Adventures in Electronic Music (2011) (opens in new tab)

Pretty crazy when I think about how much money we spent as musicians buying hardware just to make music and now how everything from synths to guitars, and most modern music is made 100 percent on laptops with software and samples now. Pawn shops are literally full of crusty old gear that won't likely be sold to anyone butt museum curators and nostalgic producers with money to burn.

There will of course be people who will say that analog sounds better, but nothing beats being able to save the position of every knob and not have to worry about your kids coming in the studio and messing up your perfect tuning by playing around. The main gripe I have is that the software is still priced too high, but thank goodness we're not wiring and tuning hardware moogs any more... Most producers that know the real pains of getting the perfect tone back then (prior to making each recording) will agree.

Windows defender reports "Exploit:HTML/IframeRef.R!MTB" on this page, it's the first time I've seen it report anything.

I am running Defender and have no trouble viewing this webpage with Mozilla.

It is a spectacular look at the history of electronic music from the view of a veteran music hacker. The clean page layout shows the care and detail that Petzold brings to all his work. Furthermore, it features a great photographic history and audio samples from the instruments. Very nice! .

This is crazy side-related but he mentions that his first purchase was a synth an a TEAC-3440 tape recorder. I bought this exact same tape recorder probably about 15 years ago for peanuts, called Tascam for a belt and spring, which they sent to me FOR FREE. I was able to figure out how to put these parts in as a 19 year old and get this thing working perfectly(it was pretty easy I think).

Anyway, I loved that tape deck. A good friend had found some german language tapes in Ann Arbor and gifted them to me which me and my bud used to record music over. I eventually gifted this tape deck to this friend. I think it is worth a decent chunk of change these days too!

Back then synths(and analog recording gear) were dirt cheap, I've made thousands and thousands of dollars on them just because we got into them into the 2000s as teens. Good times!

Like the author, I was fortunate enough to be inspired by some of the early electronic music including Carlos and minimalists like Glass, and Reich. My public high school was very spoiled and we had an EML 101, 200 and 400, as well as some early MIDI stuff - CZ-101, RX-7. I'm pretty sure we had one of those Teac tape decks as well, because the mention of simul-sync triggered some recognition deep in my brain.

Unlike the author, we had sequencing with the EML 400 which is still one of my favorite analog sequencers, and we had an Alpha Syntauri which was an Apple II based system with a custom expansion card that did additive synthesis and sequencing (it was pre-MIDI).

It's really crazy to think of how hard it was in the early days to just go out and buy things that we can now do with a cheap or free app on our phones. Recently with Dave Smith's passing, I was reminded of how huge of an impact his co-invention of MIDI was. My personal intro into the stream of electronic music equipment history was just as MIDI had been recently introduced and before digital synths replaced so many analog ones.

We've now come full circle in that analog modular synths have had a huge renaissance and there's a fair amount of even cheap stuff which has both MIDI and analog CV/gate. Moog, Sequential Circuits, Roland, Yamaha and Korg have all reprised their most popular respective pre-MIDI analog machines.

It was struck by how he ended up wire-wrapping various CMOS stuff together in the name of making music. While not everyone takes up a soldering iron, it's often the case that so many electronic music people get lost in building their systems starting with various levels of building blocks. Some may be content with finding a few special VST plug-ins for their DAW, while others may solder PCBs for some of their analog modules from a kit.

I founded a company to create a General MIDI synth for the Palm platform. I did this mostly because I wanted to recreate the experience of sequencing with an EML 400, and the Palm was a relatively popular platform and affordable way to have a touch screen (albeit resistive and 160 x 160 black and white) to interact in real time with the synth module. This was not exactly a huge success, but much like the author, my burning desire to interact with a certain sort of sequencer lead me to learn a lot about electronics and product development. That I don't regret.

I'd love to hear a follow-on to his musical journey, but reading through some of his blog, it seems other advocations have taken his focus.

I've read Petzold for years across a bunch of different mediums, but never realized he was such a synth / music nerd. It's always fun to see a different aspect of someone like this out of context. Cool article.

Very motivating article. I encountered LOGO when I was a kid and did not fully understand its elegancy. Many years later, I leant engineering in college and then shifted to language study and instrument playing. Finally, I landed on live coding and made this live coding language in my PhD study(https://glicol.org). I think in this era, music tech is much more democratised and we can easily access many kinds of software freely. But the beauty of hardware is irreplaceable and building some hardware is always one of my goals.