Winter 1993 - The PPGs

By late 1992/early 1993 there was still a part of me that thought that a career in music was a possibility, and I crafted a plan: What I really needed was a decent mixing board, a multitrack ADAT, and a good effect unit. I came up with a budget of $6500 for the project, and approached my dad for a loan. This was actually the first time I had decided to ask: Up to then I'd been able to work and save for each piece of gear - $500 here, $1000 there. But a big investment like this... I needed some help. He gave the money willingly, though with the caveat that this is the last of it - what I did next would need to fund itself.

What happened next was absolutely brilliant and idiotic at the same time. Not one day after depositing those funds, I picked up the CityPages and saw in the classifieds "PPG Synth - Call for Details". I couldn't not call. The PPG. The legend.

The PPG was one of the first digital synths on the market in the early 1980s, but with an analog filter. It had a brittle, digital tone, but was very distinctive. The opening to "The Politics of Dancing" was very PPG. Most of Propaganda's "A Secret Wish" album was PPG. PPG was the sound all over Depeche Mode's "A Broken Frame". Nothing sounded quite like a PPG, and nothing still does. Plus, it was GERMAN, and RARE, and BLUE.

So I called. I was... I wasn't thinking. I had a plan for that money, I really did. But I called. And I went out to meet this guy.

He had a beautiful recording studio a block away from Paisley Park - he and his brother were a band I'd never heard of called "BroJo" (after "The Brothers Johnson" - but not the funky ones who worked with Quincy Jones). They got a recording contract and a big advance, plowed it into gear, and never went anywhere, and apparently started renting out their studio and gear to jingle artists. It was a gorgeous facility with just a hint of "starting to get run down" about it. And this guy was talking a mile a minute, too. He led me into the gear room, and I couldn't believe my eyes.

TWO PPG Wave 2.3 synths, a PRK FD Master Keyboard, AND a Waveterm B computer. This was the full PPG system worth well over $40,000 just 8 years earlier, a serious competitor to the Fairlight and Synclavier. And he had it all. And it all WORKED.

And I could take it all home for $6000.

Oh man. What a choice. Be responsible, get the Mackie 24/8 mixer, get the ADAT, get the Lexicon, actually have a studio where I could do more than "press play and lay it to DAT". Or blow the money on a dream synth system from 8 years earlier with a horrible reputation for reliability, manuals in German, and no support.

I don't need to tell you that I crammed that gear into the car, wrote him a check, and raced home, my mind full of justifications, of rationalizations, about how somehow just somehow, this gear would be JUST AS USEFUL in my long term plans as the recording gear... oh yes.... why did I even WANT that recording gear anyway? If I needed to, i could just rent time in a place like BroJo. Yeah, the music I'll be writing with this PPG system will be incredible. Plus, the gods must WANT me to have this, to have the ad appear RIGHT when I could afford it...

It was like Jack trading the cow for magic beans. And I knew the beans were magic. I had no regrets. My dad rolled his eyes. Pamela (my then-girlfriend, now wife) was excited by the blue things, and happy that I was happy.

I got a new Ultimate Support stand for the whole system, which rose up the wall, with one synth almost vertical. The glowing green screen of the Waveterm was comforting. I loaded up sample disks (5 1/4" floppies) and heard sounds I had heard before on records - very distinctive choirs and strings, punchy drums, and a stand up bass that was very very playable. I had a wonderful month with them - recorded several songs with the PPG as the main sound source, got to know their inner workings....

But the bloom was coming off the rose just a bit: The PRKFD didn't actually do anything that the manual said it did. All it did was send Midi notes. You could click the keypad all you wanted, and it wouldn't change what it did. The Waveterm was actually a user-hostile system, that despite having a full screen, still insisted that you communicate with it using unlabeled "soft keys" that changed function depending on the screen, and used cryptic acronyms (of GERMAN terms) for everything. I never got it to do several key things... like sample, or sequence. It let you build your own waveforms and wavetables, but everything I made sounded either like a flute, or a flute through a distortion pedal.

And then they started failing. It was a mere 6 months into ownership when one of the Waves decided to go dark. I brought it to The Good Guys, my repair shop, and 2 weeks and $250 later, it was fixed. A blown capacitor. 3 months later, the OTHER wave went dark. The Good guys fixed it. And so it went for the next 4 years: Every four-six months, one or the other would fail, and the Good guys would get $250 (or more) to fix it. They got over $2000 of my money that way, those crafty PPGs. And you really couldn't argue it.

