Great demonstration of FM, very impressive at the end.
Benge is always a joy to watch and listen to. The finished VCS-3 patch from 25:40 and on sounds absolutely gorgeous!
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Some great bands there - Iâm going to see what more I can find, great post 
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There is another longer documentary that Iâve been spending the last 3 hours trying to find on youtube about the same thing but Iâve lost it.
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Iâll hold my hands up and say I also do the looking down the neck thing (and that I have never been too sure what exactly I was looking for)
About Serge Modular
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Thanks for posting this! All musicians and music here is genius level and Jobson is fantastic. Hearing it played live is unbelievable. The level of discipline and mastery is next level. Much more in common with classical music and symphonies than classic rock. These guys could really compose and I really miss that.
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There is a part2 in the makingâŠ
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I feel like this is an obligatory followup posting to thisâŠ
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This ELP album in 1971 was definitely one of my infuences that lead to me building my first modular synth two years later in 1973.
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haha - Iâm trying to avoid getting back into ELP - they are one prog band I have not gone back to. But I did enjoy this song at the end of an episode of the (excellent) TV show âash vs evil deadâ.
Yeah. Eddie Jobson. This triggered me to revisit his album Theme of Secrets (1985). Featuring the mighty New England Synclavier.
Jobson later recounted:
The first thing I did was get hold of the Synclavier operating manuals, about two months before the system was delivered. I remember sitting on a beach, on vacation in the Caribbean, reading these three giant manuals so I would be able to hit the ground running when the system finally arrived. When I made the Theme of Secrets album a few weeks after the arrival of the Synclavier, I was already familiar enough with the programming software to input many of the electronic motifs, such as the famous âbouncing balls,â typing it all in using only the qwerty keyboard. And as I did the whole album with only a 10MB hard drive and a now unbelievable 4MB of RAM, I also had to develop some novel micro-looping techniques and use the FM synthesis module as much as possible.
Eddy Jobson - Theme of Secrets (1985)
Never knew but I just noticed the album was produced and co-engineered by Peter Baumann of Tangerine Dream fameâŠ
Speaking of the Synclavier and synth legendsâŠ
Anthony Marinelli started a YouTube channel some time ago. Some videos (especially the earlier ones) are about his synthesizer work for Michael Jacksonâs epic/Epic (pun intended) Thriller album. Explaining how the sounds and the album tracks were made. With demos and interviews with those involved.
Heâs very much an ARP 2600 lover. But thereâs some episodes on the Synclavier too. E.g. about the much debated Beat It intro sound/notes (derived/recreated from a Synclaver demo sounds album.) But also about the use of the Synclavier sampler/sequencer functions (in a pre-DAW age).
AnywayâŠ
Worth watchingâŠ
Anthony Marinelli on YouTube
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kraftwerk used to sequence their synclavier from my DOS MIDI sequencer, Seq+.
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Kinda special youâre part of electronic music history (with Voyetra).
Hereâs Karl Bartos (ex Kraftwerk 1975-1990) remembering âthe daysâ in a Music Radar interview:
Your first computer set-up was the IBM XT running Voyetra Plus sequencing software. That must have felt like going supersonic after using tape? âIt was a real revelation. We were recording Electric CafĂ© [Kraftwerk, 1986] at Kling Klang [the bandâs private studio originally located in DĂŒsseldorf, Germany], then we took it over to Right Track Studio in New York where François Kevorkian and Fred Maher introduced me to the Voyetra Plus software he had running on a laptop. I remember thinking, âIf Stravinsky had seen this machine he would have gone through the ceiling!â I found it incredible that you could put every instrument on the timeline like a score. I instantly knew that was going to be it.â
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Those were fun days. Meander was DOS and assembly language in those days. Of course I did not have Kraftwerk using my software 
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Nice! Yep, I certainly remember all that, although I had never seen that article.
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