What is this prog-rock musician doing?

Factual Questions
1

I recently acquired a DVD of assorted progressive rock band performances. One of the videos (which looks to be shot in the 1970s) shows the guitarist operating a machine to produce some trippy, distorted noises during an extended instrumental sequence. You can see a short video clip of this.

My questions are as follows:
[ol]
[li]What’s the name of the machine the musician is operating?[/li][li]What are the individual knobs and switches for?[/li][li]Is there a standard term which is used to describe what he’s doing?[/li][li]I’ve heard similar noises in modern space rock music (e.g., Monster Magnet). Are they produced the same way?[/li][/ol]

2

  1. It’s an Electronic Music Studios (EMS) VCS3 Synth

  2. In a nutshell, the knobs control tone and timbre of the sound being created. You can alter the oscilators (the core of the sound) white noise, reverb, and the envelope of the sound (how fast it attacks and delays).

  3. He’s just messing with the filters. I suppose if you had to call it anything it would be “tweaking knobs”.

  4. More or less. The older synths were controlled like this. Newer synths you can assign the filter control to another aspect of the keyboard control.

I often assign filter modulation to aftertouch on the keyboard. When I push a key down it plays the note. When I push it harder it triggers the filter - which is whatever I tell it. it could be a pitch bend, noise, modulation filters, volume, or any other aspect of the synth.

3
  1. Yeah; those are pretty typical analog synth sounds; Pink Floyd used the VCS3 in particular on “Dark side of the moon.” In fact, the vast majority of “on the run” is just a VCS3 running throug a sequence while being tweaked. Youtube Clip
4

VCO3: For some reason I expected you to appear in this thread (not that I know if you’re a synthnut like I am, but by your name alone.) :smiley:

5

Oh yeah. :stuck_out_tongue:

BTW, you’re not “SevenArts” from AH, are you?

6

This probably won’t come as news to self-confessed synthnuts VCO3 and Seven, but anyone interested in how classic analog synthesizers actually worked can go to this company’s Web site: Arturia.com. They sell software simulators of several old synths, although not the EMS VCS3, unfortunately. But they have the Moog Modular, the Minimoog, the Prophet V, and my favorite, the ARP 2600. (Although I never owned one, there was one at the studio where I spent a fair amount of my time back in the 1970s. I think I still have a copy of a 2600 manual lying around somewhere.)

You can download slightly crippled demo versions of each of the synths and play around with them. (For some reason, I couldn’t get any sound out of the 2600 demo just now, but I haven’t looked into it too deeply.)

What was amazing about the early Moog and Arp synths was their total flexibility, achieved by routing signals from module to module with external patch cords. You could use any signal to modify or modulate any other, and had complete and direct control over every aspect of every sound.

The downside of this complete control and flexibility was the complexity of getting a sound you liked and the difficulty of getting it back once you found it. What you can do these days with a push of a button might have taken several minutes of patching and knob twisting. This made using these instruments for on-stage performing, as opposed to studio recording, somewhat problematic. Nevertheless, some musicians, including (IIRC) Edgar Winter and Yes’ Rick Wakeman, did take ARPs and Moogs on the road.

For anyone interested in trying out one of the demos, there’s a fairly steep learning curve, figuring out what each module does, how it works, and how it can be combined with the others. Reading the manual is almost essential. Fortunately, the demos provide pre-set patches, so you should be able to get sounds from the start. But it can be a lot of fun. (I used to know all that stuff, but it would probably take me quite a while to get it all back now.)

It’s also pretty cool how the sim simulates the flexing and swinging of the patch cords!

7

If anyone’s interested, you can actually download a demo of a virtual VCS3 at this page (link is in the middle). It makes you realize how weird and musically unusable that synth is!

8

From that page:

GREAT! Reconditioned synths that still can’t stay in tune. :smiley:

*I wouldn’t mind having one of those EMS Vocoders though

9

A friend of mine from the early days had a sig:

Continents drift, why not oscillators?