Electronic & Digital Pianos 1
How I Dreamed Realistic-Sounding Synthesizers Into Existence (With the help of others like me) – Part 1
The Native American Indians and other aboriginal tribes have a belief that everything in existence was “dreamed into being” by either a living or departed person or god. That is, when something that never existed before, all of the sudden comes into existence, it’s because somebody dreamed about it, and their dreams brought it into being. It’s not clear whether they thought up a new invention first, and then started dreaming about it, or the new thing was “ready” to be born, and snuck into people’s dreams to plant the seeds…it probably can go either way.
Like many children, I had an experience, several tmes, of dreaming about something unique that didn’t quite exist, and then “discovering” it when later it did come into being. And naturally I felt my dreams had something to do with that.
The great psychologist Carl Jung, had a field day with this. He believed all our minds were inter-connected as one unconscious mind. So the concept of thousands of people dreaming about something that has yet to be invented, then having those dreams contribute to it’s coming into being, was quite natural to him.
Certainly the greatest thing I “dreamed into being” would have to be the “electronic musical instrument simulator on a piano keyboard,“ or for short, the synthesizer. As early as 1960, a-decade-and-a-half before Bob Moog and the advent of the first monophonic, dials-and-wires everywhere synthesizers (see below,) I envisioned a full piano keyboard that was, somehow, electronically connected to ultra-realistic sound simulators that allowed a piano player to simulate every instrument in the orchestra. I even envisioned the multi-track layering that allowed him to play a full orchestra’s worth of music using just his two hands. I could see it all clearly, in my dreams.
Being merely a piano player and not a sound engineer, my only contribution to this was dreaming. Somebody else had to actually invent the electronic frequency filters and benders, and later, the digital-chip sampling, that would make this dream a reality.
At seventeen, I was in a rock-’n’-roll band (my fourth one already!) playing piano and organ, and singing. We couldn’t afford to bring a real piano around to gigs, and the organ I had was awful. At that time, the “cool” organ du jour every band had to have was a portable model made by Farfisa (Rick Huxley of The Dave Clark Five played one of these on the Ed Sullivan Show.)
I lusted after the Farfisa everytime I demoed it in my local music shop, but they cost about $1000, and back then that was like what $8000 is now. So I never got one. But the mock flute and trumpet stops on big theatre organs reminded me of my dream of a “keyboard orchestra”, and fed the notion that this would eventually be possible.
A few years later, I was drafted into a financially-well-backed band which had already purchased several choice keyboards for their original player (who broke his hands in a drunken car accident.) There was a Fender Rhodes Electric Piano (a very cool sound of its own, but nothing like a real piano) and the marvelous Hammond B3 organ – the king of rock-’n’-roll organs. But the keyboard they had that made me think I was dreaming awake to find all my orchestral keyboard visions a reality was…the Mellotron. They had a Mellotron! Oh my God!
Why was this so way cool? I’ll continue in my next post…
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