Song: Popcorn by Hot Butter

[Glitch]

There seems to be 4 instruments used to make this song. One of obviously a tamborine (sp?) but what are the other instruments?

[Q.E.D]

According to this page, it was only two instruments: a bass and a synthesizer (or possibly multiple synths).

[Glitch]

Outstanding!! Thank you Q.E.D! I figured the background music was a synthesizer, but I figured the foreground “popping” sound to be some kind of wooden chime or something, but I guess not. Thanks again!

[Glitch]

Well, maybe I got too excited too fast. Looks like it is actually a remake and he used a bass and synth to create the same effect. So, anybody got the straightdope on the original song?

[Q.E.D]

This page calls it the first “synth hit”:

It wasn’t the first synth hit --that honor belongs to Gershon Kingsley’s hissing “Popcorn,” performed by studio group Hot Butter-- but it wasn’t a pure novelty either.

[Glitch]

Thanks again. I used that info to confim that it was all done on a Moog synth. Very cool!

[GuanoLad]

Check out the second half of this page.

[Glitch]

It Popcorn-topia!

[I_can_t_believe_that_s_butter]

Are the drums synthesised as well? It sure sounds like a real (if tuned massively low) drum kit to me…

[Meeko]

Im just 21, the first time I heard the song I knew I had to have it. Wasn’t it on a Diaper or Chip commercial a while back? with the product opening on the 'pop’s ?

[Glitch]

I don’t know enough about music to tell the difference.

http://www.kingsleysound.com/Pop2.html

It says here it was made with synthesizers. I guess technically it doesn’t say it was made with only synthesizers.

[wolf_meister]

Q.E.D., as far as the first synth hit, consider:

Telstar which pre-dates “Popcorn” by a decade.
Del Shannon’s “Runaway” uses a synthesizer (called a “musitron” by its designer - Maximillian Crook) and that was also from the early 1960’s.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Hoo boy, I bet we’re going to get down and dirty over the definition of what is a synthesizer.

First, Telstar:

http://www.retrofuture.com/telstar.html

After the session is completed, the Tornadoes (below) leave Meek’s studio and go back on the road. But Meek—a visionary producer with an abiding love for weird special effects—is far from done. He knows his ode to “Telstar” needs something extra. First, he overdubs the sound of a Clavioline, an electronic keyboard with an otherworldly sound.

And, finally, for extra effect, Meek adds the reverberation of a rocket lifting off (purportedly the sound of a flushed toilet played backwards).

And the clavioline is also the basis for the Musitron:

http://www.delshannon.com/runaway.htm

Thirty-seven years later, in Del Shannon’s small hometown of Coopersville, Michigan, Crook revealed his secret keyboard to del’s legion of fans at the annual summer tribute. “The Musitron is a three-octive, monophonic (single-note playing) keyboard with a slide on it that will allow me to play at a range of two-cycles-per-second up to beyond human hearing. Also, I can bend the notes, which was something uncommon at the time for mini-keyboards. I bent the notes in the middle of Don’t Gild The Lily, Lily, the B-side of Hats Off To Larry. The Musitron is also totally tunable. I can tune it to anything. I built the Musitron out of a variety of things. A clavioline was part of it, but I also threw in some resisters (too early for transistors), tubes from television sets, parts from appliances, and other such household items. That’s basically what it consisted of.”

On the other hand, the Moog Synthesizer grew out of the theramin. The sounds came directly out of the electronics:

http://www.synthmuseum.com/moog/

More or less in my spare time I built two voltage-controlled oscillators and two voltage-controlled amplifiers, and some kind of controller that could turn the sounds on and off and change the pitch and the rates of modulation. It might have been a couple of doorbells. When Herb came up with his family – he parked them at a cabin in the state park while we worked for three weeks – he just flipped when he heard what my breadboards could do. By the end of that session and the one that followed, together we had come up with the basics of a modular analog synthesizer.

So here’s the 64 dollar question: is either the clavioline or the musitron a true synthesizer?

This site would seem to indicate no. So does this electronic music history site.

Of course, both mention constructs labeled or even marketed as synthesizers before Moog. The difference appears to be in his going beyond vacuum tubes to solid state circuits, but that’s getting way too technical for me to debate.

