Synclavier

Synclavier 9600ts

"With a Synclavier, you push a button and you get a finished composition which, I'd say, is every composer's dream."

The Synclavier was an early digital synthesizer and sampler, produced by New England Digital in 1975.

History

First developed at Dartmouth College, it used FM synthesis, as well as sampling in order to create sounds, which were stored on large, magnetic disks. It was often referred to, by New England Digital and others, as the "tapeless studio," due to one's ability to compose and produce an entire song, solely on the Synclavier. Synclavier Systems were expensive – the highest price ever paid for one was about $500,000, although average systems were closer to about $200,000 – $300,000. Although this made it inaccessible for most musicians, it found widespread use among producers and professional recording studios, and it competed in this market with other high-end production systems, such as the Fairlight CMI.

Frank Zappa

From the mid-1980s on, Zappa started making more use of the Synclavier. Together with Henry Kaiser and Jean-Luc Ponty, he was one of the earliest musicians to compose with it. Joel Thome, interviewed in Frank Zappa, Musician, February 1994, said that Zappa became more motivated to use the Synclavier because it allowed him to create his music directly, without having to rely on fallible musicians and having to deal with touring and contracts: "He could do things with instrumental sounds that he couldn't achieve with live instruments; technically they wouldn't have the range. I remember he called me late one night and played a passage on Synclavier that sounded like traditional instruments, but at a speed that never would have been humanly possible."

In Peefeeyatko, Zappa discusses composing with the Synclavier in some interview segments. Todd Yvega transcribed Zappa's Synclavier works into traditional musical scores for the Ensemble Modern. He made use of Synclavier compositions from Zappa's personal music library to be used as background music in the animated TV series Duckman.

Quotes

Picture by Ann Summa

"That's why I'm happy that the Synclavier came along, because it's brightened my life considerably. The sequencer in this thing is powerful. The software lets you do and hear things that are – ridiculous. I can't really play the piano, but I load stuff in through the keyboard and I'm totally satisfied with the results. The only drawbacks are certain limitations in the music printing and the fact that it's difficult to interface with other machines." - Modern Music Is a Sick Puppy, Steve Birchall, Digital Audio, October/November 1984.

"I haven't done anything with a paper and pencil in months and months. It's all in the computer. (...) The way I use it is more for composition. It has certain massive advantages, and a couple of disadvantages that we managed to overcome by writing our own software for a couple of special things. (...) I do all the actual music editing myself – I play the stuff in, and for things that have already been written on paper that I want transferred into the machine line, I have a guy who types that in by the hour. Once it's in there, I do all the rest of the assembly to make compositions out of it. It's like having a musical secretary. Personalities have never really been a problem. You have to consider the physical limitations of what human bodies can and can't do. Instruments also have a fixed range, and they can only play so high or so low. The great thing about the Synclavier is it does away with all those problems. If you want a tuba player playing a high 'C', you can have it. If you want to have a flute go down to the 'C' below the bass clef, no problem." - Frank Zappa in Frank Zappa, 84/11, Gary A. Shay, Songwriter Connection, November 1984.

"I'd tried the Fairlight a few years ago and didn't like the sound of it, so I bought the Synclavier instead. I don't want to denigrate the Fairlight, because I understand they've made a lot of improvements to it since the time I heard it. And that's also not to say that the Synclavier is the ultimate computer instrument, because I've heard others capable of doing things it can't. But the main feature is its music-printing program, SCRIPT. After all those years of scoring with pen and pencil, it's a blessing to be able to write your own composition, push a button and have all the parts printed out. (...) The compositions themselves are loaded in by me playing things on the keyboard, and I do all the editing myself. Until recently, I used a guy named David Ocker to do all the cleanup work, such as putting in clefs and performance marks. He was like a musical secretary, typing in specific rhythms and stuff in SCRIPT language. I just hired another guy to do that job." - The Art Of Being Frank, Philip Bashe, International Musician and Recording World, June 1985.

Frank Zappa behind the Synclavier.

