50 Fun Facts About Synthesizers

Sound designer Ben Burtt mixed his own voice with an ARP 2600 synthesizer to create which Star Wars droid's speech?

R2-D2 owes his beeps and whistles to an ARP 2600. Burtt later used the same machine for the eerie sounds of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Which pop group used a Moog synthesizer on a 1967 album after its drummer bought one of the first twenty sold?

The Monkees were among the first pop acts to record with a Moog. Micky Dolenz played his own on the song Daily Nightly, while session man Paul Beaver handled a second track.

Which musician's 1968 album Switched-On Bach, performed on a Moog synthesizer, won three Grammy Awards?

Wendy Carlos built the album one note at a time over about a thousand hours, because her Moog could sound only a single note at once. It became the second classical album to sell a million copies.

The Roland TB-303, a flop designed to replace bass guitars, became the defining synthesizer of which 1980s dance genre?

Acid house began when electronic musicians picked up cheap second-hand units after Roland dropped the machine. The 1987 single Acid Tracks is often credited as the genre's first record.

Which robot-voice effect began as a 1930s Bell Labs invention used to encrypt voice calls during World War II?

The vocoder was the work of engineer Homer Dudley, who wanted a way to synthesize human speech. The wartime SIGSALY system built around it weighed about 55 tons.

Which singer's 1977 disco hit I Feel Love swapped the usual orchestra for a borrowed Moog synthesizer?

Donna Summer sang over a Moog that drifted out of tune so quickly it had to be recorded in bursts of 20 or 30 seconds. The kick drum had to be played on a real kit.

Robert Moog began by selling mail-order kits for which electronic instrument, a product of Soviet sensor research?

The theremin, played without being touched, hooked Moog at 14 when he built one from plans printed in a magazine. He was still selling them while studying for his PhD.

George Harrison's own Moog synthesizer is heard on which Beatles album, including the song Here Comes the Sun?

Abbey Road gives the Moog a starring role in the middle of Because. John Lennon also used its white noise setting to dub a howling wind onto another track.

Which 1969 David Bowie single features the Stylophone, a pocket synthesizer sold mainly as a children's toy?

Space Oddity got its Stylophone part at Marc Bolan's suggestion. Bowie had already used the little instrument, played with a metal pen, to work out the song's melody.

Deep Note, a swelling chord synthesized by computer in 1982, is the sound trademark of which cinema audio brand?

THX got its famous crescendo from just 355 lines of C code written by James Moorer. He has named a Beatles song and a Bach fugue among his inspirations.

Which standard for linking synthesizers nearly got the name Universal Musical Interface before its 1983 launch?

MIDI got its name after Sequential's Dave Smith called the first idea, UMI, a little corny. He and Roland's Ikutaro Kakehashi later received Technical Grammy Awards for the standard.

Which synthesizer, used on Michael Jackson's Thriller, was the first polyphonic model with programmable memory?

The Prophet-5 paired synthesizer chips with a microprocessor so players could recall sounds instantly. Designer Dave Smith almost shelved the idea, assuming Moog or ARP would get there first.

The Fairlight CMI, the 1979 instrument that coined the term sampling, was designed in which country?

Australia's Fairlight took its name from a hydrofoil ferry that passed the Sydney Harbour home of designer Kim Ryrie's grandmother.

Which German group traded krautrock for a Minimoog and drum machines on the 1974 album Autobahn, a US top five hit?

Kraftwerk had to switch their synthesizers on in the afternoon to have them in tune by evening on the tour that followed. Stage lighting was strong enough to knock them out again.

Which singer went electronic after finding a Moog synthesizer left in a studio, then topped the UK chart with Cars?

Gary Numan wrote that biggest hit on a bass guitar, then put it on an album that swapped electric guitars for synthesizers. He ran them through effects units for a distorted, metallic tone.

Which Netflix series has a pulsing synthesizer score by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of the electronic band Survive?

Stranger Things hired the pair before a single actor was cast, and their demos were played over the audition tapes. The theme went on to win an Emmy.

