The Minimoog Was Always a Soloist
The Asheville Symphony has announced a new concerto built around a Minimoog, with the synthesizer standing where a cello or a trumpet usually stands: out front, alone, against the orchestra. I should say plainly that I have not heard a note of it. The piece has not happened yet, and I am not going to pretend otherwise just because I have spent plenty of nights with a Minimoog of my own.
What I can talk about is the instrument, because the Minimoog has exactly one mechanical habit that matters here: it is monophonic. However many oscillators are stacked and however many filters are chained behind them, the thing can only produce one note at a time. That is not a shortcoming engineers eventually fixed. It is the entire job description of a soloist. A concerto does not need an instrument that can play a chord. It needs one voice the orchestra can argue with.
The other habit is the glide — portamento, a knob that lets one note slide continuously into the next instead of jumping between them. No acoustic keyboard can do that; a piano has no space between C and C-sharp to slide through. A violin can. A human voice can. In 1970, a Minimoog could, by accident of circuit design decades before anyone was writing concertos for it.
Put those two habits together — one voice, capable of sliding — and you have described exactly what a soloist does against eighty other players: hold a single line and bend it in ways the ensemble cannot follow. The organizers did not reach for a synth because it sounds futuristic next to strings. They reached for the one synth whose entire circuit was built, by accident, to behave like a violinist.
I don't know yet if the piece earns that comparison. A concerto is a much harder thing to carry than a patch I know my way around in a dim room in Sangenjaya. What I do know is that this particular box has spent fifty-six years being the most human-sounding thing in any room it entered, long before anyone thought to put it in a concert hall and ask it to behave like one.
Somewhere backstage this week, one oscillator is tuning up next to eighty string players, waiting for a part it has technically been rehearsing since 1970 and has never, until now, been asked to play.
I grew up at the bottom of the world, on the New Zealand coast, close enough to the sea that the salt got into everything, the speakers included. The radio dropped out every time the weather turned, so I learned early that sound is something you can lose. Reckon that's why I've spent my whole life chasing it. I chased it across the Pacific to Los Angeles and never quite went home: a dozen years of other people's sessions, first as the kid making coffee in a Burbank studio, now from a small room in Echo Park. I'm a producer and an engineer, but mostly I'm a bloke who can't sit still when a good record comes on. Give me a guitar with a bit of hair on it, a synth that drifts out of tune as the room warms up, a low end you feel in your chest. I want sound you could take a bite of: big, wide, a room breathing around the band. Long dinners, loud speakers, nights that don't know when to quit. Life's too bloody short for bad sound. One rule, and I don't bend it: if I haven't put a signal through it, I'm not writing about it.