Mister Rogers Demonstrates How to Cut a Record
When I was a little boy, I thought the greatest thing in the world would be to be able to make records. — Fred Rogers
By 1972, when the above episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired, host Fred Rogers had already cut four records, including the hit-filled A Place of Our Own.
But a childlike curiosity compelled him to explore on camera how a virgin disc could become that most wondrous thing—a record.
So he borrowed a “special machine”—a Rek-O-Kut M12S overhead with an Audax mono head, for those keeping score at home—so he could show his friends, on camera, “how one makes records.”
This technology was already in decline, ousted by the vastly more portable home cassette recorder, but the record cutter held far more visual interest, yielding hair-like remnants that also became objects of fascination to Mister Rogers.
What we wouldn’t give to stumble across one of those machines and a stash of blank discs in a thrift store…
Wait, scratch that, imagine running across the actual platter Rogers cut that day!
Though we’d be remiss if we failed to mention that a member of The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls, a forum devoted to “record-cutting deviants, renegades, professionals & experimenters,” claims to have had an aunt who worked on the show, and according to her, the “reproduction” was faked in post.
(“It sounded like they recorded the repro on like an old Stenorette rim drive reel to reel or something and then piped that back in,” another commenter promptly responds.)
The Trolls’ episode discussion offers a lot of vintage audio nerd nitty gritty, as well as an interesting history of the one-off self-recoded disc craze.
The mid-century general public could go to a coin-operated portable sound booth to record a track or two. Spoken word messages were popular, though singers and bands also took the opportunity to lay down some grooves.
Radio stations and recording studios also kept machines similar to the one Rogers is seen using. Sun Records’ secretary, Marion Keisker, operated the cutting lathe the day an unknown named Elvis Presley showed up to cut a lacquered disc for a fee of $3.25.
The rest is history.
More recently, The Shins, The Kills, and Seasick Steve, below, recorded live direct-to-acetate records on a modified 1953 Scully Lathe at Nashville’s Third Man Records.
(Legend has it that James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s World” was cut on that same lathe… Cut a hit of your own during a tour of Third Man’s direct-to-acetate recording facilities.)
via @wfmu
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inkyzine, current issue the just-released #60. Join her in NYC on Monday, September 9 for another season of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...What Happens To Your Body & Brain If You Don’t Get Sleep? Neuroscientist Matthew Walker Explains
As an insomniac in a morning person’s world, I wince at sleep news, especially from Matthew Walker, neuroscientist, Berkeley professor, and author of Why We Sleep. Something of a “sleep evangelist,” as Berkeley News calls him (he prefers “sleep diplomat”), Walker has taken his message on the road—or the 21st century equivalent: the TED Talk stages and animated explainer videos.
One such video has Walker saying that “sleep when you’re dead” is “mortally unwise advice… short sleep predicts a shorter life.” Or as he elaborates in an interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, “every disease that is killing us in developed nations has causal and significant links to a lack of sleep.”
Yeesh. Does he lay it on thick? Nope, he’s got the evidence and wants to scare us straight. It’s a psychological tactic that hasn’t always worked so well, although next to “sleep or die” sermons, there’s good news: sleep, when harnessed properly (yes, somewhere in the area of 8 hours a night) can also be a “superpower.” Sleep does “wonderfully good things… for your brain and for your body,” boosting memory, concentration, and immunity, just for starters.
But back to the bad.…
In the Tech Insider video above, Walker delivers the grim facts. As he frequently points out, most of us need to hear it. Sleep deprivation is a serious epidemic—brought on by a complex of socio-economic-politico-technological factors you can probably imagine. See Walker’s comparisons (to the brain as an email inbox and a sewage system) animated, and learn about how lack of sleep contributes to a 24% increase in heart attacks and numerous forms of cancer. (The World Health Organization has recently “classified nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen.”)