Which director wrote and performed the synthesizer-laced score of his own 1978 slasher Halloween in just three days?

John Carpenter says he can play just about any keyboard but cannot read or write a note. In the credits he jokingly billed himself as the Bowling Green Philharmonic Orchestra.

Which hard rock band's 1984 hit Jump is driven by an Oberheim synthesizer riff that the other members first rejected?

Van Halen's guitarist Eddie wrote the keyboard line around 1981, years before the band agreed to record it. Daryl Hall says Eddie told him he had copied the part from the Hall & Oates song Kiss on My List.

Which Greek composer played a Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer on his film scores for Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner?

Vangelis called the CS-80 the only synthesizer he could describe as a real instrument. He first used one in 1977 and kept playing it for the rest of his life.

Thaddeus Cahill's 200-ton Telharmonium, an ancestor of the synthesizer, delivered its music to listeners by what means?

Telephone lines carried its signals to a metal cone on the handset that worked as a primitive loudspeaker. The service stalled when the phone company refused the use of its network, fearing damage.

Harold Faltermeyer's synthesizer instrumental Axel F was the theme tune of which Eddie Murphy film?

Beverly Hills Cop producers were lukewarm about the tune until director Martin Brest spoke up for it. Faltermeyer played every part himself, using five machines.

Jan Hammer's synthesizer theme for which 1980s TV cop show reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100?

Miami Vice gave the Hot 100 its last instrumental chart-topper for almost three decades, until Harlem Shake in 2013. Hammer's theme also won two Grammy Awards.

Which Victorian song about a tandem bicycle became, in 1961, the earliest sung by a computer's synthesized voice?

Daisy Bell stuck with the writer Arthur C. Clarke, who saw the IBM demonstration. He had the computer HAL 9000 sing it while being shut down in the 1968 film 2001.

Which hit 1980s home computer carried the SID chip, a three-voice synthesizer whose designer later co-founded Ensoniq?

The Commodore 64 got only three voices because a planned 32-voice design ran out of time. Engineer Bob Yannes simply copied one sound circuit three times across the chip.

Which French musician recorded the 1976 synthesizer album Oxygène in a makeshift studio at his home?

Jean-Michel Jarre was turned down by several record companies before the album sold an estimated 18 million copies. In 1979 he played to more than a million people in Paris.

Which shoulder-slung synthesizer was first mass-produced as the Moog Liberation in 1980?

The keytar hangs from a strap like a guitar, so its player can leave the keyboard stand. One 1980s musician who strapped on a full-size Oberheim instead ended up with back problems.

The 1970 Minimoog introduced which now-standard synthesizer control, an invention Robert Moog never patented?

The pitch wheel lets a keyboard player bend notes the way a guitarist or saxophonist does. A colleague felt that a patent on it would have made Moog extremely wealthy.

Which university patented John Chowning's FM synthesis and licensed it to Yamaha after American firms said no?

Stanford was turned down by American instrument makers whose engineers, Chowning felt, did not understand the idea. A visiting Yamaha engineer grasped it in ten minutes.

Which 1983 Yamaha synthesizer supplied the glassy electric piano heard on countless 1980s power ballads?

The DX7 was so hard to program that most players stuck to its built-in sounds. In 1986 its electric piano turned up on 40% of the number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100.

Which rapper used the Roland TR-808, an analog drum synthesizer, on every track of a 2008 album named after it?

Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak saluted a machine that flopped when new: fewer than 12,000 were sold. By the time Roland dropped it, used ones often went for under $100.

The Korg M1's piano and organ presets drove 1990s house hits including which Madonna single?

Vogue used sounds from a 1988 workstation that let musicians finish whole tracks without a studio. Robin S turned to the same machine for Show Me Love.

Which Motown star featured TONTO, a giant custom synthesizer, on 1970s albums including Talking Book and Innervisions?

Stevie Wonder's engineers won a Grammy for Innervisions. The name of their machine stands for The Original New Timbral Orchestra.

Which director cast ARP engineer Phil Dodds on the spot to play the synthesizer that greets aliens in a 1977 film?

