13:29, it sounds like something out of an old science or weather documentary film. The repetitive semiquaver motif notes and the larger value horn sounds give it that atmosphere.
I find it astonishing that technology has advanced so far so fast, that people can listen to what was a $200K machine and the space shuttle of its realm, producing sounds that no human of the time had ever heard before, and sit back and go, like, meh.
they had bad sound systems then. few rich people had great speakers. The average clown didn't know what computers were let alone synths. but if they had spotify and lots of headphones back then, they'd be mindblown
New England Digital tried to sell Vangelis a Synclavier. Vangelis was interested, until he discovered that he had to shell out a bunch of extra cash to have two octaves added. He said "Synclavier claims to have the best piano sound in the world, and yet they sell it on a keyboard that has two less octaves than a conventional grand piano, and the Synclavier already costs $300,000.
It's funny seeing the "most replayed" graph/overlay on this video. The whole video is completely flat except one giant bump at the moment we all came for.
I knew a couple engineers that worked in a studio that had a Synclavier. When I was working with them they were no longer at that studio. However, it was all they ever talked about was how badass this thing was. It almost got boring the magnitude of which they raved about it. This was in the mid-80s.
Oooo, I wanted one so bad in the 80's! I looked at the magazine ad's for these like looking at Playboy! I didn't get too much of either of those things at the time though. Just fantasizing.
@ Exe. Dist: Well the THX Deep Note was actually done on a computer similar to the technology used in the Synclavier II. So technically the instrument could have been used to re-create that destinctive sound as well :)
@@nbuehster É o mesmo porém o tom é que está diferente, Isso se chama timbre, é como uma Voz humana que soa diferente, mas para chegar ao original de Michael vai precisar mexer em vários botões pra chegar no timbre certo
yeah and THIS came first, for those who don't know. :) Denny Jaeger wrote and played that piece on this record, and somehow someway MJ lifted it and used it for Beat It.
Basically, the thing ran on a mini-frame computer similar to the PDP-1170. That was no small, cheap computer - even by 1981 standards. Companies ran their entire businesses on computers of that class.
Frank Zappa was a huge fan of the Synclavier using it extensively on Jazz from Hell and in other works, it helped him realise compositions that humans would find very difficult to play, he instrument until recently as been a huge mystery for me, so any videos like this help me a lot, thanks.
Well actually, the music you're referring to was cotton candy pop music that he forced himself to write so that musical light weights, like yourself, would finance his real music projects.
Frank loved that "cotton candy pop music". He was never forced to write anything. He was also a big fan of 50's doo wap stuff. Everything he did was his "real" music projects. James Ward's ridiculousness aside, I must say G-Spot Tornado!
Looking up this synthesizer because I have access to Arturia's Analog Lab via the Keylab Essential, and the Synclavier FM E Piano 2 in particular is so iconic that I immediately composed a song based on that sound. So very 80s and feels so very good
no tangerine dream used that patch 2 years prior allready before jackson on the opening track of exit album , but the mk1 could probably make that sound as well genesis and kim wilde used the mk1, compass point studios howard jones used mk2 as this was the mainstay instrument of his producer rupert hine
Now I have to find where I put my copy of this record. I would listen to it for hours when I bought my first a ensoniq and tried to model my own sounds. Great memories!
It's fascinating listening back to this now. 3:26 - sounds like one of the many Sync II patches that Tony Banks used in Home By The Sea (under the guitar solo near the end), 7:35 - Home By The Sea bells mixed with the Mama lead? 12:10 - Home By The Sea "ghosts" (used in the break between verses and the lead-in to Second HBTS) 18:20 - definitely Tangerine Dream! 19:50 - Laurie Anderson, something from Mister Heartbreak or Home of the Brave, I can't recall which track. Damn 16:20 and 17:11sound soooo close to analogue (something the DX7 just could not do) That bass note around 18:55 I think might be one of the sounds that David Shire used in the score for 2010: Odyssey Two. Not the best film, and not the best film score either, but some nice Sync II (and DX1) sounds. Ironically, Tony Banks was supposed to have scored 2010, so it likely would have still had Synclavier in it!