Alas, I knew this going in: The PPG was a notoriously unreliable beast: They failed Depeche Mode in concert. Everybody who had one needed another for a hot spare. The inside was basically a computer with three big cards plugged into it, and the cards came loose over time - it was common to drop a PPG to reseat the cards! It was like having british sports car - a rich man's folly.

After the PPGs, there really wasn't anywhere I could go with the vintage gear - maybe a Fairlight... but that would have been at least $4k back then, and my money was spent. The PPGs were the last hurrah of my vintage phase. I had everything I could have wanted - a Jupiter 8, a Linndrum, a Simmons SDS7 kit, a TX816, a PPG system, a MemoryMoog, an OB8, and the Rhodes Chroma... And it was all running through my Mackie line mixers, sequenced by my Mac, using Performer...

It was a good setup, and I wrote a hell of a lot of music with it. And by 1998 when the studio fell, I had got my money's worth out of the gear. The PPGs wound up selling for a bit more than I paid in 1993, but less if you factor in all of the repairs - I think it was $7500 all told, and they had recently been serviced, so I hope the owner got some good use out of them. I'm sure the Good Guys knuckled back a tear...

In 2000, Wolfram Franke of Waldorf (which continued the PPG tradition) created a "Virtual PPG" plug in for the computer. And to my ears it sounded amazing - JUST like the PPG I remembered. And the PPG sound appeared again in a lot of my music... for a while. But it kept refusing to blow a capacitor, and it only cost $400 total, and I never had to drag it to the Good Guys... so the experience wasn't completely authentic.

As a coda, I decided to look up BroJo, and the only mention out there is "Three Charged in Hazardous Waste Fire - BroJo Sound Studios" under the category "Disaster - Fire" in the annals of the Carver County Historical Society. I don't think it's worth the $3 for the article reprint however...

Summer 1996 - The Awesome Denouement

I have to stick with linear just long enough to give the payoff on the Hip Clips Music story, because it was awesome.

In Spring 1995, as Hip Clips was failing to take the world by storm, Paul was being a good internet citizen, participating in various discussion boards (not astroturfing, just being online) and wound up chatting with a certain celebrity about Windsurfing. And after a while, the two became net-friends, and Paul was invited out to Half Moon Bay California to do some Windsurfing, and some talking...

And that was how it came to be that Thomas Dolby asked Paul to join him at his Silicon Valley startup company Headspace. As a part of this, Hip Clips was "acquired" by Headspace. No, there wasn't any actual money in this, but at this point I was just happy for Paul, so I signed away the rights. And Paul and his wife Melissa up and moved to California. JUST LIKE THAT.

Working for a man who I had somewhat idolized as a synth god in the 1980s... It just seemed so wonderful.

Of course, in those early days, Headspace was sort of struggling to find a place in the world - for a few years it got by being "Thomas Dolby's Company" - Paul did some soundtrack work for videogames under the Headspace banner... but it was more of a services company than a big product idea.

In early 1996, that changed when Headspace acquired a pretty cool browser plug-in called "Igor": The idea of Igor was to be a standard midifile player with a twist: You load in your own sounds. So we were approaching MORE bandwidth, but still nowhere near as much as if you were streaming actual music. A Midifile is maybe 4k in size, and the initial Igor download was I think 4 meg, which was as much memory as most professional synthesizers were providing as standard. So you could start with a good basic sound set, and then if you "sonified" your website with Igor, you could also specify custom samples to be downloaded into the player for your own sound. They called it "Rich Media Format" RMF files.

So after you bit the bullet and installed Igor (and it was available on those CD-Roms on the cover of magazines, don't forget), you could get a pretty good sounding bit of music going with a less than 100k download (10-20 sec on dialup), music and samples. It was a cool concept, which was ultimately doomed by the ever cheapening bandwidth that allowed for real streaming music without the gimmick, but for a few years, it was pretty unique. They refocused the whole company around this plug in, renamed themselves "Beatnik", and ran with it.

I know I know - we'll get to the ME part of the story now.

As they were preparing Igor for launch in Summer 1996, they wanted some demo files to show it off. They had the music licenses to Hip Clips already, and Paul knew I had the source files. So in what I'll call "the easiest money ever" (as long as you don't factor in the hours and hours of work that went into the ORIGINALs), Headspace paid me $100 per file to deliver the source midi files so they could repurpose them into Igor.

The catch is that I did need to do some prep work on the files: A lot of the drum tracks weren't mapped to traditional voices, since they were triggering my ancient strange pieces of equipment, not standard midi boxes. But once I got into the "cleanup" mindframe, the whole project was done in a few weeks, and they cut me a check for $4000.

