Electric and electronic instruments of 20th century pop

We’re spending the last chunk of Advanced Popular Music Transcription talking about the sonic and timbral aspects of pop production. This week we’re focusing on identifying various instrument timbres and talking about their stylistic associations. I won’t be talking (much) about the guitar, because my students already know what guitar sounds like. Instead, I’ll focus on electronic instruments that are less familiar.

Electric piano

The two most commonly used electric pianos are various incarnations of the Fender Rhodes and the Wurlitzer. They sound similar and work in the same way: when you press a key, a hammer strikes a thin metal tine like a tuning fork. This tine vibrates next to a magnetic pickup like the ones in an electric guitar. Rhodes and Wurli sound guitar-like not only because they use the same basic physics, but also because people often run them through guitar amps, and sometimes through guitar effects pedals too.

Ray Charles – “What’d I Say” (1959)

Ray Charles started playing electric piano for a practical reason: the pianos in the clubs he was playing were usually horribly out of tune, and touring with an electric piano is a lot easier than touring with an acoustic one. As I learned from the 500 Songs podcast, other musicians gave Ray a hard time about it, because electric pianos were considered to be toys, not serious instruments. But now the sound of the Wurly evokes Ray’s jazzy, sophisticated soul. You can see Ray playing electric piano in The Blues Brothers, though there he’s playing a Rhodes.

Aretha Franklin – “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1971)

While the Wurly has an edgy bite, the Rhodes sounds more rounded and bell-like. Aretha plays Rhodes on many of her recordings. This one starts with a nice long solo. It also features a great performance by Billy Preston on Hammond organ, an instrument we will get to shortly.

Ramsey Lewis – “Summer Breeze” (1973)

I learned about this breathtakingly funky performance from the PDBass breakdown. The studio version is killer too.

Starting at 1:13, Ramsey Lewis plays Rhodes through a wah-wah pedal! At 4:15, there’s an especially funky bar that Little Simz sampled for her song “Gorilla”, which I adore.

Electric organ

A Hammond organ is to a pipe organ what a Fender Rhodes is to a piano: a much smaller, cheaper and more portable electric emulation. Hammond organs don’t sound much like pipe organs, but they have their own inimitable vibe. Electric organs generate sound by spinning a metal wheel next to a magnetic pickup. Like pipe organs, electric organs aren’t velocity-sensitive, so it doesn’t matter how hard you hit the keys, the notes are either on or off. The only way to control your dynamics is with a volume pedal. But electric organs offer a lot of fine timbral control; you use the drawbars to control the volume of the individual harmonics.

Booker T and the MGs – “Green Onions” (1962)

A cool, smooth blues groove based on a riff that Booker T Jones came up with at age 17. I analyze the tune in detail here.

Procol Harum – “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (1967)

The song begins with a Bach-like churchiness, and then on the chorus, it takes on more of a gospel feel with the activation of the Leslie speaker. This is a rotating speaker cone that creates a gorgeous shimmery tremolo. The organ makes you think that this song must be profoundly, achingly meaningful, but the lyrics don’t appear to be about anything in particular. Beautiful instrumental track, though.

Santana – “Oye Como Va” (1970)

Gregg Rolie’s organ sound is much dirtier and more distorted than the one on “A Whiter Shade Of Pale”, because he’s running it through a cranked-up guitar amp. Rolie went on to co-found Journey.

Electric clavichord

Wait, what? That’s a thing? Do people want to play amplified Baroque music? Hohner apparently thought so, because they developed the clavinet. It sounds extremely guitar-like because pressing the keys literally plucks metal strings that vibrate next to magnetic pickups. Unlike guitar, though, the clav doesn’t have dynamics; every note has the same velocity, and it also has a uniformly short percussive decay. Maybe that percussiveness is what drew rock and funk musicians to it.

The Band – “Up On Cripple Creek” (1969)

Garth Hudson is playing clav through a wah-wah pedal. Be sure to check out this live performance from The Ed Sullivan Show.

Stevie Wonder – “Superstition” (1972)

Stevie is synonymous with the clav in the popular imagination for the same reason that Ray Charles is with the Wurly. Stevie plays clav on a lot of his 70s classics, but none are funkier or more iconic than this one.

Eddie Kendricks – “Keep On Truckin’” (1973)

Leonard Caston Jr’s clav is one of many layers in this extraordinarily intricate arrangement. When you hear the wah-wah, that’s on the guitar, not on the clav.

Talking Heads – “Houses in Motion” (1980)

The clav is running through a Mutron or some other envelope filter. It isn’t the bassline; that’s a simple thump on every downbeat. Instead, the clav is doing a kind of counter-bassline. Talking Heads’ musicianship is not on the level of the funk and R&B musicians above, but my students find their wonky groove to have its own charm.