19:50 was Blue Lagoon. You've got a great ear for these things, I didn't recognize most of them at first. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-3rjQQ26vjoo.html
The original Synclavier was about $200,000, Omnisphere 2 runs to around $400 or so. So try recalculating, to make that about 1/500th or so of the price. With one tenth of the price of an original Synclavier I could get a very nice Eurorack Modular going :) Pretty much all modules I want would come to about that, so...Times have changed, that's for sure.
It certain parts of Eastern and Southern Europe you could probably get a decent holiday villa for that much. In South America, probably two:D The take home story, for me, is that there were a lot of big budgets for music production back then. So, while the equpiment is cheaper now, making money can actually be harder.
Well, the main impact of the Synclavier wasn't it's internal additive synthesizer but the high quality sampling and sequencing function, but today with Pro Tools or Logic nobody would even want to work that way anymore.
The _original_ Synclavier is now available from Arturia as "Synclavier V". It costs $200 or so (I forget). It's based on the _original source code_ for Synclavier. Arturia hired Cameron Jones who was one of the original developers at New England Digital.
The Synclavier has always been my favorite instrument. Truly the most versatile keyboard ever made, with the highest quality sound, well worth the $200K ($400K today) price sticker. It wasn't just a keyboard, it was a self contained recording studio.
I was a Synclavier product specialist five years. We sold a full-blown 8 track HD / sampling unit to Miami Sound Machine. They wrote a check for $387K and Emilio Estefan said, "Now the monkey is on your back. You must deliver!" I spent a month in Criteria studio with them, helping to program the thing. Working for N.E.D. got me interested in programming, and I've been a software engineer ever since.
@@jameswest8280 Awesome little anecdote! Was the quality of the sound output inherently superior in the original hardware version compared to, say ,Arturia? or was it something else?
Two of my favorite specimens of this instrument are the two records that DonDorsey made in the latter 80s, BachBusters and Beethoven or Bust. He not only used sounds internal to the Synclavier, but he made incredible use of its outputs, sending MIDI signals to the different modules he had in his arsenal during those years, such as the Roland MKS80, Yamaha TX7 and TX816 or the Oberheim Xpander, as well as others.
Those Don Dorsey albums were like the last of the "classical music on a synth" genre. I was nerdy synth loving teen at the time and I liked them for what they were, even though I thought they were corny as hell.
The later Synclavier (by '87 it became unbelievably expensive) was all over 'Bad'. Lots of TX/DX yamaha too. That might be where the intro came from. Anyone here know what else was used on that album?
@@trevorwoodley3897 There's no human-audible improvement from 44.1kHz to even 192kHz. If 50kHz was used on the Synclavier it was probably due to steep-enough filters not being available.
Kraftwerk bought one of these too. The spent days, weeks and months to learn this thing and got lost in it. This was after Wolfgang Flür left the band and had a chat with Karl Bartos who soon left the band as well.
At 20:45 is one of my all-time favorite electronic classical music albums: Jeffrey Reid Bakker's, "The Four Seasons." It is from the "Summer" movement. I haven't heard that in years. I remember reading that he had two Synclavs linked together to get stereo output.
@@kevinmcguire1766 Yes, you are correct. I had that very same vinyl LP. Then I got it on CD. And now I have it as an Apple Music file in their new uncompressed and remastered format. It sounds amazing.
Yes you are right. Also at around 5:50 and after you may recognise something too! You can also hear a Synclavier sound used on White Eagle, Mojave Plan at about 9: 40 onward, which is the same as used on Michael Jackson's Beat It.
Yes indeed. They did claim in an interview to have hired a Synclavier in for some sounds... but I'm betting this demo disc just got sampled instead. (Not forgetting the section from André Almuro's _Musiques Experimentales_ LP that got flown into the middle break of Ricochet.)
This is interesting because it makes you understand for example where some of the sounds on the earlier Depeche Mode records come from. But honestly, the big digital synthesis game changer of the time was Yamaha's DX-7, the Synclavier's internal synth isn't really lightyears beyond the DX-7 or DX-5 in terms of versatility. You could also get all of these sounds and more for much cheaper using Music 5, Cmusic and others. The main impact of the Synclavier was it's high quality sampling capability combined with the internal sequencer. Art of Noise, Depeche Mode, Propaganda, Frankie Goes To Hollywood produced some of their tracks completely without any multichannel tape just using the Synclavier. The additive synth in the Synclavier was just an add-on for most.
