Archives - 1989

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Music and Sound Retailer

February-March 1989
The Once And Future Keyboard:
The Inventor Of The Minimoog Looks At The State of The Synth Market
By Bob Moog

The musical instrument business has always been driven by technological innovation. If you doubt me, just remember that the African Diembe drum is a marvel of pre-industrial technology, Stradivarius' instruments are sophisticated examples of 17th century wood working technology, and the acoustic piano, developed nearly two centuries ago, remains the most complex mechanism that we encounter in our daily lives.
In fact, it's hard to find any musical instrument product that wasn't developed with the cutting edge of technology.
The computer-based instruments of the late 80's follow this time-honored tradition. But we shouldn't be interested in them just because they're high-tech.
The road of musical instrument development is littered with countless elaborate, clever contraptions that were high tech in their time, all right, but failed to provide musicians with the sound quality, control, and reliability that they needed.

Three Basics:
Sound quality, control and reliability are the three basics that account for the long-term viability of any musical instrument - even the new ones of today that have injection-molded bodies and digital hearts.

Sound Quality:
Today's digital instruments sport so many bells and whistles that it's easy to lose sight of the importance of the most essential basic - sound quality.
But just look back a few decades. Out of the morass of endless electric and electronic keyboards that have come and gone, the sounds of a few remain a durable traditions in today's music.
The Hammond B-3, the Rhodes Piano, the Yamaha DX7, perhaps even the Minimoog, are all notably short on bells and whistles, at least by today's standards. They remain viable because of their sound. There isn't a theory, algorithm, or formula that can hold a candle to old-fashioned taste and discretion when it comes to determining when an instrument has high-quality musical sound.
Voicing a digital instrument is still an essentially human craft, just as it was five hundred or more years ago, when the first great pipe organs were built.
The trend today is toward ever-improving sound quality. As the cost of digital electronics continues to descend and digital sound generation software technology advances at a rapid pace, the worthy goal of perfectly clean, full range, "CD-quality" sound should be realizable in the very near future. It already exists today in many of the professional-level products.
The danger in today's marketplace is that buzzword-specsmanship is often used in place of careful evaluation of sound quality. Does "16-bit" equal "CD quality?" Not on your life!

 

I won't mention names, but I'll bet you know of many 16-bit instruments that you would not dare to demo without reverb. Reverb is a valuable studio technique, but it is a cheap trick to use reverb like perfume, to mask dirty sound.

Control:
Sound becomes music only when it is placed under the control of a musician. In today's digital instruments with the widespread application of MIDI, the sound producing part is entirely separate from the control part, which is great for instrument designers because of the design freedom it affords.
However, by and large, sound production technology is ahead of control interface technology. The best of today's instruments can produce virtually any acoustic instrument sound with near flawless accuracy, as well as a variety of synthesized timbres.
However, even the best controllers are merely the opening moves toward near perfect control. Let's take keyboards as an example. Nearly every keyboard player I know is vitally interested in how a keyboard feels. He will try out the
keyboard of a new instrument even before he listens to the sounds. And yet,
only a few of today's keyboards offer anything like, say, the sort of control that you can expect when you play a good acoustic piano.
We can expect keyboard technology to make drastic strides in the very near future. I believe that smooth-acting polyphonic after pressure will become a standard feature on all except entry-level keyboards. Actions with precisely proportioned weighting mechanisms will be a part of all velocity-sensitive keyboards that are designed to be played like a piano. And those features now called "left-hand controllers" will be expanded to provide much more expressive control.

Reliability - Not long ago, electronic instruments were analog, with oodles of wires, connectors, and drifting transistors - and manufacturing techniques rooted in the 19th century. Retailers routinely coped with erosion of profit and customer confidence brought on by instruments that were "defective out of the box."
Today, with large scale digital integration and sophisticated manufacturing, product reliability is much higher. But we can expect to see further advances in reliability and serviceability - advances that will relieve retailers of some of the technical service burden and allow them to focus more on the constructive aspect of customer service.
In addition, many synths have keyboard contact mechanisms that are difficult and time-consuming to service. Rugged, "bullet-proof," easy-to-service
keyboard sensor systems are on the horizon right now. I believe that keyboard musicians will take an increasingly serious interest in reliability and serviceability of their instruments - to their benefit as well as the benefit of the dealer.