Hey, Joy.
What are you up to?
Oh, you know, just single-handedly reinventing music.
Whoa.
Just another Wednesday, I guess.
And may I ask just how you're reinventing music?
Well, you know, between being a beloved podcast host actor, wrestling club president and gum connoisseur, I'm also An aspiring DJ.
Yes, because DJ Dolo is just too good of a name to pass up.
Was that you making all those bleeps and bloops just now?
You better bleep bloop believe it.
I just found the most bananas, bonkers, never-before-seen instrument in my closet.
It was right in between my collection of party hats and my signed Boyz II Men poster.
I'm calling it the Dolophone Bleep Bloop 5000.
That looks like a keyboard with a bunch of knobs.
Well, what it is is the Dolophone Bleep Bloop 5000.
Because it bleep bloops to the five thousands.
Want to hear what I've been working on?
Yeah.
Music to your ears, right?
It's definitely noise to my ears.
Joy, I don't think that's any old keyboard.
You're right.
It's not a keyboard.
It's the Dolophone Bleak Blue 5000.
Actually, I think it's called a synthesizer.
Oh, you're so right.
It is a synthesizer.
Hey, I didn't know I could play the synthesizer.
I'm not so sure you can.
Watch out, world.
DJ Dolo in the house.
You're listening to Forever Ago from APM Studios, the show where we explore the before.
And today, I'm here with my co-host, Lilica from Santa Barbara, California.
What's up, Lilica?
Hi, Joy!
Today, we're talking about synthesizers.
One of the most revolutionary instruments in history.
Synths are huge today, but they weren't always this popular.
It took a lot of experimentation to bring synthesizers into the mainstream.
Which we'll learn about soon enough.
But first, let's listen to some synths.
You may not realize it, but synthesizers are everywhere in music today.
From Break My Soul by Beyonce.
To Bejeweled by Taylor Swift.
Or Blinding Lights by The Weeknd.
Synthesizers sometimes look like a plastic piano keyboard with a bunch of knobs and dials.
Yeah, but they also look like metal boxes with lots of switches, knobs, and buttons.
And they make such awesome sounds.
Just listen to my Dolophone Bleep Bloop 5000.
I'm still getting the hang of it.
Lilica, do you play any instruments?
Yes, I play ukulele and piano.
How long have you been playing ukulele and piano?
I've been taking piano lessons on and off since I was probably six or seven.
Oh, wow.
I've done online classes.
I've done in-person classes.
Mostly, I'm self-taught.
I'm pretty good at ear-picking a song for the notes and then just kind of figuring it out.
And ukulele, I've been playing probably since, I think...
I want to say May or April.
Lilica, I want you to go on a journey with me.
Let's just imagine.
Let's just imagine it's 10, 20 years in the future and you are a famous musician.
Okay, what would your stage name be?
Oh, that's a good one.
I feel...
Like, I might just go with my name.
You have a pretty great name.
I'm not going to lie.
Lilica?
Yeah.
I feel like I don't really want a stage name.
Like, I see the appeal of, for instance, a pen name.
But, like, a stage name just feels a little bit...
I don't know.
I think I would feel kind of awkward about it.
You have to pick one and then you can pick one like that's really cool.
But then I would always panic like, is someone judging my stage name?
Did I pick one that isn't cool enough?
Did I pick one that's like too full of myself?
And I would just have so much self-doubt about it.
You know, I feel the same way about Dolophone Bleep Bloop 5000.
Yeah.
I just named a synthesizer after myself.
Yeah.
But anyway, speaking of synthesizers, you might be wondering how in the bleep bloop do synthesizers work?
Synthesizers, including the Dolophone Bleep, Bloop 5000, are electronic musical instruments, which means they use electricity to make sound.
Now, this is different from acoustic instruments, which could be anything that doesn't need batteries or to be plugged in.
Like piano, guitar, violin, trumpet, or a drum set.
Or even the human voice, la-di-da, singing, yeah.
Acoustic instruments make music by making physical vibrations.
When you strum a guitar, the strings vibrate.
When you hit a drum, the drum itself vibrates.
When you sing like how I'm singing now, your vocal cords vibrate.
Synthesizers are different from acoustic instruments.
Instead of the sound starting with movement, like vibrations from strings or your vocal cords, it starts with electricity.
And you can take that electric signal and shape it using all these knobs.
Here, I can show you.
Joy, permission to play the Dolophone Bleep Bloop 5000?
Abso-Bleep Bloop Bleep Bleep.
Thanks!
Okay, this is what the pure electric signal sounds like.
But if I twist this knob, I can completely transform the sound.
It's blonkers that one instrument can make so many different sounds.