Bastille Yeah its DA converters had its own character as did the Fairlight, PPG Wave 2.2, etc. Problem is I'm listening to this demo on my computer through my EMU 1616m's DA converters, and it sounds no better than any of my Kontakt Synclav Samples which also run through the same DA converter. To really appreciate any of the 80's unobtainium digital synths you have to go play one in a studio somewhere through a NEVE, SSL, API, etc. console, and that just ain't gonna happen for 99.9999% of us.
Guyz, this thing is actually a "soft synth", it was one of the earliest digital synthesizers and samplers, and many of its amazing sounds are indeed samples. However, I too can hear the sounds so clear, so natural and realistic that amazes me and makes me wonder why can't the home keyboards replicate such a clear sound even after so many generations of development?... Things have gotten stale or what.. Do the DAs make so much difference?
The main issue is that so many companies are trying to replicate analog synthesizers digitally (and, to their credit, they're getting pretty close) instead of innovating and creating new, innovative digital synthesizers.
I remember getting that blue LP demo in late fall 1980 or early 1981, When I first heard MJs Beat it intro, I said that came from the Synclavier demo lp. 1981
Someone mentioned below that the driving computer might be compared to an 11/70. NSM. New England Digital (NED - out of White River Junction in VT.) built a discrete component box with a max memory of 128K and two 3.5" disk drives, later upgraded to 8" drives. Two versions of this computer were available - the Able 40 and Able 60 - originally for use in labs at universities in the NE for real-time applications. The programming language Scientific Programming Language (XPL) was structured much like PL1 and was 'compiled' to p-code - Heathkit Z-19 and DEC VT100 connected via serial ports were the general video terminals of choice. 16-bit Interfaces were provided on add-on cards for various external devices such as a 30MB Priam voice-coil disk. Everything had to be coded at a very low level to provide the appropriate driver for the device - but it all worked and was fast. All this just FYI - I had a 40 in 1980 - loved it - wrote BASIC for it - wrote an 8-terminal 'OS' for it (round-robin interrupt stack) and the first MLS system in NC.
Didn’t know much about this but listen to some videos of the presenting sounds was cool. But this bloody hell hearing the first 3 presets just blew me away. It is truly an incredible synthesizer. Creating the most atmospheric, powerful and also scary sounds.
i always wondered why trevor horn & the art of noise went from 8 bit fairlights to cheap consumer grade akais instead of synclaviers which could handle HD audio and were so much more advanced.
funk toon Trevor Horn owned a Synclavier from the time of Frankie Goes To Hollywood. He used it a lot with Steve Lipson. I custom rebuilt it for him in the 90s. A later model than the one here. And don’t forget before comparing it to other systems that you are listening to a 35 year old vinyl record. And vinyl has its limitations. In real life it is a much fuller sound. And it would develop a lot in the next 10 years.
I think often about how this proto-workstation synthesizer was used on several of the recordings which lined my formative years, a partial list including two Michael Jackson records, two offerings by (pyrotechnics specialist) Don Dorsey, the Alan Silvestri score from Flight of the Navigator, various Police/Sting recordings, various Stevie Wonder recordings, Graceland, at least one Kenny G song, at least two Genesis albums and various songs by Mr. Mister and Paul Davis.
It's tracks 5, 9 and 11, Consumerist Utopia. They include "By the Time This Night is Over" featuring Peebo Bryson, "Even If my Heart Would Break" featuring Aaron Neville and "Sister Rose".
Walter Afanasieff who produced Kenny G's biggest albums used the Synclavier extensively. He also used it on stuff he produced for Mariah Carey (the nylon string guitar passage on her song "My All", for example), Celine Dion and many others. He's mostly a schlockmeister - type producer but his productions sounded exceptional in no small measure to the NED tech. And he used really big drum sounds.
Mega money synth. Could cost 250,000 or more for the full set up. But it was advance for its time. It was better than the Fairlight. But some think the Fairlight was as good but it wasn’t. But the Fairlight did have a better setup. This machine was mad for its time and even used today because of how powerful it is. Had a fantastic sampling rate on it and FM synthesis which then become the famous Yamaha DX7 in 1983. So these two synths are related to each other in a way. Great tech.
