Art by Daniel Špaček.
This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson.
In the United States, the East Coast and West Coast have rivalries across food, sports, music and more. But there’s another rivalry that’s less well known, but just as important. This standoff created sounds that were unlike anything that had been heard before. It redefined what a musical instrument could be. And it changed the sound of pop music forever. Featuring journalist Ryan Gaston and composer David Rosenboom.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Original music by Wesley Slover
Maze (Instrumental) by Twiceyoung
Orthosie by Ben Elson
I Think I was There by Emil Axelsson
The Calling (instrumental) by Vivera
hwy 704 cascade court by Makeup and Vanity Set
Rapuviro by Sound of Picture
Molecular Mood by Marten Moses
Fly By by Kern PKL
Thyone by Ben Elson
Mind Sync by Makeup and Vanity Set
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View Transcript ▶︎
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.
[music in]
Here in the United States, there’s always been rivalries between the East Coast and the West Coast. You have the Celtics vs. the Lakers. Broadway vs. Hollywood. Bagels and lox vs… avocado toast?? And of course we have the big one… Disneyworld vs. Disneyland.
But the most famous rivalry has to be the hip hop battle of the 90s. On the West Coast, you had artists like Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and Tupac. Over on the East Coast, you had Biggie Smalls and Puff Daddy.
[music out]
But there's one rivalry that started a long time before that.
[music in]
Andrew: Only this time it was a rivalry not between artists, but between instrument makers.
That's Twenty Thousand Hertz producer Andrew Anderson.
Andrew: And this one created new sounds that were beyond the wildest dreams of musicians that came before.
It led to whole new genres like disco, post punk and electronic dance music.
Andrew: It represented two different philosophies about the relationship between a musician and their instrument.
It's one the biggest stories in music history that you've probably never heard.
Andrew: And it starts all the way back in a New York hospital in 1933. [music out into hospital sounds]
Andrew: On May 23, 1933, a baby is born in Queens, New York City [sfx: crying baby]. His parents call him Robert, but he'll be known to everyone as Bob.
Four years later, and almost 2,500 miles away in Los Angeles, another baby is born. His parents name him Donald, but that quickly gets shortened to Don.
[hospital sounds out into music in]
Andrew: Both boys show an early interest in engineering. While still at school, Bob builds [sfx: soldering] his own musical instruments, like simple electronic organs, from plans he finds in magazines.
Meanwhile Don makes his own radios. [sfx: radio tuning]
Andrew: After highschool, Bob studies electrical engineering at Columbia, and he keeps building musical instruments. He especially loves theremins, [sfx: theremin] which have a distinctive sound that is perfectly in tune with sci-fi style of the 1950s. He also plays piano, [sfx: piano notes] and gets pretty good - although he never considers himself a musician.
On the other coast, Don studies physics and music at CalTech. He works on the Gemini rocket that takes some of the first US astronauts into space. [sfx: space comms]
[blastoff into music out]
After college, Don finds himself at the heart of the counterculture movement in California. [sfx: bongos, chanting etc] He hangs out with poets, musicians… He even grows his hair long and wears a big, bushy mustache.
Andrew: Meanwhile on the East Coast, far from the free love of California, Bob's life is following a more traditional path. He starts a business building theremins [sfx: theremin], and before long he’s one of the biggest suppliers in the US. But then Bob gets interested in a new technology: synthesizers.
[music in]
Ryan: Prior to the mid 1960s, electronic music wasn't nearly as codified as it is today.
Andrew: That's music journalist and synth historian Ryan Gaston.
Ryan: The tools and techniques were not at all standardized and there weren't just instruments that you could go to a shop and buy.
Andrew: At the time, electronic music was very much do-it-yourself.
Ryan: Experimental musicians were using repurposed scientific test equipment. So stuff leftover from World War II, like tape recorders, oscillators [sfx: oscillator] and test tone generators, [sfx: test tone] kind of misusing those for musical purposes.
[music out]
Andrew: There was one commercially-built synthesizer out there, but it wasn't exactly portable.
Ryan: One of the only other notable, historical devices was The RCA Synthesizer, which is a kind of room-sized contraption that uses punch cards.
Before magnetic tape came along, a lot of computers were programmed using punch cards.
Andrew: These were literally cards with holes punched in them, which told the computer how to behave using the binary language of ones and zeros. If there was a hole punched in the card [sfx: hole punch], that was a one [sfx: bleep]. If there was no hole, then that was a zero
[sfx: static].
Andrew: By stacking hundreds or even thousands of these cards together, you could create a computer program. Or in this case, write a piece of music.
Here's a tune created with punch cards that was recorded on that giant RCA synthesizer. It’s a Bach piece called "The Well Tempered Clavier."
