Synthesizers In Rock Music

A little bit about the early days of electronic music. Click on the links to open up the music in Spotify. Enjoy.

Right there in the intro to The Beatles’ “Here Comes The Sun,” underneath the chiming acoustic guitars, a new sound. Something that will end up being a very big deal in the years to come.

There are some earlier Rock and Pop recordings that made use of the Synthesizer — we played an example in Chapter 17: “Save the Life of My Child” from Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bookends.”

The Moog Music Synthesizer was first introduced to the world as a prototype at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Moog Electronics set up a booth on the fairgrounds to display their wares, and they were mostly ignored. But a few of the musicians — notably Pete Townshend of the Who — noticed, and started keeping an eye on developments in electronic music.

In 1968 Wendy Carlos made an album called “Switched On Bach” that cracked the top ten, and it had legs: as late as 1972, “Switched On Bach” was still on the Billboard Charts. Every sound on it was generated by a Moog Synthesizer.

By ’69 the Moog Modular was in production; if you had a ton of money and a lot of patience you could order one from the factory in upstate New York.

It was a bulky contraption with patch cords and dozens of knobs — like something out of a cheesy Sci Fi Movie. It needed a lot of maintenance, and it was hard to keep it in tune, even in a controlled studio environment. Only a few studios had a Moog in 1969, and even fewer really knew what to do with them.

Enter The Beatles.

They had always found new gadgets irresistible, and the Moog Synthesizer at Abbey Road was no exception. George Harrison really got sucked in; he spent many hours fiddling with the Moog and figuring it out during those sessions.

Along with “Here Comes the Sun,” two other cuts on “Abbey Road” feature the Moog: the McCartney ditty “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” and John Lennon used it to create the white-noise effect at the end of “I Want You/She’s So Heavy.”

It wasn’t the first adoption, but it was a very early adoption. And when The Beatles adopted something, so did everyone else.

The timing couldn’t have been better for Moog Electronics. A year after “Abbey Road” hit the stores, Moog introduced the Model D, or MiniMoog. It was a superb piece of engineering: a compact, affordable design, the first synthesizer available in retail stores. Rock keyboardists snapped them up. 50 years later, the MiniMoog’s fat, distinctive analog sound is STILL prized by artists and producers.

From this point forward, for better and for worse, the textures and tones of the keyboard synthesizer will be a key element in Rock Music.

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