But that's not the good part. The good part is that in Summer of 1996, I finagled a visit out to Headspace in San Mateo and got to hang out with Paul in Silicon Valley in the middle of the Tech Boom. As we walked the streets of San Mateo, there were shiny BMWs lined up like it was a dealership - every 25-year old in the area was flush with money, and were spending it as quickly as possible...

And while I was visiting, I got to spend a few minutes talking with Thomas. I tried to geek bond on a few technical things, but as it can be with professionals who lived through a time, he seemed mildly relieved to NOT have to be using some of those old synths, and was especially pleased with his brand spanking new Yamaha QY700 all in one synth/sequencer/groovebox. I grinned and rolled with it.

I did, however, get to pet his not-turned-on Fairlight CMI Series 3. That was some legendary tech.

And I heard tell that it was around 2003 when he finally got around to trying out his Fairlight again, and started playing some of his old tracks again, rediscovering his love for the gear once more. But that's his story, not mine.

By 1998, just about everyone was getting DSL, and the need for a tool like Igor (now the Beatnik plugin) was pretty much non-existent - the people who cared about a quality audio experience were buying the bandwidth, and the people who didn't stayed with dialup and didn't care about having music on their websites. Beatnik did a few re-focusing moves, partnering with Nokia to port the technology to mobile phones, and somehow getting into the custom ringtones market, but by then Paul had moved on...

It was a wonderful payoff to the Hip Clips adventure to finally get some money, some schmoozing with a hero, and some impossibly good Thai food as well. Paul never did come back to Minnesota, and I never did move out to California to find a pot of gold.

Fall 1994 - Hip Clips

You kids may not believe me on this, but in the early to mid 1990s there was an explosion of rich content playing on computers - animated menus, interactive stories, cool video clips on demand, funny animations... But it wasn't on the internet. No, there was a big market for interactive CD-Roms back then. Magazines were putting CDs on their covers. There were CDRom magazines you could subscribe to. Of course Games were on CD, but so were corporate presentations.

And the backbone for a lot of this development was a product called MacroMedia Director. Director has since been wrapped into the thing we all now know as Flash, and is sold by Adobe. But in 1994, if you wanted to be a king of new media, you dropped the $1200 on a license of Director, and you needed a pretty powerful machine to run it - we're talking at LEAST 40mhz CPU, and preferably 8 meg of ram. Yes, that is MHZ not GHZ. And it's MEG not GIG.

By 1999, almost all of this type of content was being delivered by the Web, with Broadband connections growing in popularity. But in 1994, one of the best selling CDRoms was from the San Diego Zoo, a virtual tour with short, tiny, embedded video clips.

Cards on the table: I was not a visionary here. I came along for the ride. All credit goes to Paul Sebastien, who called me up and asked me to help him with a project. Paul spotted the trend and connected some dots: People are making interactive CD Roms. No matter what your content is in there, you are probably going to have a menu or two or three, plus a splash screen. And what says "multimedia experience" better than music? GOOD sounding music?

CDRoms were the breakthrough over Floppies because they offered a crazy 650meg of content - bigger than many hard drives at the time. And games delivered on floppies were limited to 2 meg or so. The music on games and presentations at that point was "Midi Files" - this was basically a musical score that the sound card in your computer would play back. They usually sounded tinny and terrible, and never sounded the same from computer to computer. But storage wise, they were very economical. And the Web of the era was also limited to these Midi files too, and forget about video!

Paul figured with the huge storage size of a CD Rom, people could actually put REAL music on there. But few people in 1994 would have access to high quality license-free music. And at the time, the competition was very high priced "industrial music" companies, who did canned music for corporate films - each track would cost between $10-100. Paul's vision was FIFTY great, loopable pieces of music in 5 different styles for $150 (I think) - $3 a track, in high, medium, and low quality versions for inclusion in your project, license free.

But Paul needed some help: This was still in the days of Psykosonik, and he was having some degree of writer's block on their third album... any music coming from his brain would need to be dedicated to his actual BAND. So he asked me to join him and be "the music guy", and Paul would be the Macromedia Director guy, plus the marketing. That division of labor worked for me: We did some basic numbers modeling, and hopefully this would bring me somewhere around $10,000 in the first few months if all went to plan. The upside could be incredible. Of course there would be no up-front compensation, but I had a day job, so that wasn't that big of a hurdle for me.

For 3 months, I wrote music like a madman, laid it to DAT, and drove to his townhouse in Plymouth to play tracks and see how the project was coming along. The styles were Slow Groove, Midtempo, Upbeat, Ambient, and Hyper. In the end, I think we scaled back from 50 to 40, because I was beginning to burn out a little and the user interface looked good with 8 buttons per style. 40 completely distinct 1 minute pieces of produced music is a bit much for even a maniac like me. And I was obsessed with making each one really sound DIFFERENT, unlike some libraries we had found where it was really only 4 actual compositions, but sliced and diced 5 ways each. So for each track, it was a blank slate: I picked a tempo/style, and started writing.