[clip: The Well-Tempered Clavier]
And here’s a 1959 song called "Study For One Cymbal Stroke." It was created by cutting and manipulating magnetic tape.
[clip: Study for One Cymbal Stroke]
Andrew: But whichever method you used, it just took a really long time.
Ryan: It's definitely not an immediate process. It takes a lot of work to go from the point of having a musical idea to actually hearing it realized. Sometimes days or weeks of work just to get a few seconds of music.
Andrew: For musicians and composers, this was pretty frustrating. But then Bob had a chance meeting that changed everything.
[music in]
Ryan: Basically Bob and Herb Deutsch, who was an experimental electronic musician, met by happenstance at a conference.
They started talking about creating an electronic instrument that musicians could actually play.
Andrew: Bob was inspired, and before long, he came up with a solution.
Ryan: The most revolutionary concept was introducing this idea of control voltage.
Andrew: Control voltage is a small electrical signal [sfx: electricity] that changes how electronic components in a circuit behave.
Ryan: People were suddenly able to program the way the synthesizers should behave and hear the result immediately.
Andrew: For example, you could use control voltage to change the pitch of a note. [sfx: pitches changing]
Andrew: And the change was instant. You didn't have to cut up tape, or learn how to program a computer the size of a building. You could play his synthesizer just like a piano. [sfx: piano + synth]
Ryan: The difference between making a plan and taking days to realize it, and making a plan and immediately hearing the result, for a musician, is a huge deal. Musicians could suddenly make much more intuitive decisions and could hear the results of their decisions right off the bat.
[music out]
Soon enough, Bob's prototype was ready, and in late 1964 he released…
[sfx: synth build up]
the Moog Synthesizer.
[clip: Moog synthesizer + music in]
Andrew: That's right - the Bob Moog, legendary synth pioneer.
Most of you have probably heard his name before… although you might have heard it pronounced as…
Other Voices: Mooog. Mog. Mow-ger. Maug?
Andrew: But it's definitely pronounced Moog.
Trust us on this one.
Andrew: Anyway, regardless of how you pronounce his name, there's no denying that Moog's synth was brilliant.
It had 12 keys, which meant that anyone familiar with Western music could play it.
Andrew: It responded to the performer instantly.
It was small enough that it could fit into any recording studio.
Andrew: And best of all, it sounded amazing.
[Moog synth track begins to build]
The age of synthesized music had arrived.
[Moog + music track goes up, then out]
Andrew: But it wasn't just control voltage that made the Moog revolutionary. It was also its modular structure.
Ryan: The idea behind a modular synthesizer is that it's made out of several individual components, that you could assemble into a singular instrument.
Andrew: There are basically three main types of modules.
Ryan: The first type is a module that makes sound, most commonly an oscillator which produces a constant tone, [sfx: tone] or a noise source, which produces a white noise [sfx: white noise].
Ryan: Another category of modules are modules for processing sound. So these are things like filters, which can change the brightness [sfx: filter sweeping] of a sound, or amplifiers, which change the loudness of a sound [sfx: gain increase and decrease].
Ryan: And the other type of module are control sources, which are just ways that you alter the behavior of an oscillator or a sound source or the sound processors over [sfx: phasing between two different VCOs] time.
You can think of these three modules like cooking.
The signal sources are your ingredients. [sfx chopping]
The filter modules are the seasonings, which add or subtract from the original flavors. [sfx: peppermill]
And the control source is the oven, which modifies the ingredients over time. [sfx: sizzling]
Andrew: But a modular synthesizer can do so much more than that. In fact, to push that cooking analogy a little bit further, if you could cook with a modular synthesizer… you'd actually be able to make the food change flavor once it was already in your mouth. [sfx: mmm...mmm!...]
Which, let's face it, is a pretty weird idea. [sfx: yuck / spitting out food]
Andrew: Although Moog’s instruments were expensive - about one hundred thousand dollars in today's money - Bob managed to start selling them to recording studios.
Ryan: Bob was quite focused, early on, on marketing the instrument and making sure it got into the hands of musicians that would help make that possible.
Andrew: By the late 60s, the Moog was appearing in songs by The Beatles.
[clip: The Beatles - Maxwell Silverhammer]
It was also being used by progressive rock bands like Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
[clip: Emerson Lake & Palmer - Tank]
Andrew: And, perhaps most famously, Wendy Carlos' album Switched on Bach, was recorded entirely with a Moog.
[clip: Switched on Bach]
[music into sfx: tape rewind]
But while Bob was on the East Coast crafting the Moog synthesizer, Don was over on the West Coast working on his own invention. [sfx: play button]
[music in]
David: He was brought in to the San Francisco tape music center originally to design an instrument.