Mellotron

This is the weirdest pre-synthesizer electric keyboard: when you press a key, it activates playback of an eight second tape strip of an instrument playing that note. You can switch out the banks of tape strips to switch instrument sounds. This is impractical! Mellotrons are delicate, and notoriously difficult to keep in good working order. A tape of an instrument playing back on a Mellotron sounds approximately nothing like a person playing that instrument, but it does sound wonderfully strange.

The Beatles – “Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967)

The Beatles were infatuated with the Mellotron during their psychedelic period, and it doesn’t get any more psychedelic than the flute in this song, especially at the end.

David Bowie – “Space Oddity” (1969)

Rick Wakeman plays Mellotron strings. See a recreation of his Mellotron part here.

Harmonica

This is not an electric instrument, but as used in midcentury blues and R&B, it effectively became one.

Little Walter – “Juke” (1952)

I asked my classes to identify the lead instrument on this song, and they were completely stumped. Guesses ranged from guitar to trumpet to saxophone. Little Walter got this sound by plugging the harmonica mic into a cranked-up guitar amp. Here’s a little production secret: everything sounds good through guitar amp! I went to a presentation by a German techno producer who said that he puts literally everything through guitar amp emulation plugins: drums, bass, synths, vocals, you name it. It works especially well on harmonica, though.If you have very good pitch, you might be able to tell that the harmonica’s thirds, sixths and flat sevenths are extremely flat. This is not because Little Walter is bending the notes. I mean, he does bend some notes as he goes along, but the first chorus is all straight playing. The harmonica itself is tuned to play these intervals flat! This is because Hohner was tuning to seven-limit just intonation, which blues musicians preferred.

Pedal steel guitar

Imagine one or two guitar necks with up to sixteen strings, with the strings really high off the fretboard, with a bunch of pedals that you can use to retune in real time, and that you play with a metal bar instead of fretting with your fingers… You know what, just watch this video.

Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys – “I Hear You Talkin’” (1946)

Pedal steel is the sound of classic country. NYU kids tend to know nothing at all about country. Even fans of the genre may not be aware of just how massively popular Bob Wills was in the 1940s. In the 500 Songs podcast, Andrew Hickey locates some of the roots of rock and roll in the Texas Playboys’ sound, and there’s also a huge amount of jazz mixed in there. Les Paul met Charlie Christian at a Texas Playboys gig. Anyway, the pedal steel guitar must have sounded incredibly futuristic in 1946 and it still sounds magical today.

Update: a commenter informs me that this is probably a console steel, like a pedal steel but with no pedals.

Willie Nelson – “Something To Think About” (1965)

A simple songwriting demo with Jimmy Day on pedal steel. Willie’s demos are better than most people’s albums.

Moog synths

Before Robert Moog, synthesizers were custom-built devices that filled entire rooms, and were so expensive that you could only find them in universities and other large institutions. In the 1960s, Moog’s company began producing and selling smaller and less expensive modular synths to labels, studios, and even some individual musicians.

The Beatles – “Here Comes The Sun” (1969)

The Moog series III synth appears in this song just a few seconds in, doubling the guitar riff the second time through. Listen to the wild pitch falloff on that last note before George Harrison’s vocal comes in. The Moog takes on more of a presence in the bridge, under the “Sun sun sun, here it comes” part. Each time through the phrase, George Harrison plays the melody with a different timbre, and he moves it up an octave. It sounds like he’s treating it as an organ with a lot of interesting tone varieties.

Parliament – “Flash Light” (1977)

The Moog synth used by the Beatles was smaller than an institutional synth, but it was still too big and heavy to bring on the road with you. To solve that problem, Moog introduced the Minimoog, which is exactly what its name suggests; it’s the size of a breadbox rather than a fridge. Bernie Worrell used three or four connected Minimoogs controlled from one keyboard to play the iconic “Flash Light” bassline. The synths are wildly out of tune with each other, and with everything else in the track. I don’t know whether that was intentional or not (analog synths go out of tune as they heat up), but it creates a wonderfully rich and edgy sound. Bernie also uses the Minimoog as an organ and as a kind of bird chirp too. One reason people like analog gear is that you can discover strange timbres and tunings by accident, or through undirected knob-twiddling. You can certainly detune the oscillators in a DAW plugin, but you have to do it on purpose.

ARP synths

ARP Instruments was named for the initials of its founder, Alan Robert Pearlman. His synths were the main competitors for Moogs among pop musicians in the 1970s. R2-D2’s voice was created partially with an ARP 2600.

Herbie Hancock – “Chameleon” (1973)

Herbie’s epic ARP Odyssey solo begins at 4:04. Here’s a great live version where you can see the Odyssey in action. The best part is when Herbie starts using a theremin-like remote sensor to control the pitch and timbre by waving his hands slowly up and down, looking like Afrofuturist Gandalf and clearly having the time of his life.