Paul learned more and more about Director, but the application had mysterious crashes, and despite having a simple interface, would crawl to a halt on many systems. Again, this was new territory - CD Roms were hard to make compatible with every system, and you had to put a lot of "sensing" code in to see exactly what hardware landscape it was to interact with... Things we take for granted in the web world now.

Also recall my writing style during this era: Twirl the knobs, hit record, and move ON. I was still using Performer, and the sounds on this project were heavily weighted to the Jupiter 8, The SY77, The Oberheim OB8, the Juno106, LinnDrum, Simmons SDS7, and TX816 So each of these songs was truly a moment in time captured. There was no easy way to go back and recreate one if we wanted to change it a little... I delivered these "AS-IS", and Paul was very accommodating, really. And sitting with him in his austere, beautiful studio listening to my tracks was a very fun experience, because he wasn't shy about handing out the compliments. I felt very good about this project.

When the CD was finally ready for market, it was months later... and you probably don't need to be told it didn't sell all that well. I think several dozen all told. But it was alone in its genre, so it could actually be said to be the "best selling" of its type, which helped Paul down the road....

This experience was also my first encounter with... astroturfing. Since we didn't have much money, we couldn't take out a full page ad in the back of Mondo2000 magazine. We tried to spread "word of mouth" via various internet bulletin boards and usenet forums. But even back then, there were pretty strict "no selling" policies in these user communities, so Paul and I logged in as "normal people who had bought Hip Clips and really liked it". Of course, how suspicious is it that you have a user just join the forum and the first and last thing he posts is mention of a product he likes? Yeah.

I confess I only did a few of them because I felt guilty about it. But Paul went to town on it - I think he had 3 dozen different AOL accounts at one point, posting accolades for our product. Not that it worked THAT well, but hey, we sold a few.

In the end, I never got any actual cash from the venture: Paul went into debt getting the CDs printed with cases, and he had to pay off the Director software as well. But he did give me one of his pieces of gear as sort of a "sorry this didn't work out" sort of gift, and music junkie that I was, that was actually JUST FINE with me. Plus, I got 40 pieces of music done. I only wish I had thought to make each one a full piece of music, because I really really like these pieces even today, and want them to go longer than 60 seconds. Plus it proved that Paul and I were a pretty good team, which would come in helpful in our ventures in the in the new century... but that's another story.

Winter 1990 - Six Crises

Mike, the lead singer of PG13 and my ongoing partner in Musical Crime came to me with several odd proposals in the years 1989-1991. Some of them resulted in some odd garage-funk music that we called "Spongebath", but today I'll tell you about one of the two "Rock Operas" we almost started. One was a musical history of Sammy Davis Jr called Yes I Can that we never actually wrote any music for, but give us 10 min and we could sing the whole thing out. I have half of a sketch from the dramatic intro, but it never materialized. We imagined a great "Sammy loses his eye" moment recording a ping pong ball bouncing across the floor, and someone shouting from the kitchen "MY EYE!" Perhaps it is better that we didn't do more with this.

The other we actually wrote music for. Six Crises, the Opera based on the book by Richard Nixon of the same name.

The first song we wrote was actually me alone: I was watching CNN Headline News in the apartment I shared with Erik, and there was something on about white bigots in South Africa, and this man looked a bit like Santa Claus but more Dutch, and he was spewing some particularly florid hatrid "We cannot allow them to take our land, rape our women, kill our children. We will FIGHT until the bitter end". But what was amazing was his VOICE: He had the most silken deep voice, a voice you'd love to hear telling you bedtime stories. A voice that probably had a beautiful laugh. A voice put to a very evil service. I couldn't believe my ears, and the next half hour of my life was wasted as I raced to find a videotape so I could capture this man's voice, since Headline news repeated their stories ever 30 min. I actually had to wait a full hour for this particular piece, but it was worth it.

Immediately, I got to work on a piece of music that was menacing and plodding, sounding a bit like a military march with low horns and some distorted synths percolating in the background. By this time I had my Yamaha SY77, which had some very good brass and strings sounds, and I was able to sound somewhat epic. It built and built, until everything dropped away and I dropped this voice in: I had filled the memory of my Akai S950 with this sample, and it was too big for a single disk, so I had to use it or lose it.