Andrew: That's composer and academic David Rosenboom.
David: And Don saw what they wanted, looked at what their design was and said, “That's not the way to do this.” And he went away and he came back later with his own design, which was amazing.
Andrew: Like Bob, Don gave his own name to his first synthesizer.
He called it the Buchla 100.
Andrew: Now, Don Buchla’s name might not be as well known as Bob Moog's, but his reputation is legendary among electronic music nerds like me. And when you hear what his synths actually sound like, it's easy to understand why - they are totally unique.
[music out]
Here's one of the first compositions created with the Buchla 100. It’s called Silver Apples of the Moon, by Morton Subotnik.
[clip: Morton Subotnik - Silver Apples of the Moon]
And here's a song called Better Find Out For Yourself by pop musician Buffy Sainte-Marie.
[clip: Buffy Sainte-Marie - Better to Find Out For Yourself]
Andrew: These far-out sounds reflected Don's brilliance as an engineer.
[music in]
David: Don was one of the most virtuosic designers I ever met in my life. He could sit down, and once an idea was clear, he would draw out the circuits, and then he would have the printed circuit boards made. Most of the time he didn't even make a prototype. And it was amazing how they would come back and then they would work.
Andrew: But with that brilliance, came an intense personality.
David: Sometimes that might lead to a little bit of a private way of interacting with people that might be misperceived as being kind of dark. He was not the easiest person to get to know for most people. But behind it all was an iron protection of his own creativity, and his own ability to make decisions about what he was going to do.
Andrew: So, if that meant building a synth without a keyboard.
Or deliberately adding features that turned whatever you played into chaos.
Andrew: Then Don was just gonna go ahead and do that.
You could say that if Bob Moog was the Thomas Edison of synths.
Andrew: Then Don Buchla was Nikola Tesla. [sfx: electrical charge]
Before long, synthesizers were taking over the world, and Don and Bob’s creations were leading the pack. The competition would never catch up.
Andrew: Or so they thought.
That's coming up, after the break.
[music out]
MIDROLL
[music in]
In the mid sixties, Bob Moog released the first commercially available synthesizer. It was immediately picked up by musicians, thanks to its simple interface. Pop music would never sound the same again.
Andrew: At almost the exact same time, Don Buchla released his own synth and the electronic ideas behind it were spookily similar. They were both powered by small electric currents called control voltage, and they both had a modular structure that allowed anyone to build their own custom synth.
[music out]
But while the electronics were similar, Don's ideas were very different from Bob's.
Andrew: Where the Moog was sold to the working musicians, the Buchla was really only bought by cutting edge composers who were friends with Don. And while the Moog was predictable, the Buchla had a mind of its own.
For example, when you played a note on a Moog [sfx: Moog note] you'd get the same result every time.
Andrew: But when you played a note on a Buchla [sfx: Buchla note] you never really knew what was going to happen.
[music snippet: Mozart - Eine Kleine Nachtmusik]
Andrew: It was the difference between riding a thoroughbred horse in a dressage competition.
[music snippet: Alanay - Bluegrass 6 Harmonica]
And ridin' a bucking bronco at a rodeo.
[music out]
Andrew: As well as having a different feel, the two synthesizers were completely incompatible. Buchla modules only worked with other Buchla modules, and visa versa.
Although one inventor did come up with a way of combining them together.
Andrew: The result was a synth called Tonto, which was used by groups like The Doobie Brothers and Stevie Wonder.
[clip: Stevie Wonder - Living for the City]
Andrew: But thanks to all the complicated wiring, Tonto was enormous. So it was really only used by rich and famous musicians who could afford to rent it.
[music out]
Oh, and there's one other thing you have to know: Don Buchla didn't believe in keyboards.
[music in]
David: He was not a lover of the black and white keyboard. In fact, in his early instruments, he thought that all you're doing, if you use the black and white keyboards, you're making another form of organ.
Andrew: Instead, Buchla wanted to find new ways of interacting with his instruments.
Ryan: They had keyboard-like things that were like arrays of metal touch plates that you could touch and interact with the instrument. They intentionally avoided references to familiar instruments or familiar interfaces, because they were trying to figure out what types of interactions you could have with a machine.
[music out]
Andrew: For example, the Buchla 100 came with 10 touch plates [clip: 10 notes rising] . The harder you pressed a plate, the more intense and expressive the sound became [clip: note becomes more intense]. But none of those 10 plates had a fixed pitch. You could tune them to whatever you wanted. [clip: 10 notes becoming more intense]
Ryan: The keyboard-like interfaces on Buchla's instruments were made so that you would have to kind of define your own scales, if you wanted to use it in that way.