I kind of underestimated it at the time. I was more of a Fairlight man myself. As if I ever got near either one, ahum! So the best Michael Jakson bit ever was just a rip off? For years I thought that Baet It sound had been made on a PPG Wave 2.2. No wonder I was never able to recreate something like it it when I finally got my own incarnation (Waldorf XT). Overall the Synclavier however reminds me most of the DX 7 but then without that gnarly bell like quality that saoked almost every first generation DX sound. Of course any laptop can nowadays do more but I'd still love to own and use one.
The beginning reminded me of the song Running with the Devil by Van Halen 1978. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Bl4dEAtxo0M.html Wikipedia says The song begins with a collection of car horns sounding. The horns were taken from the band's own cars and mounted in a box and powered by two car batteries, with a foot switch. Producer Ted Templeman slowed the horns down before adding them to the track.
Earlier than that. The Synclavier was notably used on their "Electric Cafe" album for instruments and FFT resynthesis of their voices for choir sounds (which the Fairlight could also do but Synclavier does it the best)
TBH, one of the sounds that really surprises me from this thing if the tonewheel organ through a wah effect, after the "Beat It" gong. The Synclavier didn't really have interactive filtering-you could program in static filters if you had the Polyphonic Sampling upgrade, but nothing like a DCF/VCF. So how exactly was this done? I know you get somewhat similar effects by modifying the FM modulation depth, but nothing this resonant or vocal. Or maybe I'm mistaken?
there had to be some amount post-processing on the final mix. there is a shit-ton of reverb some of those sounds. i would imaging they ran the output through a wah-pedal on that organ sound. i have the synclavier v and the only way i can imagine replicating that sound is by stacking multiple sounds and using phasing/fm amount to trick a filtered(with resonance) sound...but i cant get anywhere close. cool demo though
Well, the Casio CZ synths could do it via their phase distortion method, which is closely related to the FM/PM that the Synclavier does. They basically hard-sync the modulator wave to force a resonance frequency and do some clever processing to smooth it out.
> Well, the Casio CZ synths could do it via their phase distortion method, which is closely related to the FM/PM that the Synclavier does Absolutely false. CZ synthesis, which I've written a software synthesizer that emulates and extends, is basically an extremely clever way to simulate analog cutoff and resonance on sawtooth, square waves, and a few other basic waves, while only using a sine wave output. There's really no relation whatsoever to Yamaha-style "FM". You are right that technically they used PM but it's a distinction without a difference as with sine waves they are utterly identical in theory, PM however requiring far far less mathematical precision to implement. The fact you even mention PM suggests you're just parroting things you've read without understanding what you're talking about.
@@lqr824 I said related, not exact. I get that the CZ/VZ series used their implementation of phase modulation to achieve results significantly different from Yamaha's FM synthesis method. I mentioned it as the closest then-contemporary equivalent digital synthesis technology that stood a chance of reproducing some of these sounds. If you're interested in improving knowledge on the subject, I'm highly supportive, but you don't have to get hostile and assume the worst out of your audience right out of the gate; it's counterproductive. That said, if you have done of a softsynth implementation of PD, I'd totally check it out, if you can provide a link to the project.
@@eddievhfan1984 OK, you're right, "related" can mean more distantly related as well as more closely related, and I wasn't thinking of that. Sorry for the tone of voice. The similarity of the two is that you have a base sinewave and rather than play the wave at a fixed speed, you speed up and slow down the playback speed (in FM, or playback position in PM) using something else. In that sense they're related. In FM, it's another (typically) audio wave, while in CZ it's much more complicated and variable. In that respect, they're utterly unrelated. There are actually very few sounds that both DX and CZ synths can both make. My soft synth basically takes a modular synth approach to voice design, but allows any amount of math in the interconnections, and rather than a diagram just does the whole thing in text. So the synth itself doesn't have any built-in CZ emulation, but rather, has enough power for a user to write a CZ voice out of a sine oscillator or two plus some math. And it ships with such a module called "Cazanova" pre-written that you can use as is (as shown in this video), but if there's anything you don't like about it or want to do something different you can just do your own thing. The vid has a link to the software. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-VLXXhyMHx2Y.html
Actually, it's not. I read in Guitar Player, where Eddie said he plucked the whammy bar springs, while releasing the bar, and they flipped that over so it played backwards on the record.