On the upside, rarely is health science so unambiguous. If nutritionists could only give us such clear-cut advice. Whether we’d take it is another question. Learn more about the multiple, and sometimes fatal, consequences of sleep deprivation in the animated TED-Ed video above.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...Where Zombies Come From: A Video Essay on the Origin of the Horrifying, Satirical Monsters
Will zombies ever die? To zombie enthusiasts, of course, that question makes no sense: zombies are already dead, drained of life and reanimated by some magical, biological, or even technological force. Most of us have never known a world without zombies, in the sense of zombies as a presence in film, television, literature, and video games. In the video essay “Where Zombies Come From,” video essayist Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, goes back to the dawn of these dead figures to pinpoint the origin of this robust “modern myth.”
The first mention of zombies appears in 1929’s The Magic Island, a book on Haiti by “journalist, occultist, and generally eccentric minor celebrity” William Seabrook. “The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life — it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive.”
That 90-year-old description may sound more or less like the zombies that continue to scare and amuse us today, but the modern image of the zombie didn’t emerge fully formed; 1932’s Bela Lugosi-starring White Zombie, the very first zombie film, may not strike us today as fully representative of the genre it founded.
But “in 1968 everything changed.” That year, the young filmmaker George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (watch it online) laid down the rules for zombies: they “devour living human beings. They hobble forward awkwardly but relentlessly. They’re dumb, able to use objects as blunt-force instruments but nothing else. They can only be killed by being shot in the head or burned, and if one bites or scratches you, you’ll die not long after, then transform into one and pursue whomever is nearby, family or not.” To Puschak’s mind, the film holds up not just as a zombie movie, but as a movie: “In its neorealist, black-and-white style, it is a smart, tightly crafted story made on a shoestring budget with a third act that is absolutely brutal and punishing even now, 50 years later.”
Night of the Living Dead didn’t call its zombies zombies, but its sequel, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, put the label of zombie on not just them but us: “The film, which takes place almost entirely in a mall, uses zombies to critique consumerism: as the zombies lumber through this familiar place, we see our own behavior as a grotesque reflection. A zombie’s thoughtlessness, Romero understood, is the perfect mirror for our own.” Dawn of the Dead bolstered the potential of zombies not just as as “creative, primal monsters,” but as satirical devices, and the finest zombie movies know how to use them as both at once. (So far I’ve seen that balance no more impressively struck than in a Korean zombie movie, Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan.)
Over the past half-century, post-Night of the Living Dead zombie stories have made all manner of tweaks on and variations to the standard zombie formula. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, for example, popularized the fast-moving zombie, and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead pioneered the full-on zombie comedy. Most recently, no less astute an observer of American culture and re-animator of seemingly dead cinematic tropes than Jim Jarmusch has offered us his own entry into the zombie canon, The Dead Don’t Die. Jarmuschian zombies shamble compulsively toward that which they desired in life: coffee, wi-fi, chardonnay, Xanax. As long as we can still see these ourselves in these both funny and terrifying creatures, the zombie apocalypse will always seem dead ahead.
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Martin Scorsese Creates a List of the 11 Scariest Horror Films
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Aldous Huxley Trips on Acid; Talks About Cats & the Secret of Life (1962)
Dystopia and drugs: these are the two concepts most commonly associated with Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World and, decades later, advocated the mind-expanding possibilities of psychedelic substances. The sociopolitical realities of the 21st century have prompted us to return to and more fully understand what Huxley was trying to tell us with his novelistic vision of a society engineered and automated into total submission. But how many of us really understand his perspective on what the drugs did for his thinking?
Huxley may have written eloquently on the subject, most popularly in 1954’s The Doors of Perception, but in the audio clip above we can hear some of that thinking straight from the visionary’s mouth. “This is a recording of Aldous Huxley on 100 μg of LSD, made on December 23 1962,” writes the uploader, “gonzo philosopher” Jules Evans. “The trip sitter is his wife, Laura Archera Huxley.” A trip sitter, for the uninitiated, is like the designated driver of a psychedelic journey, a companion who stays on the ground to look out for the one who gets high. (This same wife would, the following year, take Huxley on his final trip, the one that would take him all the way out of this world.)
