The first digital synth: the keyboard that killed the 1970s
If synthesizers were to be selected to represent a decade, the kneejerk choice would go to the 1980s. For good reason, too, the era’s synthpop explosion and new wave’s electronic sheen were brought about by the growing affordability and, crucially, portability of synths, seeing electronic music crafted in the bedroom rather than affixed to world-class studios available to bands that could afford access.
In an astonishing decade for music, heralding a golden age or cataclysmic new birthing of rock and pop, disco, punk, hip-hop, prog, soul, and everything in between, the synthesizer was nearly as much a binding agent instrument across such disparate genres alongside the guitar and drum kit.
Not just confined to Kraftwerk’s pioneering electronic exercises, but whether it’s the Minimoog’s warm filter sweeps on Bob Marley and The Wailers’ ‘Stir it Up’, Rick Wakeman’s wizard Korg noodling, or the ARP 2600’s squelching modular funk on Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’, the 1970s was the real synth decade, scores of artists fascinated with its strange tonalities long before purists’ stubborn rejection of the following decade’s knob twiddlers.
The phat, chunky sounds of analogue synths that defined the polyphonic rush of budding synthesists soon gave way to the emerging possibilities heralded by the digital revolution. While FM (Frequency Modulation) keyboards would be defined by the Yamaha DX7, around half of 1986’s Billboard 200 featuring its pre-sets bells and flutes, it’s often erroneously thought that the Fairlight CMI system was the first commercially available digital synthesiser.
An early sampler and Digital Audio Workstation rolled into one, the Fairlight’s innovative sonic possibilities of aural sculpture and manipulation of instruments drew in artists such as Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, the latter’s Hounds of Love largely shaped and built by the innovative computer system.
Only a few years after Dr Robert Moog unveiled his mini namesake synth, Allen Organ Company of America’s electronic subsidiary Rocky Mount Instruments dropped the first-ever digital synthesizer in 1974 amid a climate still firmly planted in the analogue. Rather than deploying the standard amplifiers and voltage-controlled switches, the RMI Keyboard Computer produced individual waveforms using digital circuitry, a revolutionary process that took the music world several years to actually grapple with.
Speaking to Red Bull Academy in 2012, French electronic composer Jean-Michel Jarre listed the original RMI in his favourite synths feature. Praising the machine’s ability to easily layer frequencies as heard on his Deserted Palace and ‘Oxygène 5’, Jarre bestowed particular praise on the experimental organ off-shoot: “It created a very different sound to anything else that could be heard at the time, precisely because the digital edge added a certain coolness. This synth was to music what the film Tron was to cinema at the time.”
The “digital edge” would, by the end of the 1980s, fatigue synth artists bemoaning the hollow artifice wrought by digital keyboards. Amid the current resurgence of modular hardware, it’s an appreciation at odds with electronic music’s love affair with the tactile. Despite its sonic merits and artistic possibilities, the RMI’s digital wind change spelt the end of the 1970s before anyone even knew it.
