going Without the wind:

Maybe it will be hard for some of you to conceive of a time when there were no synthesizer rock groups, or electric guitars. Many symphony and opera fanciers carefully ignore their existence even now; but those people probably aren't reading Interval. The point I am trying to make is that today, surrounded by electronic gadgets, it may be easy imagine oboe tone coming from a black box with a keyboard; but way back in 1936 when I built such an apparatus, the very idea of such a thing jarred people more than the real functioning instrument did.

Here is an opportunity for me to say that the term "synthesizer" is somewhat of a misnomer, pardon me if I take it. Today's instruments called synthesizers usually do not add up the harmonics and noises that constitute a musical tone; they start with timbres basically characterless and subtract from these whatever factors are not wanted at the moment. This modus operandi may change in the future -- especially now that computers and component modules designed for computers are being introduced into many of the new electronic instruments. That is, I concede that "synthesizer" might become a more suitable name later on.

Wish I didn't have to get into this can of worms, but when you have been insulted and heckled and scolded and misunderstood for 4O-odd years, it just might be common sense to get fussy about definitions! When people used the term "synthetic oboe" with relation to my instrument, I would have had to be superhumanistically patient and charitable not to think that they were implying that it wasn't "real" -- often they said as much, and went on to claim that electronic instruments had no right to exist. Harsher terms like "imitation" or "fake" or (CENSORED) were common.

For the record, "synthetic oboe" is the name of a stop on pipe-organs which combines a Salicional 8' with a Nazard 2 2/3' to get a solo effect which organbuilders imagine is an oboe. Now that is synthesis, putting a violin-toned pipe with a flute-toned pipe of higher pitch to get a reed.

By this time you will be wondering: Why did I want an electronic keyboard oboe in the first place? Like most composers, I was started early on the ubiquitous piano. Later I needed an instrument that was used in orchestras, so I chose the cello and during my teens played in a large orchestra group. But nine other cellists were playing the same part as I was. I felt kind of Expendable or Dispensable. Also, as composer, I needed to experience the orchestra from the winds' standpoint as well as that of the strings. Which wind instrument was most needed? Lots of clarinet and trumpet players, especially while jazz was king. The oboe and bassoon are much rarer, so that seemed a good choice.

To get a balanced musical experience, the bassoon was another bass instrument in a similar register to the cello, whereas the oboe is a treble instrument, so that decision was easy enough. To take up a treble instrument with an entirely different kind of part, might give me a better overall viewpoint in my composing. The mid-thirties were the height or rather the depth of the Great Depression, so when I found out how much oboes cost, I was discouraged. After talking to experts and music teachers, I felt even more blue--I would have to become a mere beginner once more, and go trhough all that I had already gone through on the cello, three years from horrid scratching to melody -- well, a beginning oboist is if anything worse on the neighbors than a beginning cellist!

It so happened that at this time in my life I had learned Continental Morse Code so I could get an amateur radio license-and for learning to send this code there was an affair called the code practice oscillator -- a vacuum-tube and transformer arrangement producing a strident but adjustable tone. (There is another kind of code-practice oscillator that produces a soft flute-like tone, but I had oboes on my mind, remember.) At this time I was living in a cramped hotel room in downtown San Francisco, and while studying for my ham license and experimenting with musical tones, the phone would ring and the switchboard operator downstairs complained that my penetrating code-noises were heard on all the phones in their system and they couldn't talk! Something like a giant Busy Signal stepped up two octaves higher, they said.

Returning back up north to Portland for a while, I got a mail-order catalog and ordered a boxful of variable resistors (now called pots, no relation to what some people smoke) and some copper strip, and made up a two-octave keyboard.

I hope no sadistic Establishment piano teachers are reading this now -- it might give them dangerous ideas: Without intending to, I had invented a marvelous educational device: If you did not play a perfect legato on this keyboard, it would give you a high-voltage electric shock! To rest my nerves, I soon glued insulating tape on all the strips of copper. Then, after coming back to California again, I bought an accordion keyboard and more variable resistors and extended the compass of the instrument. Now it could be oboe, English Horn, bassoon, contrabassoon, or even the hitherto nonexistent oboe piccolo. I had a new box made for it, and as I gained experience playing it in John Metzger's orchestra in San Diego, added this and that refinement. Conventional oboes are hard to mute -- this could be softpedaled down to a gentle whisper. Extra keys were connected to small capacitors (called condensers back in those days) and these keys, while not sounding of themselves, had the power to lower the pitch of the playing-keys by microtonal amounts, such as an eighth, sixth, or quartertone -- this also provided the wind-player's "humoring the tone" and a manual vibrato. There are now 8 pushbuttons on the oboe's auxiliary keyboard, allowing trills as well as vibrato and microtonal alterations and extra pitches. But even from the very first, in its shocking copper-strip version 42 years ago, the keyboard oboe had microtonal capability, since, when you put down more than one playing-key at a time, resistors were connected in parallel, creating new resistance-values which then sounded pitches not in the 12-tone scale.