"I don't worry about pencil and paper anymore, I just play it and tweak the raw material until I get the composition the way I like it in the machine. I get massively more done and now I can write for instrumental sounds and combinations that don't exist in nature. You can make things that sound like normal instruments play things that those instruments couldn't do in the hands of a human being. The thing now is to remember that nothing is impossible as long as you have enough RAM memory. (...) Basically how the Synclavier works is when you take samples you build these things called Patches, which is an instruction to the machine to locate different sounds under different keys. You could have one sound under all 88 keys or you could have a different sound on each key times four. That means that a middle C can not only sound a C on a guitar but it can be a C on a trumpet, a C on a harp and a C on a xylophone at the same time. You compound this by the fact that the stereo panning and the way each sound travels in time and space can be determined on a partial by partial basis. We do stereo sampling here which is something that most people are not doing right now. The other type of information you can build into a patch is what happens the harder you press a key. For example, on the Spastic Pressure Patch you press a single harp note and the harder you press down the more gliss you'll get. Spastic Orchestra takes a whole assortment of orchestral sound and lays it on across 88 keys and with pressure lets you bend the stuff and do all these tape effects in real time. So you can play in with a single line and score a whole orchestra's worth of utterly ridiculous stuff on a single track in about five minutes! (...) There's one thing that a Synclavier will teach you and that is the most important thing in music is timbre. You can take the most mundane tune or collection of notes and if it's got an interesting timbre it will be far more listenable. Every period has got little timbres associated with it. You can hear a recording of Renaissance music and know right away that's the Renaissance sound and Renaissance timbres. If you had those same timbres playing Purple Haze it would still sound like Renaissance music. So if you take all of today's squeals and the rest of the common coinage for rock'n'roll guitar playing and have those same timbres playing Renaissance music, it's not going to sound like Renaissance music even though it was actually written in the Renaissance." - Zappa: Now And Then..., John Stix, Guitar, May 1986.

"One of the most intriguing things about working with a Synclavier is what it lets you do with rhythm. That's always been one of my favorite things to investigate. It's possible to get accurate performances of the most ridiculous rhythmic combinations. I'll give you an example. I've been working in large tuplets recently. If you're in 3/4, I'd put in a tuplet – say, a bar of 3/4 that has a 75-tuplet or a 35-tuplet in it. You can hear that there's a waltz going on, but when these things occur, it's like, "What is that? Where do these things come from? Why does it still have a groove to it?" It still relates mathematically to something else that's going on in the bar. With this system, you can pick a random number, then take any size bar of music and divide it up into those components. You're going to have an 88-tuplet or an 87-tuplet. Or you can take a composition that has, say, ten bars of 4/4. The first bar you start with an 88-tuplet, the next bar is 87, 86, 85, 84, 83, 82, 81, something like that. You could never hand that to a musician on a piece of paper and say, "Here, do this." - Frank Zappa, Sample This!, 1987.

"It's a massively complicated rehearsal problem, in order to make it work invariably night after night. That's the main thing that concerns me about taking it out, because I know other people have had them out on the road, but I don't think anybody else has asked the machine to do what I want it to do, and to do it without fail in a hostile environment. When you take things on the road, they do break. Guys do drop them, and that's a big worry. If you build your show around the machine like that, and the machine doesn't work one day, you're going to have a lot of dissatisfied ticket holders out there. That's one of the great things about live music in its pure sense. If one guy gets sick, or you have some kind of mechanical problem, a creative band will find a way to make the show entertaining, and keep it going. If you have a very technologically-oriented show, you have to carry spares. And the problem about carrying a spare Synclavier is it's a quarter of a million dollars. The musicians you recruit are of such high caliber that syncing with the Synclavier shouldn't be too much of a problem. I've already done tests. My guys can sync with it, no problem. They latch right on there. But that was in a studio. You take it onto a stage, and you've got monitoring problems to deal with. What the drummer needs to hear is vastly different than what the keyboard player or what the bass player would need to hear. So now you're into multiple monitor feeds. It's endless. It's a massive headache. And the solution to each headache is in increments of five figures." - Frank Zappa, Sample This!, 1987.

Frank Zappa behind the Synclavier.

"We have sampling sessions, like I hired a saxophone player to come up here because as far as I know, none of the sample libraries that Synclavier puts out has a stereo tenor sax playing subtone notes. I've got that and I've got all the tenor saxophone honking notes, squealing notes and special effects tenor saxophone noises. Then we did the clarinet: short notes, long notes, the whole range of the instrument, closed-miked, distant-miked. Then we did a session with all the different components of the drum set. Ordinarily when a drum kit is sampled, you have the drum kit set up with the ordinary miking and the guy goes, okay, here's the tom-tom and boom, he hits the tom-tom. He hits the snare, the kick, and so forth. But along with that, you have all the resonant noise of all the rest of the components of the drum set, all the metal, all the unwanted stuff that's in there. (...) We sampled all the components of the set isolated from everything else. So I've got pure roto-toms, pure snare drum, pure tom-toms, pure kick, pure high-hat, pure cymbal crashes. It's a very startling sound when you hear real drums in real stereo with none of the reflected sound, none of the sound you'd get if you just turned the mikes on a drum set. It's surrealistic, totally surrealistic." - Frank Zappa and His Digital Orchestra, Electronic Musician, September 1986.

