What are you Watching? (Educational)

Ben Burtt on creating R2D2 sounds with his ARP

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That Moog documentary with Herb is fantastic - highly recommended! It’s like getting a good peek into the very birth of electronic music instruments and what the people were thinking, straight from the horses mouth.

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How Malcolm Cecil made the legendary TONTO -

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A nice little video to understand different types of curves.

here’s a video that explains why midi is the way it is ^.^

and wow it’s so 90s

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Prepare for new users incoming :wink:

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Jeff Rona was a pretty smart guy. We were both “founding” members of the MIDI Manufacturer’s Association. Some of those folks were annoying idiots, but Jeff was always reasonable.

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Can “watching” include some “reading” as well?

Being Dutch (from the Netherlands)…

I was pretty surprised and impressed with the role the Dutch electronics company Philips played in research & development of electronic music in the early 1950’s and 60’s.

Philips? Yes, the guys that also brought you the Compact Cassette and the Compact Disc (amongst loads of other stuff). More specific: the Philips physics R&D laboratory: NATLAB.

In this case: walls of analog equipment, tone generators, tape machines that sort of stuff. All given tot a handfull of guys to play with. Lots of it used in unintended and creative ways. In an attempt to see if all this could lead to marketable products.

A general article with some video links within…

How electronic music began in 1950s Netherlands

How electronic music began in 1950s Netherlands.

Some of information is in (untranslated) Dutch language. Maybe use Google translate or similar service for text translation if needed.

The main characters in this story are:

Examples on Youtube

Some “behind the scenes”… (Dutch voice over)

Kid Baltan and Tom Dissevelt (1959)

An album…

Tom Dissevelt & Kid Baltan - Song Of The Second Moon (Full Album, 1956)

BTW, 1956 is the same year that Bebe and Louis Barron created the first fully electronic score to a movie: Forbidden Planet. But that’s another story.

To continue the Philips Natlab story;

There is also a (rare) 4 CD set with these early works. With booklets full of background info.

Popular Electronics. Early Dutch electronic music from Philips Research Laboratories, 1956-1963 Popular Electronics - Wikipedia (dutch)

Maybe also checkout Hainbach (Youtube), who is (musically) travelling back to this period of analog experimentation.

Here’s an example of him visiting the Dutch Willem Twee Studios, where they maintain and use a huge collection of this sort of early analog electronic gear.

Visiting Willem Twee Studios - a modern early electronic music studio

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Interresting, and from Wikipedia:

A bucket brigade or bucket-brigade device (BBD ) is a discrete-time analogue delay line,[1] developed in 1969 by F. Sangster and K. Teer of the Philips Research Labs in the Netherlands.

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And over 50 years later:

The BBD is still very much alive

As a Delay effect

But also in the much sought after Roland “Juno” Chorus with BBD delaylines

Much less as a Shift Register. Since digital copying is much more precise and reliable. Although the fact that an analogue “copy” is imperfect and degenerates with every copy that is passed to the next link in the chain is still very relevant and usefull for certain applications.

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this one too: VCV Library - Submarine BB-120

A purely digital shift register in fact.

Which is where the Lindenberg BBD gets its name

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Always great to see the pioneers and inventors recognized and respected…

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Very cool that 1956 album! Never heard of it. The Ductch and Philips have always been very inventive, great to see a little credit here.

for the microtonalists

This looks like a strange, self-made MIDI controller:

Robert Fripp & Frippertronics (tape loops) (from another thread)

Robert Fripp Frippertronics Demonstration 79