If you want to hear more about how synthesizers work, our pals at Brains On made an episode all about it.
So check it out.
Brains On.
Synthesizers are so cool.
But at first, people didn't really realize their true potential.
It's true.
Synthesizers got their start when electricity became more widespread and people started experimenting with making electronic instruments throughout the decades.
But early synthesizers were really hard to play and really expensive.
And they were huge.
Right.
They took up whole rooms.
You couldn't exactly take your synth to band practice.
Unlike the Dolophone Bleep Bloop 5000.
So people kept trying to improve the synthesizer into the 1960s.
And that's when things really started taking off.
Technology was bleep-blop booming.
Most people had TVs in their homes, and the U.S. was set on figuring out how to travel to the moon.
And rock music was really starting to take off.
Turn it up.
I dig it, man.
Groovy, baby.
A lot of different engineers wanted to make synthesizers that were easier for musicians to play.
One of those people was Bob Moog.
He set out to build an instrument that would be easy to use, not too expensive, and not too big.
After a couple of years, Bob presented his first synth to a bunch of musicians and a lot of them were interested.
Bob's invention was exciting because it could make so many different sounds like a flute or trumpets.
With the Moog synthesizer, you can make the sounds of different instruments without ever needing the real instruments.
Exactly.
Well, bleep my blorp, that's catchy.
Almost like music from outer space.
Moog's synthesizer used what looked like a piano keyboard to control the sounds.
So musicians who were already familiar with the piano could quickly transfer those skills to the synthesizer.
Exactly.
It was still pretty complicated to get a sound you liked.
You had to experiment by connecting lots of cables and fiddling with a ton of knobs.
But once you found a sound you liked, you could play it on the synthesizer almost like a piano.
Okay, so goal number one achieved.
It was somewhat easier to play and Moog's synths were also smaller, like they didn't take up an entire room.
Yeah, it's all relative.
They were smaller, but still heavy.
Each one was about the size of a refrigerator turned on its side.
So it wasn't something you could throw in your backpack, but definitely smaller than other synthesizers at that time.
They were also more affordable.
Depending on which custom parts you bought, they were anywhere between $2,000 to $10,000.
Today, that'd be around the cost of a car, or even a couple cars.
That is not very affordable, Lilica.
I know.
Like, not even close.
But another synthesizer around the time called the RCA Mark II cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build.
Okay, so I guess the Moog was cheaper in comparison.
Right.
The average person probably wasn't going to buy a synthesizer, but a college music department or even a wealthy musician might have bought a Moog.
And people were making really experimental music with the Moog.
Here's a song called Blues Mix by Joel Chodaby from 1966.
That does sound like something from outer space.
That's so weird.
That sounds bizarreby fascinating.
Very.
I completely agree.
And a lot of people thought synthesizers sounded bad or weird, which is wild because they had so much potential.
But back then, people didn't really see that.
Yeah.
Some people thought synths sounded more like noise than music.
That meant synthesizers were not in the mainstream.
That is until one album came along and changed everything by putting a fresh new spin on something hundreds of years old.
Just like how I'm reinventing music with my Dolophone Bleep Bloop 5000.
Hey, you're kind of getting the hang of that.
Aw, yeah.
All right, hold the story.
Let's celebrate with a little game I like to call...
It's your favorite game where we try to guess the order things came in history.
Today we've got three musical instruments, the saxophone, the harp, and the banjo.
Liliko, which do you think came first, which came second, and which came most recently in history?
Ooh, this is a good one!
Oh, they all feel so plausible.
Yeah, they do.
Okay, so let's start with which one you think might be the newest.
How about that?
Maybe saxophone?
Like they have a lot of moving parts, so I could see where it might have been difficult to produce for a while.
Yeah, yeah, they've got all those little buttons and flippers and things like that, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know, and I mean, I feel like the harp, I feel like, is really old.
It just has, I feel like, I mean, if you think about it, like, back in ancient Greece, they had, like, lyres, so.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
I thought that too.
And a lyre is a stringed instrument.
It actually kind of looks like a harp, but banjos also have strings.
Do you think the lyre is the grandfather of the banjo maybe?
Sorry, I'm just trying to picture like the god Apollo just casually playing his banjo.
That would make for a great mythology story.
It's like, man, he just came down the mountain.
Yeah, absolutely.
Just playing his banjo.
I would enjoy that deeply.
That's a story I'd read.
Yeah.
I feel like the harp has to be first just because of...
Just how historic it is.
Yeah.
So I'm going to go with the harp first and then I feel like the banjo and then the saxophone.
I don't know.
I'm doubting myself big time here.
I'm going to go with you.
I'm going to tell you to trust your instinct because that's what I think, too.