Huxley “discusses the secret of life — to be oneself and at the same time ‘identical with the divine.’ And he wonders about the value of blasting off into the stratosphere, like Timothy Leary.” Leary, a fellow champion of psychedelics, began his career as a clinical psychologist at Harvard and ended up dedicating his life to the possibilities of LSD, along the way popularizing the phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out.” “Tim is alright,” says the tripping Huxley. “He’s just sort of… an Irishman, banging around, but I think he’s doing a lot of good.” But in Huxley’s view, Leary also “just wants to be an ass. We all have to be forgiven for something. My God, will you forgive me!”
In just three minutes drawn from a longer recording stored at UCLA’s Huxley archive, the writer makes a variety of other observations as well. These include the desire of drug-users to “take holidays from themselves,” the value of psychedelic experiences showing people that “they don’t have to always live in this completely conditioned way,” and the challenge of having to be “completely boxed up in oneself as that cat is” — as he gestures, presumably, toward a household pet — “at the same time one has to be completely identical with God!” LSD has reportedly led some of its users to communion with the divine, but on this trip Huxley settles for trying to commune with the feline. After a brief attempt at speaking the cat’s own language, he returns to English to make a broader point about the human and animal condition: “Luckily he doesn’t have our problems. But he has his own.”
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...People Pose in Uncanny Alignment with Iconic Album Covers: Discover The Sleeveface Project
We’ve all heard a great deal over the past twenty years or so about the death of the album. This talk seems to have begun with the emergence of the downloadable individual song, a technology that would finally allow us consumers to purchase only the tracks we want to hear and avoid paying full price for “filler.” But against these odds, the long-playing album has persisted: artists still record them and listeners, at least dedicated listeners, still buy them, sometimes even on vinyl.
Somehow the album has remained culturally relevant, and a fair bit of the credit must go to its cover. It didn’t take long after the introduction of the 12-inch, 33 1/3‑RPM vinyl record in 1948 for the marketing purposes of its large outer sleeve to become evident, and the past 71 years have produced many a memorable image in that form. Few platforms could be as representative of our digital age as Instagram, but it is on Instagram that the album cover has recently received homage from across the globe.
“Sleeveface is an amusing participatory photo project in which people from all over the world strategically pose with matching album covers,” writes Laughing Squid’s Lori Dorn, “creating the illusion that the original picture is complete.”
Browse the tags #sleeveface and #sleevefacesunday (for everything on the internet eventually gets its day) on Instagram and you’ll see a variety of tribute poses, some of them uncannily well-aligned, to musicians whose faces we all know not least because they’ve appeared on iconic album covers: Bruce Springsteen to Bob Marley, Simon and Garfunkel to Iggy and the Stooges, Leonard Cohen to Freddie Mercury, Janis Joplin to Adele.
All those famous names have undergone the sleeveface treatment, and quite a few of them have undergone it more than once. Many of us have grown familiar indeed with these albums, and surely even those of us who’ve never listened to them start-to-finish probably know at least a couple of their songs. But even if you’ve never heard so much as a measure of any of them, you’ve almost certainly seen their covers — and may well, at one time or another, have been tempted to hold them up in front of your own face to see how they lined up. Popular music shows us how much we have in common, but so does its packaging.
via Laughing Squid
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Enjoy Dazzling & Dizzying 360° Virtual Tours of Los Angeles Landmarks
Remember when armchair travel meant a book, a magazine, a handful of postcards, or the occasional after-dinner slideshow of the neighbors’ vacation photos?
Those were the days.
The throngs of travel “influencers”—both professional and aspirant—have taken much of the fun out of living through others’ visits to far-flung locales. The focus seems to have shifted from imagining ourselves in their shoes to feeling oppressed by their highly-staged, heavily-filtered Instagram-perfect existence.
Photographer Jim Newberry’s dazzling, dizzying 360° photos of Los Angeles, like the views of Echo Park, Chinatown, East L.A., and Downtown, above, offer armchair travelers transportation back to those giddy pre-influencer days.
(Angelinos and other LA-versed visitors will enjoy swooping through City of Angels landmarks as if rotating on the no-parallax point, too.)