Steven Spielberg liked the look of Dodds, who had come only to install and look after the ARP 2500 on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Which part of a synthesizer produces the raw waveform, with Robert Moog's version tuned by a control voltage?

The oscillator supplies the raw tone that the rest of the instrument shapes. Players found that ARP's designs stayed in tune better than Moog's.

A synthesizer's ADSR envelope shapes each note in four stages: attack, decay, sustain and which final one?

Release is the time a note takes to die away once the key is let go. Robert Moog built his first envelope prototype with a doorbell button.

Which British band built the 1973 track On the Run from an eight-note sequence sped up on an EMS Synthi AKS synthesizer?

Pink Floyd had to punch the notes in by hand before each show, very slowly, then speed them up on playback. Even the hi-hat came from the same machine.

Which keyboardist's one-take Moog synthesizer solo closes Lucky Man, a 1970 ballad Greg Lake wrote aged twelve?

Keith Emerson was just jamming around and was devastated to learn the take would be used, with no tracks left for another try. He later needed a magazine's transcription to relearn it.

Which synthesizer waveform, rich in both odd and even harmonics, is the classic starting point for bowed string sounds?

The sawtooth suits violins and cellos because a bow really does drag and slip the string in that jagged pattern. It is named after the teeth of a saw.

Which synthesis method do classic analog synthesizers such as the Moog use to shape their sound?

Subtractive synthesis shapes a bright raw tone by removing some of its frequencies. Robert Moog's first filter design sounded much like a wah-wah pedal.

Casio's VL-1, the little keyboard heard on Trio's hit Da Da Da, combined a synthesizer with which other gadget?

A calculator shared the VL-1's buttons, and players programmed new sounds by typing a number into its memory before switching back to keyboard mode.

Which organ maker built the Novachord, the first commercial polyphonic synthesizer, heard at the 1939 World's Fair?

Hammond built only 1,069 Novachords, each close to 500 pounds and about the size of two spinet pianos. The first went to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a birthday present.

Which American company built the 1957 Mark II Sound Synthesizer, the first that could be programmed?

RCA's machine, nicknamed Victor, read its music from a punched paper roll. That spared composers from splicing sounds together on magnetic tape.

Which Berkeley inventor, working independently of Robert Moog, built modular synthesizers played from touch plates?

Don Buchla left the standard keyboard off his early instruments so that players would not be tied to conventional tuning. His first system was commissioned by the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

Isao Tomita's 1974 Moog synthesizer album Snowflakes Are Dancing reworks pieces by which French composer?

Claude Debussy's pieces took Tomita 14 months to rebuild, one part at a time. The album went on to earn four Grammy nominations.

ARP Instruments, Moog's great rival of the 1970s, took its three-letter name from what source?

Its founder's initials were those of Alan Robert Pearlman, who started the company in 1969. ARP went on to overtake Moog as the leading maker of electronic instruments.

Which German maker of Cubase created VST, the plug-in format that runs software synthesizers inside recording programs?

Steinberg began in a Hamburg apartment in 1984 and was later bought by Yamaha. Its first VST plug-ins were effects, with instruments following in 1999.

Oskar Sala's Trautonium, a German synthesizer of 1930, made the sound effects for which Alfred Hitchcock thriller?

The Birds has bird noises that are not birds at all. Sala made them on the Trautonium, which he went on developing until his death in 2002.

Moog composer Mort Garson wrote his 1976 album, once given away with Simmons mattresses, as music for what audience?

Houseplants were the intended listeners of Mother Earth's Plantasia. Garson got the idea from his wife, who grew many of them in their home.

Robert Moog's patented transistor ladder, the heart of the Minimoog's sound, is which type of filter?

Low-pass filters trim the frequencies above a point the player sets, and Moog's design also boosts those right around it. Its sound is often described as rich, juicy and fat.

Which modular synthesizer format, specified by Doepfer in 1995, later drew modules from over 600 manufacturers?

Eurorack borrows its module height from the Eurocard frames of industrial electronics. Every signal is patched with small 3.5 mm cables.