I think, like, the lyre thing is really a key component in this.
So we'll say the harp is first, the banjo is second, and then third is the saxophone.
Yeah.
They said confidently.
We'll hear the answers after the credits.
You're listening to Forever Ago.
I'm Joy.
And I'm Lilica.
We love talking about the surprising history behind some of our favorite inventions on the show.
We also love hearing about inventions you couldn't imagine living without.
Here's today's... Invention Mention.
My name is Oscar, and my Invention Mention is a backpack because, like...
It would be so hard if we didn't have a backpack.
Could we just be carrying all this stuff around?
First of all, it would be heavy.
And also, we'd just be dropping it every five minutes.
And we could very easily lose it without a backpack.
Thanks, Oscar, for setting your invention mention.
Listeners.
Send us a recording of yourself sharing your favorite invention and what's great about it at foreveragoorg slash contact.
Now, cue the synths.
Before the break, we learned that synthesizers are electronic musical instruments that changed the world.
They work by transforming electricity into sound.
The first synthesizers were giant and expensive.
But in the 1960s, inventor Bob Moog helped make the synthesizer smaller and slightly more affordable, using a keyboard as his model.
And at this point, the synthesizer was still a super experimental instrument.
Kind of like my Dolophone Bleep Bloop 5000.
Exactly.
And some people thought synthesizers made no sense, and even sounded bad.
Bad?
No, this sounds rad.
Ahem.
Like I was saying, most people didn't really understand synthesizers and they weren't very common either.
They were popular with a few experimental musicians and some academics thought they were really cool.
In fact, most early synthesizers were found at universities.
But then a super popular record came out that helped synth sound more like mainstream music.
It was produced by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind.
Instead of writing a bunch of new songs, they decided to hook people on something they already knew.
Something deep in the crevices of their brain folds?
Like Old MacDonald?
With a bleep-blorp here and a bleep-blorp there.
Here a bleep, there a bloop, everywhere a bleep-bloop.
Yes, something all up in their brain folds.
And that something was music from Johann Sebastian Bach.
Oh, I've heard that name before.
Isn't he a German classical composer from, like...
Forever ago?
That's also the name of this show?
Do you get it?
Do you get it?
No, but he was like a German classical composer from like the 1700s.
Yeah, but you still probably know some of his songs, like these.
¶¶
Bach has bangers!
It's true.
So Wendy and Rachel decided to take some of these songs by Bach and play them on the synthesizer.
But recording the album wasn't easy.
It took over 1,000 hours to finish the album, which spanned over five months.
Five months?
That's like a whole winter and spring just playing the synthesizer.
And it was really tricky work.
For one thing, at this point, synthesizers could only play one note at a time.
This made Wendy and Rachel's job much harder, because a lot of times when musicians write music, including Bach, they use chords.
That's when you play multiple notes at the same time, like this.
But at the time, the synthesizer could only play one note at a time.
So you had to play note by note, like this.
So when Wendy and Rachel wanted to create a chord sound, they had to record each note separately and then stack them on top of each other, layer by layer.
It makes the Dolophone Bleep Bloop 5000 sound like a breeze.
And that's not even the end of it.
The synthesizer was constantly going out of tune.
And sometimes Wendy had to literally bang it with a hammer to get it just right.
Unlike me, I have perfect pitch.
So after months of recreating these Bach songs, Wendy and Rachel released their album in 1968.
It was called Switched on Bach, and it sounded like this.
That sounds awesome.
Yeah, it does.
Others thought so, too.
And the album was a huge hit.
People could hear classical music that was familiar but in a new, exciting form.
It's extraordinary.
Bach is back, baby, and better than ever.
Far out.
It was genius.
Wendy and Rachel took the same instrument that was once considered bizarre and mostly only used in experimental academic settings and presented it to the public in a way they could understand.
Right.
It was so popular at the time, the radio was playing it alongside pop and rock songs.
In 1970, it won three Grammys, including Best Classical Album.
And it would go on to sell over one million copies making, Switched on Bach one of the most successful classical albums of all time.
And thanks to Wendy and Rachel's breakthrough album, the synthesizer started showing up in music everywhere.
From Maxwell's Silver Hammer by the Beatles...
Or in the bass line in Stevie Wonder's song, Superstition.
To Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush.
Synthesizers weren't just for the radio.
Right.
Synths started to be more widely used for sound effects in commercials, video games, and movies.
Wendy and Rachel even went on to use the synthesizer to score films.
Like A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Tron.
And by the 1980s, synthesizers were getting smaller and more affordable.
As computer technology advanced, so did synths.
They went digital, which means, instead of using an electric signal to make sound, the synthesizers used computer code, which made them more accessible to everyone.