Underworld – “Rez” (1993)

This rave classic features a beautiful lead sound made on an ARP 2600, the big brother of the Odyssey. Here’s how to create this sound on a modern-day clone of the 2600. Futuristic though this music is, there’s also something prehistoric about it. I would bet that the basic idea of a steady drum beat with some kind of repetitive textural semi-melodic sound on top has been a feature of human musical cultures for tens of thousands of years, if not more. The open-ended trance-like groove, with slow and gradual transformations rather than clearly delineated sections, is not typical of pop music, but it is familiar to ecstatic, dance-oriented musical cultures who seek ego dissolution as a spiritual practice. It’s a particular pathology of Anglo-American culture that we think you need drugs to attain that ego dissolution.

Prophet-5

To create a sound on a Moog or ARP synth, you physically turn knobs, flip switches, and plug patch cables. If you want to replicate your sound in the future, you have to either take good notes or a lot of photos. Beginning in the 1980s, though, synths started to have programmable computer memory, so you could easily store and recall your patches. The Prophet-5 was one of the first such programmable synths. But while the memory was digital, the actual sound generation was still analog.

Talking Heads – “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)” (1983)

There are three Prophet parts on this tune: the bassline played by Jerry Harrison, the percussive stabs played by Wally Badarou, and the pitch-bent lead played by David Byrne. If they had recorded this yesterday, it would still sound incredibly fresh.

Radiohead – “Everything In Its Right Place” (2000)

This track features nothing but Prophet-5 and Thom Yorke’s digitally distressed voice. In 2000, the Prophet was a throwback sound, and the song’s retrofuturism makes it seem to exist outside of time.

Yamaha CS-80

An especially sophisticated analog synth that was everywhere in electronic dance and pop in the 80s until digital synths crowded it out at the end of the decade.

Vangelis – “Chariots of Fire Main Theme” (1981)

Vangelis made several iconic film scores with the CS-80, but this one is my favorite. Is it a little corny? Of course. But what am I, made of marble?

Michael Jackson – “Human Nature” (1983)

Steve Porcaro programmed the intro and outtro on CS-80. Maybe this sound might distantly refer to brass or something, but at this point, I’m not hearing a clear precedent in any acoustic instrument, it just sounds like a synth.

Roland TB-303

The TB stands for Transistor Bass, because the idea was that you could program basslines into it for practicing and working out ideas. The sequencer is extraordinarily user-unfriendly, but once you have your pattern punched in, then you can use the knobs across the top to adjust the timbre in real time as it plays. If you run it through a delay or echo unit and fiddle with the filter, you get the sound of acid house.

The Orb – “Little Fluffy Clouds” (1990)

Alex Paterson and Jimmy Cauty pair the 303 with a TR-909 drum machine and samples of Ennio Morricone, Rickie Lee Jones, Harry Nilsson and Steve Reich. The 303’s wobbly pitch and lo-fi analog quality are central to its charm.

Synclavier

New England Digital’s flagship product was a digital synth that also included primitive sampling functionality. You stored the samples on giant floppy disks. Ah, the 80s.

Michael Jackson – “Beat It” (1983)

The synth bell intro is mysterious: why is it in a different key from the rest of the song? It turns out to be a recreation of a demo LP called “The Incredible Sounds of Synclavier II” – listen at 6:40.

Genesis – “Invisible Touch” (1986)

I include this song because in the video you can see Tony Banks playing Synclavier, or at least pretending to.

Korg M1

The M1 is one of many digital synths in widespread use starting in the late 1980s. It’s less icy-sounding than the ubiquitous Yamaha DX7.

Robin S – Show Me Love (1993)

The original version from 1990 is okay, but the version we all know and love is the 1993 remix by StoneBridge. It’s interesting that Robin S sang her vocal over a very different instrumental than the one we all know, in F major rather than D minor! This kind of dissociation between the top-line vocal and the backing track is common in current pop, but back in the early 90s it was unusual. Anyway, most house producers use the M1’s piano or bass presets, but this track introduced the hollow-sounding organ preset into dance music vocabulary.

Why should you care?

If you have a computer with a DAW, you can easily produce any of these sounds. How do you begin to choose? Well, if the styles of these songs appeal to you, maybe recreating or referencing the synth sounds is a place to start. When all of these recordings were made, the musicians were limited to whatever gear happened to be on hand, or whatever they were willing to spend a lot of money and time to acquire. However, if you are using a DAW, you have access to emulated or sampled versions of just about any instrument that has ever existed. Electric keyboard instruments are especially well-suited to being modeled via synthesizers. Your DAW probably has excellent Rhodes, Wurly, Hammond organ and clav sounds, and if you’re lucky, it has a good Mellotron too. Harmonica and pedal steel are harder to emulate, but you can certainly sample them in. Acoustic instruments sound terrible in synthetic form, so if you are making music in a DAW, you will have a much better time centering electric and electronic sounds.