So when Townshend recorded these bits for the records was he sitting in front of a synthesizer keyboard “playing” it like a piano or is it more of a programmed thing?
I saw Pete Townsend on a show called “Storytellers” about a week ago… don’t know what channel it would have been on in the US.
He played Baba O’Reiley, and before he started he told a bit about the song… IIRC, he said something about coming up with the synthesizer part and programming it to play in the background… my memory may be faulty, however, as I was only half-listening while trying to explain to Astrogirl who this old man was and why I was so excited to see him on TV.
I heard that the part to Baba O’Reilly was created by feeding information about Meher Baba, a yogi who Pete Townshend was following or something, into the synth. What format or information this was is a mystery to me. I’d search on Google for further elucidation, but really…
Ok, so looked up some info anyway. Here’s something from http://www.canoe.ca/JamMusicArtistsT/townshend.html
The synthesizer parts of these songs were programmed; I don’t know much about synthesizers, but I don’t think it was even possible to play one like a piano at that time. The technology just wasn’t advanced enough. According to interviews with the Who, it took several minutes to set up each note.
Genseric is correct in that Townshend had hoped to program people’s personal data into a synthesizer (this was a major part of the plot of Lifehouse), but was unable to actually manage this with “Baba O’Riley”. The synthesizer part on that song is Townshend’s conception of what such a piece of music might sound like.
Just FYI ,the beginning of Baba O’Reiley was created using a VCS3 synthesizer, an early competitor to the Moog and ARP systems. It didn’t have a keyboard; just a matrix of pins for connecting the systems together. It was actually more of a sequencer than an synthesizer. (It was also used for creating the sonf On the Run on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album. Townsend was probably using a Hammond organ filtered through the VCS3 in the same way he created the organ effects for Won’t Get Fooled Again.
Frankly, I don’t think the technology was there at the time to program music in the way we think of today. Sequencers at this time could hold about eight notes in their memory, not enough to do a whole song. People think the “Baba O’Reilly” synth part is a loop, but it’s not; it plays throughout the whole song, following the changes, unlike Pink Floyd’s “On the Run,” in which the same notes repeat over and over. (By the way, if you watch PINK FLOYD LIVE AT POMPEI, you’ll see that the synthesizer used to create “On the Run” did indeed have a keyboard.)
It’s true that you couldn’t play a synthesizer like a piano, but that’s because synths were monophonic, able to play only one note at a time, so you couldn’t do chords. You could, however, play arpeggios, which is what you hear on both “Wont’ Get Fooled Again” and “Baba O’Reilly.”
I have a “Classic Albums” DVD that shows the behind the scenes story of making WHO’S NEXT. In it, Townshend shows how he played the keyboard part for “WGFA” by patching the organ through a sample-hold filter. Unfortunately, the documentary doesn’t give much detail on the synth part for “Baba O’Reilly.” (I’ve heard the Townshend quote about programming in details about Meher Baba into a computer to get the synth part, but I find it difficult to credit.)
Still, I suspect that the “Baba O’Reilly” synth part had to have been played by hand. That same tape was used on Pete’s demo, on the final Who version, and the band uses it when they play the song live. Townshend’s explanation for this is that those synth parts are “tricky” so it makes no sense to do a new one when you have a perfectly good one lying around. Had the part been programmed, it would be easy to dash off another one; it would even be possible to tweak and modify it.
Steve Biodrowski
http://www.thescriptanalyst.com
They may have used a different synth on the road, but the original VCS3 didn’t have one. It required an external instrument to be fed through it (like the Hammond organ I mentioned.) Here’s a picture of it.
Synths were monophonic for the most part, but there were a couple mid-level syths, a Moog and an ARP, that sported duo-phonic keyboards so that you could play more than one note at a time. Probably most of the advanced racks were also limited to duo-phonic technology as well, since the advent of polyphonic keyboards attached to multiple monophonic synth modules didn’t happen until microprocessors became more advanced. I don’t think that happened until around the time the Prophet 5 came out.
Most all the sequenced passages from that era were done with analog sequencers which basically patched into the synthesizer modules where the keyboard voltage control would go. I don’t know much about them because at the time I could not afford to buy one. I’m guessing that more complicate polyphonic sequences could be produced by a machine that was capable of delivering several voltages running off the same internal clocking. It’s also possible that you can play a keyboard at the same time the sequencer is triggering the envelope generators (that’s where the choppiness comes from) and give the illusion that you’re synchronizing a live part to the sequence.