@@Kohntarkosz - Keep in mind, Eddie has at least three completely different stories for everything he's ever been involved with. I've read where Alex and Dave mention actual car horns being used too.
It IS actual car horns. A group of them. They used to use it live, too. But to give credit where it’s due, it was actually Gene Simmons of Kiss who developed the idea of de-tuning the horns from A to E for the intro of Running a with The Devil. He produced VH’s first professional demo and they did and early version of House of Pain (1984) that had the car horns blasting periodically thorough the song breaks. The next song on the demo was RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL, so Simmons destined the horns from A to E to intro the song. Ted Templemen likes it so much, he stole the idea when he recorded VH’s first album.
the beat it riff is cool and all, but there's some real impressive synth wizardry on display here. the electric guitar is especially impressive for 1981.
and 4 years later everyone could make this on a 3500 dollar setup mirage , atari and dx21/tx7 and unless you were in the film business this was allready becoming a dinosaur but one with expensive b52 knobbed frontpanel and the smell of veneer , to my knowledge the first album i heard it on was 1980 the korgis but i think the original mk1 synclav was mono sampling only , i also remembered certain countrys were excluded from buying them because of the cpu tech import ban.
i first heard it on Tangerine Dream "Exit" from 1981. the tam tam in the beginning of first track "Kiev Mission" and then the famous gong. which basically preceeded the Thriller by two years. also that slow portamento sound heard on this demo. they basically used all the great presets here all over that album. Synclavier II and also then new PPG Wave 2 have really defined the sound of this seminal record. along with the usual analog stuff they used.
I have this disk , was given to me when it came out as a kid. I listened to it all the time. Beat intro, did they grab it from this? It was a giant inspiration to me. I sampled it, borrowed from it often in the mid 80s for my music.
I could see it was a rough-cut Tuesday Slow-motion weekdays stare me down Her lipstick reflex got me wound There were no defects to be found Snapshot image froze without a sound Thursday morning was a hot flash-factor Her face still focused in my mind Test-strip, proof-sheet love is hard to find Friday night we'll dance the spotlight grind Stop-time heart for me if she's not mine Freeze-frame (freeze-frame) Freeze-frame (freeze-frame) Freeze-frame (freeze-frame) Freeze-frame, now freeze Now I'm lookin' at a flashback Sunday Zoom lens feelings just won't disappear Close-up darkroom sweet-talk in my ear Her hot-spot love for me is strong This freeze-frame moment can't be wrong Freeze-frame (freeze-frame) Freeze-frame (freeze-frame) Freeze-frame…
I want to know if this guy know that those notes were used in a song that was released the year after this? (and also the other way around, if Michael Jackson knew that the intro was based on something from the year before) Also, the intro to Beat It sounds a bit different. What did they do, since they did use a Synclavier?
The sound around 5:40 was used by Tangerine Dream at the start of Exit. As far as I understand if performed live they played a studio recording of it or possibly as a sample. Perhaps the clav was too bulky, finicky or expensive to use live?
I think if my memory serves me this was made by New England Digital and ran for ten grand or was it a hundred grand...so much for my memory.... You can do the same with a few hundred today and with better inflections.
in 1980, a bare-bones 8-voice model was only like $14k I think - cheaper than two PPG's. Then, by 1985 the company had developed a number of state of the art upgrades. Then you could get a fully decked-out system in 1988 for $500K. Unbelievable.
This instrument was oddly prominent on the making of featurette of the 1988 anime Akira. I mean, I'm not complaining. It's just that a lot of claims in that one featurette always felt odd. And it made me want to find out more about this piece of kit.
I used program fairlight and Synclaviers when they’re out back in the day when people are too lazy to sample stuff - these were very sophisticated Youness but at the end of the day, by the time EMU hit the market with the “emulator” it was pretty much came over for expensive sampler/Sample conductors.
A lot of these are just sample playback, which sounds pretty good, especially for the time, but is not so impressive now. But there are a few Sounds like the "Thriller" sound at 6:40 or the similar sound at 5:39 which really show what this instrument can do. Nowadays, there is an iPad app (SynClavier Go) and a VST, Arturia SynClavierV, so anyone with less than $100 can easily play these for themself and enjoy the experience of 1981's best synthesizer.