It wasn't a long song, under 4 minutes, but it was long enough to. We listened to it together and the voice gave us chills - Mike didn't even know where it had come from, but he was captivated. We decided this would be the music for the chapter on Alger Hiss.

But the music had its own contained presence and we never could add lyrics to it. We just called it Alger Hiss and let it sit over to the side on tape. We never loaded that sample up again, never worked on that idea again. There's something to be said for a sound demanding to be worked with, and that experience being DONE with. I never did a sample grab from TV after that, either. Done.

The other song we did was far more lighthearted - we imagined it to be Dick singing to Pat, making a statement of purpose before striding out the door to get his ass handed to him by Kennedy in 1960. It was called "This I Believe".

Right around this time I got the LinnDrum, and so the song was built around a slightly swung groove on the Linn, with the SY77 horns and strings, TX81z cutting through with percussive bass, and the Juno playing Organ as it did so often in the spongebath days. We wrote the song and cut the instrumental, but Mike never shared with me exactly how it would sound... until we played at the Seventh Street Entry in late Spring 1990, warming up for a rival synthpop band "X-Ray Kiss".

Mike pulled out all of the stops singing this, and I'm fortunate to have captured this on video because it was a true work of art. The video, by the way, was shot on a camcorder I had purchased just days earlier from Daytons, where they had a very generous return policy. And yes, that camcorder returned to Daytons just days later, before the 10 day cutoff. The salesmen were righteously pissed...

After that, we sort of let the Rock Opera thing drop, but it wasn't the end of our projects by any means.

Summer 1998 - The Studio Falls

In April 1998, I became a homeowner. Finally leaving years of rentals, my wife and I moved to an older house in Edina, built in 1913. And one of my "gifts" from my kind wife was a large room for my studio. Much larger than any room I had (except for the Death Star configuration of 1992 when I took over the center of a living room in a huge old apartment), but with a catch: There was a high traffic corridor bisecting the room. So the usable contiguous space in the studio was "just" a large L shape, not a full Rick Wakeman surround. Even a "U" configuration would be difficult. Some things would just have to go.

A couple of my things had gone in the months prior to us buying the house: We were making a full 20% downpayment, and there were a few thousand to be had by sloughing off some of my lesser used bits of gear. The Rhodes Chroma made its way out in 1997, going abroad to a nice man named Clive. The OB8 left even before that (I never truly bonded with that synth). The Simmons Drums had gone by 1996...

Around this time, a strange music store had opened in NorthEast Minnespolis: Wedged into the front half of a plumbing supply store, this outfit was one guy who always looked 3 hours short on sleep... but ALL he did was strange european things. See, by 1995, some crazy Swedes created a "Virtual Analog Synth" called the Nord Lead. And while I saw them all over the music magazines, nobody in Minneapolis had one. But this guy did. And it sounded great.... but not as great as my Jupiter8. And it only had 4 voices...

But it was only the beginning... the Europeans were coupling new DSP technology with old school user interface design, creating new synths that looked bold, sounded huge, but were easy and fun to use.

In Spring 1998, my guy got in a bit of gear that changed everything for me. He got an Access Virus. This was built by germans and had completely unreasonable specs: 16 voices, each with 2 oscillators. up to 16 different parts could be addressed, and routed to 3 stereo outputs. It had separate chorus and delay for each voice. And most importantly, it sounded INCREDIBLE - as good as my Jupiter 8 did to my ears.

And so I revisited my manifesto: I had got into these vintage synths because I was tired of the horrible user interfaces of the synths of 1990. I was tired of the digital sampled sound of those days, and the "play this preset" mentality. I moved to old synths not just because they sounded good, but because they had an immediacy to programming, AND because they were DIRT CHEAP during that brief window of time.

But by 1998, I was feeling the limitations as well: They were big and heavy and generated a lot of heat. They required lots of cables. They wandered out of tune, and never sounded quite the same from day to day. And frankly, I had used the hell out of them and was ready for some fresh sounds.

So yes, my friends, I traded my huge, heavy, beautiful Jupiter 8 for a tiny red box with knobs. Finally, new technology that sounded as good as my old stuff, but had a great user interface and was fun to use. The Access Virus had it all.

Within 4 months, everything else was gone, and in its place was one Fatar SL990 controller keyboard and five modules: A Roland JV1080, an Akai S5000, an Access Virus A, a Waldorf Microwave XT, and a Nord Lead 2. One MIDI interface, and two 8-channel audio snakes is all I needed. And it was incredible.

I tell you now, and you'll never believe me, but I didn't shed a tear for a single piece of that vintage gear... It wasn't until years later that I began to pine for the Jupiter 8 again. But everything else... It was ok. Some serious nerd was happier than I was with it. And The Good Guys (my repair shop) was considerably poorer without my regular visits.