The Chicago transplant admits that it took a while for him to find his Los Angeles groove:
After being disabused of my Midwestern, anti‑L.A. views, I’ve found that the city has much more to offer than I had imagined, but the gems of Los Angeles often don’t reveal themselves readily; it takes a bit of legwork to seek out the best spots, and well worth it. Mountains, beaches, vibrant urban life, tons of museums, gorgeous nature.
While easy-to-use “one-shot” 360 cameras exist, Newberry prefers the quality afforded by using a high-resolution non-360 camera with a wide angle lens, mounted on a panoramic tripod head that rotates it in such a way as to prevent perspective errors.
With the equipment set up in the center of the room, he shoots four photos, spaced 90° apart. Another shot is aimed directly downward toward the floor.
Panoramic software helps to stitch the images together for a “spherical panorama,” giving viewers an experience that’s the digital equivalent of swiveling their heads in awe.
Newberry’s roving lens turns Lee Lawrie’s Zodiac Chandelier, Dean Cornwell’s California history murals, and the decorative ceiling stencils of the Central Public Library’s Grand Rotunda into a gorgeous kaleidoscope.
The Taoist Thien Hau Temple in Chinatown is a more recent attraction, founded in the 1980s in a former Christian church. Community members raised funds to build the larger temple, above, dedicating it in 2006 as a shrine to Mazu, the goddess of the sea, protector of fisherman and sailors.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology, a self-described “educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic,” served as Newberry’s point of entry, when management okayed his request to shoot 360° photos there:
It’s a very special place—my panoramic photos are no match for an in-person visit. Unlike many other museums these days, the Museum of Jurassic Technology doesn’t normally allow photography, and there’s not many photos of the place to be found.
(In return for permission to shoot the museum’s Fauna of Mirrors murals, rooftop courtyard, and Tula Tea Room, Newberry agreed to maintain its mysterious aura by limiting the publication of those photos to his Panoramic Eye site. Feast your eyes here.)
The photographer is looking forward to working with more museums, creating 3‑dimensional documentation of exhibits.
His interest in the ephemeral has also spurred him to create virtual tours of local landmarks on the verge of being torn down. Entries in the ongoing Lost Landmarks series include Los Feliz’s Good Luck Bar (RIP), Tom Bergin’s Pub (above, spared at the last minute when the Los Angeles Conservancy declared it an Historic-Cultural Monument), and the Alpine Village, currently for sale in neighboring Torrance.
Begin your explorations of Jim Newberry’s Panoramic Eye 360° virtual tours of Los Angeles, including the Griffith Park Observatory, the St. Sophia Cathedral, and the Everything Is Terrible! store here.
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Ayun Halliday is the author of seven books, including No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Lateand the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inkyzine. Join her in NYC on Monday, September 9 for another season of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Hear Glenn Gould Celebrate the Moog Synthesizer & Wendy Carlos’ Pioneering Album Switched-On Bach (1968)
Glenn Gould made his name as a pianist with his stark, idiosyncratic interpretations of the music of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and especially Bach. He left behind not just a highly respected body of work in the form of recorded performances, but also a host of strong opinions about music itself and all that culturally and commercially surrounded it. His enthusiasms weren’t always predictable: in 1967 he went on CBC radio to lavish praise on the pop singer Petula Clark, and the next year he returned to the airwaves to make a hearty endorsement of a record for which not everyone in the classical music world would admit to an appreciation: Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach.
After voicing his distaste for compilation albums, comparing them to Reader’s Digest condensed literature, Gould informs his listeners that “the record of the year — no, let’s go all the way, the decade — is an unembarrassed compote of Bach’s greatest hits.” The whole record, he claims, “is one of the most startling achievements of the recording industry in this generation, certainly one of the great feats in the history of keyboard performance,” and “the surest evidence, if evidence be needed, that live music never was best.” Gould had retired from the “anachronistic” practice of live performance four years earlier, seeking his own kind of musical perfection within the technologically enhanced confines of the recording studio.
