Tom Oberheim, Dave Smith, Roger Linn, Gino Robair, and Don Buchla, at the 125th AES Convention, San Francisco, Oct. 5, 2008.
Photo by Larry the O

A musical instrument should allow us to express ourselves as easily as we dance or sing—naturally, and without having to think about it. Although the traditional keyboard has dominated music for centuries, its expressive potential hasn’t moved forward since MIDI was introduced in the mid-’80s, despite the latest hardware and software developments. However, a number of other controllers that tap the potential that electronics have to offer have been gaining a wider audience, such as the Haken Continuum Fingerboard, the Buchla Lightning, the Nintendo Wii remote, and the variety of button arrays, such as the Monome. And the current DIY craze, as reflected by the popularity of Make: and Create Digital Music, has resulted in a greater emphasis on personalized performance tools.

For its 25th anniversary this June, EM asked me to explore the issue of synths and controllers in a roundtable discussion with several pioneers in the field of instrument design, all of whom live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I wanted to meet with Roger Linn, Dave Smith, and Tom Oberheim and follow up on our 2008 AES panel discussion, “The Evolution of Electronic Instrument Interfaces: Past, Present, Future.” Fortunately, it’s not difficult to get them together, because they form the core of the Dead Presidents Society, which meets regularly for coffee near the U.C. Berkeley campus. (The group’s name refers to the original participants, who had each been in charge of their own company.) These days, they refer to themselves as the Breakfast Club, and it was my good fortune that three additional club members—Don Buchla, Max Mathews, and David Wessel—were able to participate in the discussion that morning.

The Dead Presidents Society, March 2010: Dave Smith, Roger Linn, Tom Oberheim

All six of these men have had a significant influence on our field, and it would’ve been easy to just let them tell war stories about the Golden Age of electronic music. However, my interest was in hearing what they had to say about the future—about issues that have yet to be addressed, despite the huge technological advances they have witnessed. And it didn’t surprise me that each of them had strong feelings about the subject, with, at times, wildly contrasting opinions.

I couldn’t help beginning the discussion with this question, focused primarily at Oberheim and Smith: “What kinds of instruments would you design if the vintage-style analog synth market wasn’t so lucrative?”

Not surprisingly, the overall reaction divided the group into two camps. On one side you have Oberheim and Smith, who have spent much of their career creating products that address the conventional needs of musicians. Smith admitted that he has always been “interested in the sound rather than the control side of things,” and that he “simply wanted to provide instruments with something that everybody uses and is used to,” with parts that are easy to source and easy to develop, such as keyboards. That makes perfect sense from both a marketing and manufacturing standpoint: it provides immediate solutions for problems that musicians face right now, and it keeps development costs to a minimum.

On the other side, you have Buchla, Mathews, and Wessel, who strive to create instruments that offer the level of virtuosic control that an acoustic instrument has, while taking advantage of the expressive capabilities that are unique to electronic instruments. The results are controllers that often have no musical precedence, and therefore lack the immediate mass appeal of something that resembles a drum, guitar, or keyboard.

Remarkably, Linn has a foot in both camps. While he continues to develop commercially viable products, he has a deep interest in so-called alternative controllers. His current projects take advantage of emerging technologies.

It was Smith and Linn who ultimately convinced Oberheim to reissue his influential SEM (Synthesizer Expander Module), and I wondered if he was surprised by the success of the instrument. “Yeah, very much so,” he replied modestly. “Dave warned me that it would be better than I thought. I think Roger warned me, as well. And I figured I’d sell a few a month. But it’s been better than that.”

Staying on the subject of analog synths, I posed the question to Smith: “Will we ever get to a point were digital instruments can recreate analog sounds to a high enough degree that analog purists will accept them?”

“Probably. It’s more of a preference thing, at this point,” Smith explained. “It depends on how an instrument is used. If it’s buried in the mix, who’s going to tell the difference between analog and digital? If you’re playing it solo, then, yeah, you’re still going to hear the difference. Someday [digital instruments will] get better and better at being sloppier and sloppier. As I always say, as a designer, if you design something digital, you spend all your time adding slop in. If you’re designing analog, you spend all of your time trying to take the slop and the noise out. Somewhere, the two may join, I suppose, in the future. If you don’t put time limits on it, everything will happen, someday.”

It didn’t take long, however, for the discussion to focus on the issue of controllers: “What makes a good controller? Why are some controllers more successful than others? What does the idea of ‘success,’ ‘failure,’ or ‘obsolete’ mean, when we talk about musical instruments?”

Buchla hit the nail on the head in terms of how I feel about electronic musical instruments. “I’ve developed a great number of controllers and control techniques,” he began. “The breakdown is that the ones that are accepted, and used, and developed further are those that are most closely linked to the thought. It’s amazingly illustrated [by this story]: I work a lot with bionics, usually with amputees. I was impressed by what a woman said to me just three days ago. She no longer has to think about picking something up. She no longer has to think about a movement. She just moves—that is the word she used. She just moves her arm when it happens. She doesn’t think about it up-front.

“If you plan an instrument,” he explained, “you don’t want to think about it. The things that contribute to thinking about it and then playing are, 1. latency, obviously, and 2. non-familiarity with the process and the outcome of the process.

“The gesture has to be spatially relevant,” he continued. “The percussionist is a good example. I don’t agree with David’s observations. I think the percussionist is the last person that’s going to embrace technology, primarily because of latency, and because of the usefulness of tapping a thing, like a table, and hearing the sound immediately come from the table. You don’t hear it come from a speaker up there. You hear it come from the table. And it sounds like a table, and its decay time is natural. We learn about those things since birth—how things should sound in nature. And we can create new sounds, but nevertheless, they obey the old laws. They sound, now, when we touch. It goes, now. It doesn’t go 10 ms later.”

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