A synthesizer is a musical instrument that builds sounds with electricity instead of strings, reeds, or air. Here are fun facts about how they were invented, how they grew up, what went wrong, and who used them.
How the idea started
- The word comes from “synthesize,” which means to put something together. A synth does not play one fixed sound. It builds a sound from simple electronic waves, then shapes it.
- One of the first giant electronic instruments was the telharmonium, built by Thaddeus Cahill around 1897. It weighed about 200 tons, filled a room, and sent music down telephone lines. Neighbors sometimes heard organ music leaking into their phone calls.
- In 1920, Russian inventor Leon Theremin made the theremin. You play it without touching it. One hand moves near an antenna to change the pitch. The other hand controls the volume. It can sound like a singing ghost.
- Theremin also built the Rhythmicon in 1931, often called the world’s first drum machine. It could play rhythms too fast for a human drummer.
- The same “hand near an antenna” idea was later used in burglar alarms. So a musical invention helped catch sneaky people.
Getting smaller and playable
- The Hammond Novachord of 1938 is often called the first analog synthesizer. It hid 169 vacuum tubes (glass light-bulb-like parts) inside a wooden case and could play many notes at once.
- In the 1950s, RCA built the Mark II Sound Synthesizer. It was the size of a room, weighed more than a car, and was programmed with punched paper. Only a few people ever got to use it.
- Bob Moog, an American engineer, built his first theremin at age 14 from a magazine plan. In 1964 he showed a modular synthesizer you could play with a keyboard. Musicians plugged cables between boxes to invent new sounds, a bit like building with electronic Lego.
- “Moog” is pronounced like “vogue,” not like the sound a cow makes. Bob Moog spent years politely correcting people.
- Early Moogs could usually play only one note at a time. If you wanted a chord, you recorded one note, then another, then another.
- The Minimoog arrived in 1970. It was small enough to carry, had knobs instead of a forest of cables, and became the synth many bands took on tour. A prototype was partly built from broken spare parts during lunch breaks.
What people used them for
- Wendy Carlos’s 1968 album Switched-On Bach played Bach on a Moog. It sold so well that a 200-year-old composer suddenly had a hit made of beeps and buzzes, and it won three Grammy awards.
- Synths showed up in science-fiction films because they could make sounds no ordinary instrument could: laser zaps, robot voices, spaceship hums.
- They also hide inside pop songs, video-game music, phone ringtones, and the bleep your microwave makes. A lot of “instruments” you hear on the radio are really synths pretending to be pianos, strings, or drums.
- Today a whole studio can fit in a phone app. The same kinds of knobs Bob Moog used are now on a screen.
The annoying problems
- Early synths drifted out of tune if the room got warm. Bands sometimes had to stop and retune in the middle of a show.
- They were huge, heavy, and wildly expensive. A big modular system could cost as much as a house.
- Patch cables fell out. One wrong plug and your spaceship became a duck.
- Many could play only one note at a time, so keyboard players used to pianos felt stuck.
- Analog synths were alive in a messy way: the same knob settings did not always sound exactly the same twice. Some players loved that. Others found it maddening.
- Later digital synths fixed the tuning and memory problems, but early ones sometimes sounded cold or “plasticky,” which started arguments that still pop up today.
Bands and famous sounds
- The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (1966) used a theremin-like instrument for its woo-ooo hook.
- The Beatles used a Moog on Abbey Road (1969), including on “Here Comes the Sun.”
- Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer, and Giorgio Moroder helped take synths into soul, funk, and disco in the 1970s.
- Kraftwerk built whole songs from synths and drum machines and dressed like robots. Bands from hip-hop to pop later borrowed their ideas.
- Pink Floyd, Yes, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer hauled giant synths on stage in the 1970s. Keith Emerson sometimes stabbed his ribbon controller with a knife to hold a note.
- The 1980s belonged to synth-pop: Depeche Mode, The Human League, a-ha, and many others. A Yamaha DX7 digital synth appeared on so many hits that you have almost certainly heard it without knowing its name.
- Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, and lots of modern pop and hip-hop producers still use both old analog synths and new software ones.
A good way to remember the story: first the instruments were bigger than a room and hard to play, then a keyboard and a few clever knobs turned electricity into something a band could take on tour.