On that level, it makes sense that a meticulously, painstakingly crafted recording — not to mention one impossible, at the time, to reproduce live — like Switched-On Bach would appeal to Gould. He also takes the opportunity on this broadcast to introduce the Moog synthesizer, which Carlos used to produce every note on the record. “Theoretically, the Moog can be encouraged to imitate virtually any instrumental sound known to man, and there are moments on this disc which sound very like an organ, a double bass or a clavichord,” Gould says, “but its most conspicuous felicity is that, except when casting gentle aspersions on more familiar baroque instrumental archetypes, the performer shuns this kind of electronic exhibitionism” — a sure way of scoring points with the restraint-loving Gould.
The broadcast includes not just Gould’s thoughts on Switched On-Bach and the Moog but two interviews, one with poet and essayist Jean Le Moyne on “the human fact of automation, its sociological and theological implications,” and one with Carlos herself. Asked about the choice of Bach, Carlos frames it as a test of how the new technology of the synthesizer would fare when used to play not avant-garde music, as it then usually was, but music with the most impeccable aesthetic credentials possible. “We’re just a baby,” Carlos says of the enterprise of synthesizer-driven electronic music. “Although now we can see that the child is going to grow into a rather exciting adult, we’ve still got to take one step at a time. It will become assimilated. The gimmick value — thank god — is going to be lost, and true musical expression, and that alone, will result.”
via Synthtopia
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...How Margaret Hamilton Wrote the Computer Code That Helped Save the Apollo Moon Landing Mission
From a distance of half a century, we look back on the moon landing as a thoroughly analog affair, an old-school engineering project of the kind seldom even proposed anymore in this digital age. But the Apollo 11 mission could never have happened without computers and the people who program them, a fact that has become better-known in recent years thanks to public interest in the work of Margaret Hamilton, director of the Software Engineering Division of MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory when it developed on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo space program. You can learn more about Hamilton, whom we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, from the short MAKERS profile video above.
Today we consider software engineering a perfectly viable field, but back in the mid-1960s, when Hamilton first joined the Apollo project, it didn’t even have a name. “I came up with the term ‘software engineering,’ and it was considered a joke,” says Hamilton, who remembers her colleagues making remarks like, “What, software is engineering?”
But her own experience went some way toward proving that working in code had become as important as working in steel. Only by watching her young daughter play at the same controls the astronauts would later use did she realize that just one human error could potentially bring the mission into ruin — and that she could minimize the possibility by taking it into account when designing its software. Hamilton’s proposal met with resistance, NASA’s official line at the time being that “astronauts are trained never to make a mistake.”
But Hamilton persisted, prevailed, and was vindicated during the moon landing itself, when an astronaut did make a mistake, one that caused an overloading of the flight computer. The whole landing might have been aborted if not for Hamilton’s foresight in implementing an “asynchronous executive” function capable, in the event of an overload, of setting less important tasks aside and prioritizing more important ones. “The software worked just the way it should have,” Hamilton says in the Christie’s video on the incident above, describing what she felt afterward as “a combination of excitement and relief.” Engineers of software, hardware, and everything else know that feeling when they see a complicated project work — but surely few know it as well as Hamilton and her Apollo collaborators do.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...How Scientists Colorize Those Beautiful Space Photos Taken By the Hubble Space Telescope
When you picture the giant formations of gasses and space dust that make up a nebula, maybe you see the deliciously garish CGI of Guardians of the Galaxy. The look of the Marvel universe is, of course, inspired by eye-popping images of nebulae taken by the Hubble telescope, images that have appeared routinely for the past three decades in the pages of National Geographic, Discover, and your favorite screen savers.
Whether you’re into sci-fi superhero flicks or not, you’ve surely stared in awe and disbelief at these photographs: ghostly, glowing, resembling the illustrations of outer space by certain pulp sci-fi illustrators twenty years before the Hubble was launched into orbit in 1990. If these images seem too painterly to be real, it’s because they are, as the Vox video above explains, to a great degree, products of photographic art and imagination.
