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Storage and Polyphony
Customers weren’t entirely satisfied, however. Although musicians no longer had to
contend with countless cords in order to play a synthesizer, they still had to deal with
loads of knobs and switches before they could do something as simple as switch from
one sound to another. Moreover, keyboardists were bored with playing monophonic
melody lines on synthesizers—they wanted to be able to play chords. Although dual-voice
keyboards that connected two monophonic synthesizers were available as early as 1970,
customers wanted more.
Attempting to satisfy these demands, two schools of thought emerged in synthesizer
design. One approach called for an independent, monophonic synthesizer to be assigned
to every key on the keyboard. To this end, designers married the design principles of
electronic organs to synthesizer technology. Although this breed of instrument was fully
polyphonic—all notes of the keyboard could be heard simultaneously—it wasn’t as
versatile in its control options as a true synthesizer. The first fully polyphonic synthesizer
to feature this type of design was the Moog Polymoog, released in 1975. Developed
primarily by David Luce, it featured 71 weighted, velocity-sensitive keys.
In the second approach to polyphonic sound generation, a synthesizer was assigned to
a key only when the key was pressed—in effect, semi-polyphony. As early as 1973,
American company E-MU Systems introduced the Modular Keyboard System Series 4050,
a digital keyboard that could be connected to up to ten monophonic synthesizers, and
thus had ten-voice polyphony. The problems with this approach are obvious—very few
people owned ten synthesizers, and the amount of time and effort involved in
programming the settings for a new sound were an overwhelming deterrent. Digital
memory was still waiting to be developed and, once again, the evolution of
semi-polyphonic synthesizers required the desirable qualities that only digital keyboards
could provide.
The same prerequisite-digital engineering—eventually led to synthesizers that allowed
sounds to be stored. Without the benefit of digital technology, early attempts at storing
sounds included some unwieldy solutions. As an example, a synthesizer with analog
programmability required a dedicated row featuring all of the instrument’s control
elements, for every “memory” slot! In this case, a selector switch accessed one of the
many identical control panels and connected it to the sound generator.
The first synthesizer featuring storage slots implemented in this manner was the GX1,
which Yamaha released in 1975. The control elements for the system’s storage slots were
so small that they could only be adjusted using jeweller’s screwdrivers and complicated
tools—called programmers and comparators.
559Appendix Synthesizer Basics