"I probably would be playing more guitar right now if I were more comfortable with the Synclavier guitar interface. I've tried it a number of times in different stages of development, and this is not just to pick on them – I've tried all other kinds of guitar interfaces to plug into that machine – and none of them feel comfortable to use. So most of the data that's entered into the machine is entered through the keyboard or it's typed in or it's played in with a Roland Octapad. If something ever comes along that will allow me to generate the kind of music that I want to generate on the Synclavier but started off from a guitar-based concept, then I might pick it up. But it just seems like a real roundabout way to enter the data for me right now. Very little of what I'm writing on the thing has anything to do with guitar styles. I'm using samples of classical guitar, but there is nothing in these compositions that sounds like guitar playing. (...) Well, what I like to do is, if I have access to a machine that will do impossible things, I want to make sure that the composition that results from the use of the machine contains at least a few of the impossibilities. In the case of whether it could be played on a guitar, one of the reasons that the answer would be "no" is because you can actually have pitches coming out of the instrument that don't exist on a guitar, both higher and lower, and also intervallic jumps that would be physically impossible to do on a guitar and runs going by at speeds that would be impossible to do on a guitar." - Frank Zappa in Frank Zappa On... The '80s Guitar Clone, Dan Forte, Guitar Player, January 1987.

"If there was a Synclavier available when I was 14, and if I could have afforded the thing when I was 14 and I could have gone right to work on that, I doubt if I would have ever even gone on the road. (...) The only stories you got to tell about the Synclavier is about the time that it crashed when you were working on a sequence at 4:00 in the morning and it was really terrific and now nobody will ever hear it because it's gone forever. Those are the kind of stories that you get to tell about the Synclavier. (...) But every computer operator has stories like that, about the program that they were working on and then there was a power failure or you pushed the wrong button and the memory dumped or whatever. That comes with the territory." - Frank Zappa, interviewed by Bill Forman, Interview From Hell, Bay Area Music Magazine, 16 January 1987, issue #249.

""If you write for acoustic instruments, no matter how great your composition is, the quality of the piece when it's heard is going to be determined by the acoustics of the room, the mood and the skill of the players, the accuracy of the conductor and the budget for the rehearsal time. And basically all that is going against you – to say nothing of the possibility of copying errors when the score gets turned into parts. It's a pretty shoddy hit-and-miss-type situation. I write stuff that is rhythmically complex and has difficult intervals. If you had to physically play it on a real-life instrument, you would have a hard time reaching the intervals. So the machine just does it."" - Frank Zappa, Samplin' Fool, Jeff Spurrier, Music & Sound Output, March 1987.

"You have to make little editorial decisions when you make a sample. You have to decide is it going to be dry or ambient, do you want to have a long, deluxe sample or something more compact? Is it going to be looped? Some samples will stretch for octaves and others won't stretch but a couple of notes. Some things start to sound fake even stretching a minor third. Pianos don't stretch well. Harps stretch nicely. A harp note at C3 will stretch all the way to C7. Classical guitar stretches well also but fuzztone guitar doesn't stretch worth a shit. It has to do with the complexity and characteristics of the sound. Your ear doesn't want to believe that a single oboe note in the middle register is going to stretch more than a half or a whole step. Consequently certain instruments require more memory in RAM to live in there because there are more samples involved. Our stereo grand piano uses up 20 megabytes of RAM because the patch samples every other note in stereo. But it sounds like the real deal. Once the samples are captured and trimmed and I can hear what it is, then I can start hearing uses for it. I can see a composition build up just around a group of samples. The basic things we use all the time live on one of the Winchesters [disk drives]. Classical guitar, three or four different types of drum sets, different percussion patches, clarinets, bassoons – things that are used frequently are stock. Then all the specialty stuff we pull off the floppies." - Frank Zappa, Samplin' Fool, Jeff Spurrier, Music & Sound Output, March 1987.