And then there’s the definition of a “hit.” Lots and lots of songs by famous people used true synths before 1969, but were they released as singles and featuring no other instruments? Beats me.

The Monkees’ “Daily Nightly” is usually referred to as the first major rock song to use the Moog, but…

[wolf_meister]

Expano from the website you referenced:
http://www.delshannon.com/runaway.htm

“[Maximillian] Crook was too far ahead of his time to be rightly appreciated. He created the first synthesizer to be used on a popular recording, preceding Joe Meek’s “Telstar” ingenuity by a full year, England’s Mellotron synthesizer by two years, and the Moog synthesizer by over five years!”

Again, it all depends on the definition of synthesizer, but I’d pick “Runaway” as the first song to use one.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

For Pete’s sake, the site is DelShannon.com. How objective about the situation can it be? Of course it’s going to give itself the credit.

As I noted, none of the objective electronic music history sites credits Crook with a true synthesizer. But I couldn’t find one that gave explicit reasons for making the distinction.

Runaway is a possibility, true. But I want someone else to say it than Del Shannon’s fan club.

[wolf_meister]

Expano
You raised an interesting point when you said

none of the objective electronic music history sites credits Crook with a true synthesizer. But I couldn’t find one that gave explicit reasons for making the distinction.

I have a feeling that it may have been due to ‘snobbery’. It seems the people involved with synthesizer research were well-schooled in electronics engineering. Whereas, the song “Runaway” was done by a bunch of “garage musicians” from Battle Creek, Michigan. So, even if the song did utilize a true synthesizer, a bunch of electronics engineers with PhD’s are not likely to yield credit to some rock and rollers with a knack for ingenuity.

---

And now, with all seriousness aside, I was able to find a non-Del Shannon website which does substantiate the claim about the song “Runaway”. Here is the link:
http://www.1--2.com/
If nothing else, this shows that even website “verification” is not the absolute, definitive end for all arguments.

[Lucifer]

Another early instrumental is the theme from the British TV series “Doctor Who” which came out in 1963.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

*Originally posted by wolf_meister *
**[And now, with all seriousness aside, I was able to find a non-Del Shannon website which does substantiate the claim about the song “Runaway”. Here is the link:
http://www.1--2.com/
If nothing else, this shows that even website “verification” is not the absolute, definitive end for all arguments. **

Now that’s what I call a cite.

[wolf_meister]

Expano
Yes, that is quite a website.
As I said it’s good to see you didn’t “have a problem with that”.
er…no I mean that’s what the website said.

and Lucifer if that theme is from 1963 then I would say that is definitely in contention for early synthesizer consideration.

and Expano, here’s another fact for my “snobbery” theory. When I watched the History Channel a few years ago, they said the first use of a synthesizer was the album “Switched-On Bach”. (I E-Mailed them about “Runaway” and “Telstar” with no reply of course.) Again, an album of classical (actually Baroque) music played on a synthesizer is certainly going to have more “snob appeal” than some guys from Battle Creek, Michigan.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

I don’t have a side in this debate and I’m an unreconstructed 60s rocker rather than a snob.

But my take after looking through my cites and the others I went to that I could have linked to is that electronic music has been around for a very long time. Lots of devices have been made to simulate other instruments electronically or to produce sounds that no current instrument could make or both.

Many of these devices were being actively used even in the popular music industry throughout the 50s and early 60s as well as in the most intellectual realms of “electronic” music. My read on it is that pretty much everybody knew what was out there and what other people were doing.

Yet, when Moog comes out with his device the whole world jumps upon it as something truly new and different. Lots of people in the rock world and outside play with it, but don’t know quite what to make of it as an instrument. (And also see this Beaver and Krause site: The Moog was being used “as a colorful instrument in relatively conventional pieces”. That’s key, pardon the pun.)

Then comes Carlos with a fully-formed complete album of nothing but the Moog reinterpreting music that everyone knows and understands. Of course there’s going to be a big hoorah over it.

Snobbery may play an element, but until someone can explain to me how the musitron is a true synthesizer and not just another of the hundred forerunners, I’m not about to go about crying about how Crook is being unjustly neglected.