Fall 1992 - TX Treasure

When I think of the vintage gear tsunami I fell into, it's remarkable to think it really "only" lasted 2 years - first toe in the water in 1991, last great deal found in 1993, after which point I started to retire pieces of gear. One great find for me was the TX816.

I believe this beast was actually built in 1985: Eight Yamaha DX7 synthesizers in single rack, with just a few buttons and one angry red 2-digit LED for each. You couldn't program these things from the front panel - they were strictly for playback. But by this time I was using a bit of software from Opcode called "Galaxy" which offered visual editing and library management on my Mac (which in 1992 was STILL my SE - imagine, I actually used the same computer for 5 years), so I could load up my favorite sounds and let it rip, and I could tweak them in the editing software.

The TX816 was sort of legendary for me - while it was heavily used by a lot of very hack-y sounding LA musicians (who used the 8 synths to layer up the most lush fake electric piano patch ever), it was championed by my sequencing hero David Gamson of Scritti Politti. If you listen to Cupid+Psyche, you'll hear all of these little clavinet-synth sounds, all a little different, weaving lines of melody, trading parts, almost like a Bach Invention. That was the power of the TX - you had all this SOUND to work with, but all of the sounds were sort of SMALL, so they could dance around eachother without making the mix a mess.

If you're wondering what this sounded like... try to remember "Things Can Only Get Better" by Howard Jones - that funky bassline with a little clavinet interplay - that was the classic DX sound.

Listening to my tracks from this time period, I hear all 8 of those synths going - some doubling lines, one synth being used just for a triangle sound twice in the track... It was ridiculous luxury to be throwing the sonic power of a full DX7 (when new, a $2500 synth) to that single purpose.

I found the TX in a second-hand store in St Paul called Encore Music - they typically had used synths I WASN'T interested in, but I made the rounds anyway. There was always a Korg Poly 61, or a Crumar Stratus, or a Roland Juno-6, or a early 1980s E-Piano module of ill repute and sound... but it was always worth looking. And one day, I saw the TX816 sitting there, with a treasure almost as great: 8 20 foot XLR Cables (high quality) with 1/4" adaptors. $800 for the works, and honestly the cabling was worth at least $200 of that. I couldn't say no, and took it home.

Of course, this officially overloaded my mixer, so I needed to get a second 16-channel submixer. And it was a little noisy, so this was what brought the noisegate into my house. So all told, it was at least $1200 of "deal", but it still felt like a deal, considering not 6 years earlier this would have cost in at least $5000. In fact, watching the auction prices, TX816s STILL go for around $800, having peaked up to closer to $1400 by the late 1990s. So while it wasn't a $200 Jupiter 8, it was still a good deal.

The TX wound up leaving the arsenal in one of the earliest rounds of studio pruning in 1995: By that time, I had used it on a few dozen tracks, but had fallen into a familiarity with the sound, every time I dialed it in, I was using it for similar things, and I fell out of love with its reedy thin sound. And having a huge coil of cables running behind everything was getting to feel unreasonably cluttery. I found a good home for it for a bit more than I paid for it.... and it never cost me anything in service costs (which I can't say about my other big treasure I haven't told you about yet).

Spring 1991 - Vintage

From 1984-1990, I prided myself on having pretty cool new gear: My first synth was a Yamaha DX9, which was the nouveau of the nouveau (even if it sounded like a reedy kalimba with zero power... I ran that thing thing through a chorus, and then later a flanger just to get some meat on the sound...). From there, I was buying new gear at a healthy rate, but in a strange pocket: Never the best, never the worst: I was a straight up midrange playa. And even from the beginning, I had sequencers and drum machines rather than tape machines and good mixers. Somehow that whole "program it for live" thing was in my DNA from the very beginning.

If you were paying attention in the 1980s, the second half of the decade was a horrible one for synthesizers: Yes there were some great machines, but what we were losing were knobs and sliders: Synths were becoming pre-set machines that you could edit if you wanted to search through menus and squint at a 2x40 lcd. You sure as heck weren't going to whip up a new sound in the middle of a gig. I felt pretty strongly about this: I even wrote a letter to Keyboard Magazine that got printed, and it was "letter of the month" lamenting the lack of feel in the new synths...

It wasn't all bad - you had synths with 16 or 32 voices that sounded better than the Fairlights that made us all drool in 1984 - some even had the same waveforms, so you could sort of live your Fairlight dreams, just without the light pen. And I was buying these synths, selling them off after 9-12 months, and going for the next one. I kept Torps Music in Minneapolis going for a while... at least until one day when the keyboard salesguy hollered "hey, it's the money guy". I walked out and never returned.

