aspects to my early recordings.

My love affair with music technology began to pick up steam in 1986.  In the 1980s, I was like a lot of other kids who lived in the suburbs in a few ways.  For example, my parents would sometimes need to do some shopping at the mall, so they would send me off to wander around while they ticked boxes off of their shopping lists.  In March, I happened to be at a bookstore and noticed the cover of Keyboard Managine: Jean-Michel Jarre in his studio, and a special flexi-disc of a song from the Zoolook sessions was inside and waiting for me!  The magazine came home with me, and I memorized every page.

Jean-Michel Jarre's Rendez-vous Houston, April 1986

One month later, Jarre came to Houston, Texas, my city, for a giant concert downtown.  He brought his vast array of studio synthesizers, the laser harp, and a gaggle of musicians to create an outdoor concert featuring the buildings of downtown as his backdrop.  There were fireworks, huge projections, lasers, and of course, synthesized music.  Jarre also had this semi-circular controller keyboard that had huge, translucent keys; the keys alit whenever he struck them.  I was 11 at the time, and this event had a huge effect on me.  I actually missed the concert that night (long story), but my great uncle gave me a copy of the VHS recording of the event.  I actually think that this was probably a better way of experiencing it, because of all the backstage footage.  Jarre making crazy sounds on an ARP2500 in an unfinished skyscraper gave me some early inspiration.  Yes, one day I will be making crazy sounds on a huge synthesizer in an unfinished skyscraper, too.  At least, that’s what I thought.

So goes my introduction to the world of electronic sounds.  I pined for a real analog synthesizer, and in fact I lied about my age to get an after-school job early.  My savings was devoted to building my studio at $3.85/hour.  It would take a while.