"I don't think of these things I'm doing on the Synclavier as songs. I think of them as items. They're not necessarily in song form. They're little compositions. The longest one I've done is 22 minutes, but most of them are in the five-to-seven-minute range – a little long for a song and a little short for a symphony. And I approach them in an entirely different way than if I were writing a rock & roll song. Usually [a rock & roll song] starts off with a joke someone in the band has said or something you saw on television. You get some words and then you set them to music. Rock & roll is usually a lyric-generated medium." - - Frank Zappa, Samplin' Fool, Jeff Spurrier, Music & Sound Output, March 1987.

"(...What we'd do with the synclavier on that tour is each night there would be a sequence, like a complete composition, loaded it into the Synclavier, and during the improvised part of the show, I could turn that sequence on. The Synclavier would play a collection of sounds and then the band would play along with it. On some nights we used "You're Goin' To Hell"; on some nights we used some stuff with the congress voices; some nights other things.'Bout the middle of the tour we hooked up some wires so that I could throw a switch on the stage and any one of three different musicians on stage could trigger the synclavier with their instrumental set-up, so that Ed could trigger the samples on the synclavier by playing the silicone mallets, and if I flip the switch another way, Bobby Martin could trigger it from his MIDI keyboard, or Chad could trigger it from his octopads. (...) hey put out sometimes two software releases per year and each software release gives you a chance to do something more refined to the compositions that are already in there. For example, the composition is more than just the melody line, the chords, and the rhythm, in order to make a performance out of it, even an electronic performance, there's all the essence of style, all the texture of the notes, every note that's in there, whether it's just a group of notes that are being hit as a chord, each one of them should have it's own identity and all the different notes in a melody, they should all be different amplitude, and like that, and when I first got the system you couldn't do that to what you wrote. You could only put in the pitches, the rhythm, and the chords, and you couldn't really ... (...) And so, the new software allows you to give it a better texture and a better feel, and so I think it has more of a musical feel to it when you do these things. And consequently, I'd gone back to the things that I wrote when I first got the machine, years ago, and have updated them using the new software. So now I'm finding things that, earlier compositions that finally should come out on some kind of a release, some way, that started off as very basic things but with the software updates, they're now converted into something that's more musical.they'll always hate it because it comes out of a machine, just because that's their blind spot. The way to look at the synclavier is that it's a new type of musical medium, and let's extend that concept to all music done with sampling and sequencing machines. You know, the more numbers you type in, the more expression you get into it because basically, that's all you're doing, just changing values, durations, amplitude, pitch and so forth, and it's just a matter of how many numbers can you stand to type in? And how big is your memory capacity to hold all those numbers. As the speed and the capacity of the machines change, it makes it possible for a composer to get closer and closer to some sort of an ideal, and that's what I spend most of my time doing. - Frank Zappa in They're Doing the Interview of the Century, Part 1, interview by Den Simms, Eric Buxton, Rob Samler, Society Pages, April 1990.

"Well, even with the most perfect Synclavier performance, you still don't get 100%, because there are certain nuances that are going to be absent just because the music is being played by samples, which means every note will always be the same sound. (...) You can put vibrato on it and change its amplitude and change its duration, but basically it is a digital recording of some event. What you lose is – for example, you have a patch of clarinet notes, and every clarinet note is perfect, and they're lovely clarinet notes, and then you tell the Synclavier to play this ungodly fast clarinet riff that no human being could play. That's nice. You could never get it another way. But on the other hind, if you have a really fine clarinet player, every one of the notes that he played would be different, and your ear detects that variety. I think that the ear prefers variety, unless you happen to be one of those Mongoloids who thinks that the drum machine is the greatest device known to mankind. I can't stand to listen to them. Even in the case of kick drums and snare drums, you hear exactly the same pulse at 100% amplitude each time. (...) On the Synclavier, when we do repeated patterns with percussion samples, what we want to try and do is have multiple samples of the snare drum and the kick drum, so that every time the pulse comes along, it's actually a different recording and gives it more texture and variety." - The Mother Of All Interviews (Part 2), interview by Don Menn and Matt Groening, 1992.

"I didn't think that there was any great demand in the marketplace for what I do on the guitar. I mean, why should I bust my chops, so to speak? There's plenty of people who play faster than I do, there's plenty of people who dance around more than I do, and there was nobody doing what I was doing on Synclavier. Rather than stand in line and be just another redundant guitar player plying his trade in the music business, I thought I'd better come up with something new." - Frank Zappa in Frank Zappa: The SongTalk Interview, Paul Zollo, SongTalk, 1994, Vol. 4, Issue #1.