Anyway, by 1990-1991, I was getting bored of the whole new-box-does-everything mode, and was looking for a thrill. At the time, I was writing a LOT of music, by the way - usually 1-2 new songs a week. The period from 1990-1992 was insanely fertile: over 200 songs. The point is, I was chewing through gear, but it was being USED - I can still listen to any track and tell you exactly what was making what sound. I loved my gear. BUT the state of new music gear in 1991 was pitiful: Roland was recycling the D50 sound engine yet again, Korg had new versions of the M1... Even yamaha with their commitment to strange sounds in FM was only releasing "sample player" instruments.

And sounds on the records... people weren't even trying anymore: they'd buy the new synth, dial up the presets, and record the song. So if you bought that new synth, you either had to use the same sounds (easy), or commit to programming your own signature sound... and did I mention that you'd be doing that with the small display, 4 buttons, 1 slider, and a single dial? Yeah, not very fun.

But in 1990/1991, something magical happened: People started selling off their old gear to get these new machines. Now I understand a guy who is in a YES cover band needing to have a synth that 1) he can carry, 2) stays in tune, and 3) is capable of sounding like more than the synth at the end of ELP "Lucky Man". These are working people, and they were making choices.

And in the process, they were selling the synthesizers that I dreamed about in the early 1980s. My first true vintage purchase was a Roland Jupiter 8. MINT condition. For two hundred dollars. It didn't have a midi interface (I added that myself for another $150), so I could see why the seller wanted to upgrade. But this synth.... it was incredible. This is the synth that percolated behind Duran Duran RIo. Most of Howard Jones "Human Lib" was on this synth. This is a desert island synth, sitting perfect in any mix.

My next purchase was a midi'ed LinnDrum. This classic drum machine from 1983 was limited from a 1991 perspective (16 sounds, as opposed to the 100 drum sounds in 8 meg of ROM in the new Roland R8), but this was the sound of almost every synthpop record from 1983-1986. The drums were in Heaven 17, Human League, even Dead or Alive. And it was covered in buttons and sliders - it was ridiculously easy to use, and it sounded great.

When I think of the gear I added in that 2 year period, it is almost insane, and yet my total outlay was under $3000, which was a lot less than the flagship Kurzweil K2000 supersynth was selling for. I added a Simmons SDS7 brain for $75, and a trigger-to-midi interface for another $50 (the thick Ksssshhhhh drum sounds of synthpop). I bought an Oberheim OBXa for $350 (The Time, Prince, Thompson Twins, and more).

Two treasures: A Rhodes Chroma for $200. This was the last ARP synth, and had a strange fragile sound - used as the lead synth on Rockit by Herbie Hancock, and also used by The Fixx. It wound up the lead on a lot of my tracks. And a MemoryMoog for $550, once owned by local rock legends The Suburbs (I saw that synth on stage many times) - I named it "Dr Voltage" for its huge sound... but truth be told it was insanely unstable and couldn't be relied upon to sound the same from hour to hour... I used the Doctor very sparingly in my compositions.

There were things I passed up. I didn't buy the Oberheim 4 Voice for $300, because it was too huge. I didn't buy any of the minimoogs because they didn't have MIDI, and I wanted/needed to be able to sequence these things (remember - I was a trigger-it-live guy, not a tape guy.) I never bought a TB303 Bassline - even with the acid factor, it just sounded wonky.

So my studio by late 1991 was a full half of the bedroom, creeping toward the ceiling on some seriously overloaded Ultimate Support stands. And I sat there with my Mac SE (still!) running Performer (Still!) running all of these synths into a cheap Tascam line mixer (though the noisier ones got routed through a noise gate), and printing my compositions directly to DAT - never printing the individual tracks.

I'd leave the gear up and on until the song was done. I'd set the verse up on a loop, and bring in synths, twirling the knobs and setting the sliders to find the perfect sound... it was very "of the moment" and I never saved the sounds back - that sound was for that song, and that was it. Print it, move on.

I had no shortage of musical ideas - they were flying out of my head faster than I could keep up anyway, so I never really thought about posterity or replications... I was thinking that if I ever really needed to do a song again, I'd probably do it BETTER then next time. That's what I told myself, but in truth, the few times I did try to do a remake, the sound was different enough that I considered it a new song entirely....

There were a few more treasures that made their way into the studio in 1992, but that will be another post. But Spring 1991, the arrival of the vintage... it was an amazing time, and I made some great music with those machines. What happened to them? Yeah, that's another post again.