Andrew: That meant it was really hard to play traditional Western music on a Buchla.
[clip: music not easy to play]
But if you wanted to play something weird and futuristic - The Buchla was the synth for you.
[clip: crazy Buchla music]
Andrew: The fact is, Don never designed his synthesizers with pop music in mind.
[music in]
Ryan: There really wasn't a lot of iconic Buchla music, the same way that there was for Moog music. It all remained very obscure.
David: He wasn't necessarily trying to make machines that he thought everybody should use, he was really designing them for people who he really respected.
Andrew: So for avant garde composers like David, they were the perfect tool.
David: There's something about them that blurs the distinction of composition and performance. You almost don't know whether you should use the word “instrument” because, clearly, they're used in live performance and you'd say, “Well, they're an instrument,” but they also have a sort of way of adapting to a huge range of compositional ideas.
David: There are certain things that you could do quickly. And then there's a deeper layer of engagement with the software, embedding your own compositional and interactive performance ideas inside the instrument.
[music out]
After their first models came out, both Don and Bob kept innovating.
Andrew: Bob created the first portable synth: the Minimoog, released in 1970. Due to its small size and simple interface, it quickly became popular with bands like Pink Floyd.
[clip: Pink Floyd - Welcome to the Machine]
It was also used by Kraftwerk.
[clip: Kraftwerk - Autobahn]
Andrew: And it appeared on records by legendary funk band Parliament.
[clip: Parliament - Flash Light]
The Minimoog was the first synthesizer for the masses.
Andrew: And it brought a whole new set of sounds to pop music. [sfx: Minimoog sweep]
Andrew: But while Bob's instruments were becoming more and more accessible, Don was going in a different direction.
He released two updates to his original synth, which he worked on with David Rosenboom.
David: We'd spent a lot of time talking about how to incorporate compositional thinking into the design of modules. And that led to certain modules that became pretty famous. The most well-known is probably the Source of Uncertainty module.
Andrew: That module took anything you played.
[music notes, simple]
And added random chaos to it.
[music becoming more chaotic]
Andrew: But somehow that randomness was still musical.
David: It would be a mistake to think of this module as purely a source of pure randomness. It's controlled randomness.
[music up, then out]
Andrew: Ultimately, the dichotomy between Bob and Don's instruments came to be known as East Coast and West Coast synthesis.
[music in]
Ryan: One of them gave musicians a clear opportunity to understand the device through terms they were already familiar with, that being the East Coast approach. And the other, this West Coast approach, was more about putting musicians out in the middle of the musical wilderness and forcing them to find their own way.
Pretty soon, the difference in philosophy turned into a rivalry between musicians.
Andrew: For some people, Bob’s synthesizers were just too traditional. [sfx: Moog snippet] On the other hand, some musicians said that Don’s unpredictable machines didn’t make music - they just made noise. [sfx: Buchla snippet]
It was kinda like the 70s equivalent of Nike versus Adidas.
Andrew: Or Nintendo versus Sega.
[music out]
[clip - “Genesis does, what Ninten-don’t” into music in]
Andrew: But regardless of the rivalry, both men considered their early instruments a success.
Ryan: Both Moog and Buchla felt they had been successful with their inventions. You know, with Moog it's hard to debate: his invention caught on very quickly and was taken up by a lot of really amazing musicians and inspired a lot of other designers.
Ryan: Buchla, despite never really achieving great commercial success, felt more interested in continuing to iterate on his ideas. He was happy to just make a living and chug along, inventing new things.
Andrew: By the mid 70s, the synthesizers designed by Bob were being heard by millions, thanks to their use on pop records. And Don's instruments were adored by the avant garde composers he so admired. It was all going so well.
But trouble wasn't far away.
Andrew: Before long, Both Don and Bob would be struggling to keep their companies alive.
Both would eventually lose the rights to their own names.
Andrew: And both would have to battle to stay relevant in the digital age.
That's coming up, next time.
[music out into sfx: dun dun dun, but with synth glide effect]
[music in]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound.
Andrew: This episode was written, produced and reported by Andrew Anderson.
Other Voices: It was story edited by Casey Emmerling. With help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Chad Wahlbrink, Colin DeVarney, and Jai Berger, with original music by Wesley Slover.
Thanks to our guests Ryan Gaston and David Rosenboom. You can find Ryan’s deep dives into synthesizer history over at perfect circuit dot com. Meanwhile, some of David’s albums recorded using Buchla synthesizers have recently been reissued. You can find those at black truffle dot bandcamp dot com.
Thanks for listening.
[music out]