That's awesome!
Switched on Bach was a game changer.
It really helped bring synthesizers into the mainstream.
Today, synthesizers are everywhere in music and have influenced so many genres.
To learn more, we talked to Rihanna Cruz.
Howdy, I'm Rihanna Cruz and I'm the producer of the podcast Switched on Pop.
We are a show about the making and meaning of popular music.
Switched on Bach is really important because it motivated thousands of people to get their own synthesizers.
It topped the Billboard Classical Albums chart for four years and really introduced people to the possibilities that sound could do and the possibilities that electronic instruments could do at that point.
It just revolutionized things in a lot of ways.
And I think like it's really, really important even now, right?
Like 60 years past when it was made.
They're in rock music since the 60s.
They're all over 80s music.
If you listen to an 80s music and you're like this sounds kind of cheesy, there's a synthesizer in there that makes it sound like that.
And that's sort of its charm, right?
You hear it in funk music.
Funk music has synthesizers as the base, as the backbone.
Sampling, which is a cornerstone of hip hop and electronic music, but also hip hop that was introduced because of a synthesizer.
Hip hop without the synthesizer would not be a genre, you know, because you wouldn't have sampling.
You wouldn't have the drum machines.
There just would be nothing.
Really there's a lot of genres that I think would never happen or never get realized.
If you know, the synthesizer was was not present.
I feel like if we didn't have the synthesizer today, music would all be analog, and not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
Right.
People make really great analog music.
They always have and they continue to.
But I think that potential of imagination wouldn't necessarily be there in the way that it is now.
And that's what I love about music is that it's very imaginative, and I get to hear things that I never thought I could ever hear before.
And I feel like a lot of that wouldn't be present if there weren't synthesizers.
Wow, music today would look so different without synthesizers.
There would definitely be no Dolophone bleep bloop 5000s.
Hit it, Joy.
This episode was written by Rachel Breeze and Ruby Guthrie.
We had production help from Nico Gonzalez-Whistler, Sandin Totten, Sheila Farzan, Arun Uldislasi, Anna Goldfield, Rosie Dupont, Mark Sanchez and Anna Wagle.
Sound design by Rachel Breeze.
Theme music by Mark Sanchez.
Beth Perlman is our executive producer.
We had engineering help from Anna Haverman, Derek Ramirez, and Elliot Lanham.
The executives in charge of APM Studios are Chandra Kavadi, Joanne Griffith, and Alex Schaffert.
Additional editing help from Cassius Adair at Sylveon Consulting.
Special thanks to Peter Morrow and Charlie Harding.
If you want to access app three episodes and special bonus content, subscribe to our Smarty Pass.
Check it out at smartypass.org.
Okay, Lilica, ready to hear the answers for First Things First?
Yeah, I'm nervous.
I know, me too.
I'm so excited.
Okay, so just like for a reminder first we had harp and then second, we had banjo and then the most recent, we had saxophone.
Yeah.
This is fence.
All right, here we go.
Oh, wow.
Shoot.
You were right.
Oh!
Yes!
Psych!
You were absolutely right.
So first up was the harp.
The harp dates back to as early as 3000 BCE in ancient Egypt.
There are records of the harp appearing in various cultures across the globe, including Asia, Africa and Europe.
The harp often represents hope or heaven and is even a national symbol for Ireland.
Whoa, I didn't know any of that.
Isn't that something?
Yeah.
I didn't know any of that either.
But also, I feel like we were on the right track, right?
It definitely is the oldest of them.
Yeah, Orpheus certainly didn't make his way down to the underworld with a banjo.
But speaking of banjo, that was next up.
That was the 17th century and early 1600s.
The banjo was invented by enslaved Africans and their descendants in colonial North America and the Caribbean, dating back to the early 17th century.
And so the banjo was inspired by various West African instruments with a round, gourd body, long neck and plucky strings.
It became a staple sound in American bluegrass, country, and folk music.
I think that's what we were referencing earlier, right?
Yeah, that's so cool.
Yeah.
And then last but not least is the saxophone.
The saxophone was invented by Belgian Adolf Sax.
Oh, Adolf Sax.
I wonder where they got the name from.
In the early 1840s.
He originally intended for the instrument to be used in orchestras and military bands.
And at first, most orchestras thought the saxophone was too experimental.
But the instrument really caught on with French military bands, some of which ended up stationed in New Orleans.
And that's how the saxophone eventually made its place in jazz music.
You know, New Orleans is like the home of jazz.
Yeah.
We have the saxophone, the dolophone.
Yeah.
Well, congratulations on getting all the first thing first answers.
And stick around, because we'll be back next week with an episode all about the history of chewing gum.
Thanks for listening.