The Hubble telescope only takes images in black and white. The images are then colorized by scientists. Their work is not pure fantasy. A process called “broadband filtering” allows them to reasonably estimate a range of colors in the black and white photo. Some imaginative license must be taken “to show us portions of the image that would never have been visible to our eyes in the first place,” notes PetaPixel. “For example: turning certain gasses into visible color in a photograph.”
In an impressive few minutes, the Vox explainer digs deep into the science of optics to explain how and why we see color as combinations of three wavelengths. The science has been “the guiding principle in coloring black and white images” since the turn of the 20th century. We learn above how broadband filtering—the photographic technique bringing us full-color galactic fever dreams—originated in the earliest experiments in color photography.
In fact, the very first color photograph ever taken, by physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1861, used a very early version of the technique Hubble scientists now use to colorize images of space, combining three black and white photos of the same object, taken through three different-colored filters. Given the advances in imaging technology over the past 100+ years, why doesn’t the powerful space telescope just take color pictures?
It would compromise the Hubble’s primary purpose, to measure the intensity of light reflecting off objects in space, a measurement best taken in black and white. But the scientific instrument can still be used as cosmic paintbrush, creating jaw-dropping images that themselves serve a scientific purpose. If you were disappointed to learn that the photography fueling our our space imagination has been doctored, watch this video and see if a sense of wonder isn’t restored.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...How the Yamaha DX7 Digital Synthesizer Defined the Sound of 1980s Music
There is a lot of creatively revised history in the Netflix hit show Stranger Things, and I’m not just talking about extra-dimensional monsters and Soviet scientists under shopping malls. There’s also the pulsing synth score by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein. Deserving of all its praise, the music nonetheless gives the impression that the sound of the 1980s was made by instruments of the 60s and 70s—analog synthesizers like the MiniMoog Model D and effects like the Roland Space Echo.
Such classic instrumentation does create the perfect weird, fuzzy, wobbly, lush accompaniment to the show’s compelling mix of sci-fi body horror and cuddly nostalgia. But the 80s was the golden age of new sound technology, digital, and the dawn of synthesizers like the Yamaha DX7, released in 1983, the year the saga of the Upside-Down begins. Alongside massively-popular digital synths like the Roland Juno-60, the DX7 defined the 80s like few other electronic instruments, quickly rising “to take over the airwaves,” as the Polyphonic video above explains.
Brian Eno, Kenny Loggins, Whitney Houston, Herbie Hancock, Depeche Mode, Hall & Oates, Vangelis, Steve Winwood, Phil Collins, The Cure… one could go on and on, naming a majority of the artists on the charts throughout the decade. Why was the DX7 more appealing than the analogue sounds we now associate with the height of synth quality? Polyphonic explains how the DX7 used an algorithm called FM (frequently modulated) synthesis, which allowed for more refined control and modulation than the subtractive synthesis of analog synths built by Moog, ARP, Buchla, and other specialized makers in the 70s.
That meant digital keyboards had a wider range of timbres and could convincingly simulate real instruments, like the marimbas in Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F.” Digital synths were predictable, and could be programmed and customized, or used for their many already excellent presets. And just as Faltermeyer’s Beverly Hills Cop theme was inescapable in the mid-80s, so too was the sound of the DX7. It was “damned near ubiquitous,” writes Music Radar. “After years of exclusively analogue synths, musicians embraced the DX7’s smooth, crystalline tones and for a while the airwaves were rife with FM bells, digital Rhodes emulations and edgy basses.”
Though it’s hardly as well known, the DX7 may be as influential in 80s music as the Roland TR-808 drum machine. Yamaha’s digital synth was so popular that it “almost single-handedly spawned the third-party sound design industry, and forced other synthesizer manufacturers to take a hard look at how they were building their own instruments.” Learn about the history, versatility, and customization of the DX7 from Polyphonic in the video above. And stream a playlist of songs featuring the DX7 below. While our 80s nostalgia moment favors the richly harmonic tones of analog synths from earlier decades, you’ll learn why the real 1980s belonged to the digital DX7 and its many competitors and successors.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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