Winter 1989 - Performing Live

In 1984-85, I played keyboards in a live band. By 1986-87, I started doing studio work, which de-emphasized the live playing element. My revelatory moment was in the summer of 1987 when I worked with my friend Al in his 8-track basement studio: The two of us were sequencing synths using MOTU Performer, and laying down tracks to SMPTE Time Code. I was stacking 3-4 synths on a line, and it was amazing. We actually sounded a bit like Stock Aiken Waterman with our song "DYMF".

I bought my own copy of Performer, got a Midi Time Piece, and hooked it up via Serial Port to my Mac SE (not SE/30, just SE). This was my workhorse computer: My Mac256 made it through freshman year, but by the end of that year, the amount of disk switching necessary to finish a 20 page paper was intolerable. I started sophomore year in 1987 with a Mac SE, with the whopping 20 meg hard drive. This became my music machine.

I bought Performer AND Composer, which was the MOTU Notation software, which I used in my music theory classes to notate my assignments, which would have gobsmacked and amazed my teacher, if only he hadn't introduced me to Composer in the first place. We were geeks together, Carleton Macy and I, swapping Mac tips. But that's not this story.

By my Senior year 1989-1990, my Mac SE had been upgraded to 4 whole megs of RAM, and a 170 MEG hard drive. My home studio had grown to include a sampler (Akai S950), a good synth or two (Roland Juno 106, Roland JX8P, Yamaha TX81Z, and the cream of the crop, the Roland D50 Synth), plus two drum machines - a Yamaha RX5 and an Alesis HR16B. I had a 4 track, but I was proud of the fact that with this setup I could actually run everything LIVE from my sequencer. Somehow this seemed very important, that the sounds be triggered "live" by the computer.

It was all the more important to me because my friend and rival Paul Sebastien had brazenly made the switch to the Tape Show when performing Live. Paul, like me, was a great arranger and studio nerd, but unlike me, he was also a fan of printing things to tape and moving on. His studio was always cleaner than mine - just 1-2 good synths, with a good mixing board and tape machine. He multitracked, he bounced, he acted like a real studio guy. And by 1989 he had arranged with some friends to create a "scene" - his friends opened an 18-up club above another nightclub, and Paul ran the house band, called "Smilehouse".

Smilehouse had a great sound, lots of production gloss, and a full lineup of smiling musicians, all of whom (save Paul) were faking their instruments while Paul's beautiful mix was playing on a tape deck back at the sound board.

I'm going to level with you: given the rear view mirror of 20 years, I can't imagine what the difference would be between a guy pressing play on a tape, versus pressing play on a sequencer which was then triggering the synths. But it meant something to me.

So my response was a fake band called "The Acid Police" and there was a prank involved that I'll go into at a different time, but it was a joke that grew into an actual semi-popular band at my college. We got gigs, we sold tapes, we had fans. And when we performed, we performed "live".

And by live I mean: Keyboard stack in front with the Juno and D50 on it. Keyboard stand on the right (my left) with two slabs of wood on it: On the lower slab was the two drum machines and the keyboard and mouse. On the upper slab was a rack case with the mixer, TX81Z, and Roland Delay, next to a second rack case with the sampler and on top of it all was perched my Mac SE. So between songs, I switched floppies, loaded songs, opened files, switched presets, and updated the mix.

Though I wasn't "Playing", I sure as hell was BUSY up there. I also usually left myself at least one line to actually PLAY on stage as well, while Mike and Erik ran around. Oh, Erik was my Andy Fletcher - he had a non-plugged in Keyboard (the JX) and faked, because he was actually just my roommate. Mike Mattison, now of Scrapomatic and the Derek Trucks Band was my amazing singer.

But as we played, I was always up on a riser, with my gear... and as I danced, the riser would rock, and the equipment rack would sway back and forth, the top arc over a foot of travel. I'd have to stop and grab my computer several times per song. Plus there were always mix issues, so I worked that mixer a lot.... and more than once the wrong patches were loaded, leading to a song restart... and about half of the stage banter was "is it done loading yet, Jim?"

Setup and breakdown was always horrible - because I had to make sure everything was plugged in properly, all midi cables were routed properly, all power was good, no ground loops.... Plus, that stuff was HEAVY.

We did I think 4 gigs like this, before I started to realize that in the final analysis, both the Acid Police and Smilehouse were sending a single stereo signal to the PA system. But Paul got to relax and i sweat bullets with every show.

In winter 1989, I got a DAT recorder... at first to capture my compositions... but by Winter of 1990, I was starting to use that DAT.... for playback. Yes, I started doing Tape Shows.