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Whilst the origins of the Synthesizer Keyboard lie in the early to mid twentieth century, it wasn’t really until the Sixties and Seventies that they really started to become used by musicians, mainly due to the reasons of reliability and cost.
In 1964 that started to change, with the release of the Moog (named after its creator Robert Moog) which was the first commercially available instrument of its kind. The first band to release an album featuring Moog created music was The Monkees, but they were soon followed by other notables including The Rolling Stones, The Doors and The Beatles.
The Moog created its sound by allowing the user of it to layer together simple waveforms of different kinds, such as sine waves. In doing so the sound created by the instrument could be changed to achieve a wide number of different effects.
In 1979 the Synthesizer market was shaken up again with the release of the Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument) as it took a different approach. The advent of micro computers allowed the Fairlight to work by using sampled sounds of real instruments, meaning that in theory at least it could sound like any instrument you wanted it to.
However the Fairlight and similar synthesizers still cost a huge amount of money when they first appeared, so remained the preserve of professional musicians, with probably Jean Michel Jarre being the artist who is most often linked with the Fairlight.
Back in the home however, we were pretty much still stuck with our old Bontempi Air Organs or expensive piano sized organs, until the clever bods at companies such as Yamaha and Casio came along and size and cost reduced the innards of a synthesizer onto a microchip.
By the mid-eighties you couldn’t walk into a branch of Dixons without seeing a stand of more affordable synthesizer keyboards left out for demo purposes. There wasn’t a kid in the land who couldn’t resist heading over to the stand for a little fiddle, first plinking and plonking out a load of noises by stabbing at the keys, then locating the demo button (which for some reason always seemed to play Wham’s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go) and pretending that they had suddenly become a piano whizz in the hope that their parents might buy them one.
These home synthesizers were available in a wide number of configurations, with different sized keyboards (from two octaves upwards), different numbers of built in instruments, the ability to sample your own sounds through a built in microphone. Most also featured a usually terrible sounding array of “boom-diddy-ba-boom” type backing tracks.
Another useful ability was to be able to record the notes you played and then play them back again later to check for where you were making mistakes. Some models even then you play back the recording bit by bit by tapping any key on the keyboard, so you could enter the notes correctly first, then get the timing right afterwards.
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This certainly brings back memories! Wasn’t any different in the States, except the demo song was something different.. can’t remember what, now. I distinctly remember putting on the demo and playing away for the people walking by. At the time I thought they were smiling because I was just that good.. now I think they may have been on to me.
I’m almost positive one of my brother’s friends had the one pictured, as I remember bending notes with the wheels on the left, plus all the different ‘instruments’ under the turqoise buttons on the right.
My friend had one that would record sounds and play them back ‘reversed’, which usually involved reciting various Led Zeppelin lyrics to see whether or not we should worship the devil. We were undecided.
I myself had a keyboard watch that was very unpopular with my teachers. Looked just like this:
http://i.minus.com/i73wxLrlsOMy3.jpg
I think the battery died within weeks.. apparently it wasn’t built for repeated attempts of ‘Axel F’ .
http://www.childofthe1980s.com/2009/10/28/beverly-hills-cop/
Ahem, yeah, you weren’t alone in pretending to be a piano pro in the electronics stores 😉
If it’s any help I believe the keyboard illustrating this entry is a Yamaha DX7.
Awesome watch though Duane! Never seen one like that before. I’m a little jealous of you.
The keyboard could have been that one, or just a look-alike.. Of course I wasn’t supposed to be playing with it, being about 8 years younger than my brother, so I didn’t get a very good look at it
I liked that watch, but you could hardly check the time without it chiming because you had to flip it open and invariably you’d hit some keys in the process. I think you can still buy them somewhere, as the picture was taken from a wholesaler’s site.
I got it discounted (as with most things in my childhood) at a J.C. Penney’s outlet store, an American department store that my wife tells me is probably most like BHS or C&A. Above Woolworths quality but not Marks & Spencer.
I think it may still be somewhere in my parents basement – again, like most of the things from my childhood
Duane, that is brilliant 😀