This situation also had another advantage: On the conventional oboe, there are such extremely short transition pitches, and without them the performance would sound unnatural. Not knowing this, or not caring anyhow, the engineers in mass-production synthesizer factories and similar establishments make their instruments incapable of sounding non-12-tone-tempered pitches even for an instant -- the Solovox of the 1940's was thus wired up to be idiot-proof and strictly twelve. Commercial electronic instruments use vibrato oscillators with a uniform monotonous soulless beat; this oboe can vary vibrato width and speed quite subtly.

Which brings us to the question of individual voicing. A mass produced factory product has to be uniform; it has to use interchangeable identical parts; repair persons who don't know a note of music and who never built a musical instrument have to be able to correct malfunctions in these instruments by strictly following procedures laid down in factory service manuals. Accordingly, all instruments of a given model are entirely too much alike. Sometimes you can't tell who is playing them! This has given electronic music a terribly bad name -- electronics is blamed for something not at all its fault!

As I've had to explain several thousand times, the electronic keyboard oboe was not designed to be manufactured in quantity for sale to one-finger players in five easy lessons. It just isn't fair for the same hecklers who accused me of dehumanizing and inechanizing music to chide me in the same breath for inventing something highly specialized for a limited market--as though it were a crime to make individualized things instead of grinding them out by the millions. Shouldn't it be obvious that the ultimate product is recordings of the music in quantity, not these instruments which fill a small but essential niche in an ensemble?

No two violins are alike and no two pipe organs are alike. So, although this oboe is electronic, it too is unique and any other will be subtly different. Better still: it can be rebuilt or modified as time goes on, and indeed that has been done in its 42-year life span so far. The basic design concept that sets it apart from all mass produced electronic instruments is: it starts with a tone that already has some character, some individuality; they start with a sawtooth, sine, square, or pulse waveform that is identical with millions of others of its kind.

To get the timbre of the double-reed family of instruments, such as oboe, bassoon, bagpipe, sarrusophone, or Oriental whatever, I chose a circuit called the blocking oscillator. The stream of current is completely cut off for a portion of the cycle, and a damped wavetrain of a much higher frequency than the nominal pitch of the note is superposed on the waveform by resonances in the transformer and associated capacitors. In the conventional oboe the airstream is completely cut off in each cycle by the double reed slamming shut for an instant, and there are high-frequency resonances built into the instrument. The result is that the timbre of the instrument in either case is rough and assertive at the bottom and gets smoother and smoother as it approaches the top of the compass.

A set of switches provides formants (added resonant circuits which accentuate the characteristics of oboe, English horn, &c.) but the instrument is definitely in the oboe family without these formants, which cannot be said of the typical commercial instrument. I don't have to go into all the technical details here for those of you who might want to build a keyboard bassoon or oboe or bagpipe or saxophone, since modern transistor blocking-oscillator circuits and knowhow are available in many electronic manuals. We don't want all these instruments to be identical -- that's the whole point. If you are content with cut-and-dried standard design, then you can buy it at some store.

The proof of this idea was that my keyboard oboe has been played in a number of otherwise orthodox regular orchestras for years and blended in with other instruments, whether it was playing a bassoon, contrabassoon, English horn, oboe, or other part. Long before the synthesizer and some of its designers were born. It doesn't try to be a flute or violin or clarinet, which it would do poorly. However, a similar specialized individual design approach with other oscillator circuits might afford equally good results for those other classes of tones.

Tapes are available and if enough people show further interest, an Electronic Keyboard Oboe pamphlet will be written up. In 1962 I built 61 of these oscillators as an electronic organ (actually this would be the Swell manual of a three-manual instrument) and each key on this organ sounds just a little different from its neighbors, and furthermore (no factory engineer would dream of allowing this!) the notes actually tune each other toward just intonation while chords are sounding. This ensemble can be set to non-12 temperaments such as 17, 19, or 22, which is my reason for mentioning it here. There is none of the dead umformity that plagues ordinary e}ectronic organs; this one is alive and variegated.