Part 9 - Baba O'Lowrey
I was born in 1967, so most of my early musical experiemces involved pop music from the early 1970s. For some reason, I was always drawn to synth sounds, even if they appeared on otherwise conventional pop tracks. For example
"Son of my Father" by Chicory Tip,
"Virginia Plain" by Roxy Music, the
"Rockford Files Theme" by Mike Post,
"Gonna Make You a Star" by David Essex,
"The Crunch" by the RAH Band,
"Free Electric Band" by Albert Hammond and
"Glass of Champagne" by Sailor. From a VERY early age, I just knew that I wanted to get involved with these 'synthesizer' thingies, whatever they were.
Slightly later, my brother bought The Who's compilation/soundtrack album "The Kids Are Alright", featuring both "Won't Get Fooled Again" and
"Baba O'Riley".
The opening sequencer runs on Baba O'Riley in particular absolutely mesmerised me, with their inhumanly fast and accurate ratcheting ripples of ever-changing patterns. Given that Pete Townshend owned a VCS3, I imagined for a long time that he had the AKS version with internal digital sequencer, as used by Pink Floyd in "On The Run". It was literally decades later (thanks to the internet) that I learned that those 'sequences' were actually created on an electronic organ! Another few years down the line, I picked up more
technical details of how the Lowrey Berkshire Deluxe TBO-1 achieved this particular feat (in 1971 !!!).
It was a fairly simple approach to getting rudimentary arpeggio effects from a polyphonic machine. However, it proved fiendishly difficult to envisage a system whereby it could be implemented on a regular keyboard, or even within a synthesizer patch. Even when I got my hands on modular gear and soft synths, I still couldn't work out how to split up the keys and trigger them alternately like described in the linked article above.
Fast forward to 2022 and I had started programming my own (monophonic) modules for VM. Even when using the Poly features of VM, I couldn't figure out a way to allocate keys to each alternate timing pulse. It became clear that I would have to dig into MIDI message processing and build my own module for the purpose.
Now, MIDI is quite a different proposition to voltage-control. Firstly, everything is EVENT based, not continuous-in-time voltage levels. Secondly, you have to maintain a 'model' of what effect these external events have had on the module's internal state. However, it's a great technology for processing
musical entities rather than sounds and voltages, and I expect to be utilising it a lot more in future designs.
After a bit of development, beta-testing and refinement, I finally ended up with a module that did exactly what it said on the tin. I was happy that I could play
the intro sequence to BO'R in real time.
However, in contrast to my earlier modules, it was fairly limited in its application to other tasks. Certainly, it
can be used as a polyphonic key gate for rhythmical purposes, and you can also use it as a sort of key quantiser, filtering out bum notes when playing ambitious solos outside of your limited abilities. But overall, it's a bit of a one-trick pony. My philosphy, as stated before, is only to make modules FOR ME, and if others are interested in them too, then that's a nice bonus. Somewhat remarkably for a one-trick pony, it has sold well over 150 units in stand-alone form, and many, many more as part of the Ultimate Collection. I've said it before and I'll say it again - never try to second-guess what VM users will find interesting / useful.
)
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), but as Grant has already pointed out, anything running on a digital computer is automatically a state machine, anyway.