Retrozone
Reviews : Keyboard
The world's first commercially available
string synthesizer, the Eminent 310, came from an unlikely source, a
Dutch home organ manufacturer. It was further advanced through an even
more unlikely partnership, with the legendary American synth makers
ARP...
 |
In our February Retrozone article, we featured the
story of Ken Freeman, the pioneering keyboard designer who was
instrumental in creating and bringing to market early polyphonic string
synthesizers, for the many players keen to find a way of affordably
producing orchestral-style timbres. However, Freeman wasn't the only one
chasing this goal back in the 1970s, and this month we're going to take
a look back at another participant in the race.
In 1972, the same year that Freeman demonstrated
Prototype #3 of what would eventually become his String Symphonizer, at
the Frankfurt Musikmesse, the world's first actual string synthesizer
appeared. Utilising quite a different approach to generate its ensemble
effect, it was the grandfather of almost all string synths. Yet, despite
its importance, it went almost completely unnoticed. This is because it
wasn't a 'pro' keyboard at all. Manufactured by the Dutch company
Eminent, it was a home organ: the Eminent 310 Unique.
The Eminent 310s
Eminent had been founded in 1923 as a small,
family-owned shop that sold organs and harmoniums, but in the 1950s and
1960s it experienced tremendous growth, eventually employing over 400
staff. In 1969, the owners decided to start building their own organs
under the Eminent and Solina brands, and the 310 was one of these.
As home organs go, the 310 Unique was a very
attractive example of the species, with a 42-note upper manual (C-F) and
a 44-note lower manual (F-C). The organ tabs provided conventional
organ voicing, with traditional stops ranging from 16' to 4' on the
upper manual. Likewise, the lower manual (8' and 4') and pedal stops
(16' and 8') stops were traditional, while a selection of accented
'Sustain' stops could be directed to both the upper and lower manuals to
generate a more percussive type of sound.
The conventional organ-like Timbre, Vibrato and Reverberation sliders of the Eminent 310 Unique.
|
To the right of the lower manual there were four
sliders: three of these controlled Timbre (a mild low-pass EQ); a
fixed-rate Vibrato; and Reverberation, which was supplied by an internal
spring reverb tank. The fourth balanced the volumes of the upper and
lower manuals. However, that was where the conventional organ technology
ended. The other three control panels made the 310 very special indeed.
To the right of the upper manual, there was a panel
called Strings Ensemble, featuring eight buttons and a slider. Defeating
all the organ tabs and pressing the 8' button on the upper manual
produced a deep, lush string ensemble sound. The 4' button produced a
thinner version an octave above. Of course, you could use these in
unison, but the envelope of the sound was still rather organ-like so
there was also a button marked 'SUST'. This duplicated the 8' Ensemble
tone but with a polyphonic (ie. every note independent of all the
others) extended release. Select all three together, start playing,
and... wow!
It's hard to imagine the impact that this sound must
have made in 1972, but it was far from the end of the story. Using the
upper 8' and/or 4' Ensemble settings defeated the conventional organ
tabs for the upper manual, but you could use the sustained strings with
the traditional organ stops as you pleased. But what about the fourth
button for the upper manual? This passed the so-called 'principal' organ
stops through the Ensemble circuit, meaning that you could combine your
choice of 16', 8' and 4' organ stops, turn them into a mighty ensemble
and still add the SUST string Ensemble sound if you wished.
The 8', 4' and SUST buttons on the lower manual
offered the same facilities, but instead of passing the standard organ
stops through the Ensemble, the fourth button passed the pedal sounds
through it. The range of possibilities suggested by this architecture
were mind-boggling; the 310 was not only the first but perhaps the most
powerful string synthesizer ever to be released. But wait (he said in
his best advertising voice), there's more...
The Strings Ensemble panel, which gave access to the ground-breaking "deep, lush" Eminent String Ensemble sound.
|
To the left of the lower manual, there was a control
panel called Orbitone. The two switches marked On/Off and
Chorus/Tremolo tell you what this was for, but the functions of the four
buttons were less obvious. To cut a long description short, the
Orbitone module was a gentle two-speed chorus that allowed you to select
which of four sections — the upper principals and solos, the lower
principals, the tibias and the sustains — were treated, and which were
not. So, for example, you could mix the strings, 'Ensembled' principals
and 'straight' tibias on the upper manual, with strings and chorused
principals on the lower, while playing the polyphonic bass pedals
without modulation... or any other combination. In addition, the EQ
didn't affect the strings, so you could make the organ component of the
sound more or less strident without changing the Ensemble sounds, then
add delayed vibrato, make the principals percussive, add sustain to the
pedals, and more. The sounds generated by the 310 were stunning.
The 310 Unique wasn't the only Eminent model to
offer these facilities. The traditionally cased (and somewhat uglier)
Eminent 310 Theatre included everything found on the 310 Unique, but
added a primitive rhythm unit. This offered eight preset rhythms, but
allowed you to combine any number simultaneously. A huge variety of
combination rhythms was available, but if you can find a way to make
Waltz/Samba/Slow Rock/Cha-Cha a viable basis for a track, you're a
better man than I.
Finally, the 310 offered a signal input although, to
correct what you may have read elsewhere, this bypassed the Ensemble
and Orbitone generators. It also offered a three-channel output socket,
so you could create a wonderful, warm stereo field of chorus and
Ensemble, not just using its multiple internal speakers, but on
recordings too.
The Technology
Unlike the Freeman String Symphonizer, the 310 had a
single master oscillator. The output from this was divided down into
the frequencies needed for the top octave, and then divided repeatedly
to generate the various footages. The secret to its ensemble sound
therefore lay in the adoption of the new bucket-brigade devices (BBDs)
that had recently appeared, rather than using multiple banks of
oscillators and applying differing speeds and depths of pitch modulation
to these.
The Orbitone panel allowed selected sounds to be treated with a gentle but effective Chorus or Tremolo effect.
|
The 310 took the input from its single audio source,
and passed it through no fewer than six modulated delay lines. Three of
these comprised the string Ensemble circuitry and three comprised the
Orbitone section. In both cases, the outputs from the three delay lines
were connected individually to the three output channels but, apart from
modulation depth and speed, the main difference between the two effects
was that the Ensemble circuits were cross-connected, to create a wider
and more swirly effect. Interestingly, one of the technological
deficiencies of these BBDs had a beneficial side effect. The frequency
range of the early devices was no more than about 6kHz, so the top end
of any sound passed through them was attenuated. As a result, the 310
lacked the high-frequency edginess of the Freeman, so it sounded warmer
in comparison. Many players liked this.
As you might imagine, few people in 1972 recognised
the 310 as the pioneering instrument that it was. And, let's be honest, a
home organ the size and weight of a Mellotron Model 300 was never going
to appear in the keyboard rigs of the rich and famous. Nevertheless, a
trawl through the equipment lists of the mid-'70s reveals that a handful
of artists investigated its potential. The most famous use of a 310 was
by Jean-Michel Jarre on his albums Oxygene and Equinox. Just select the SUST strings and an 8' organ tab with chorus on, and you can't help but play Equinox Part 1. It's iconic, and no string synth has ever sounded better.
The Eminent Solina
If Eminent had stopped there, the 310s would have
been little more than footnotes in the history of rock & roll
keyboards and we would have been robbed of one of the most revered of
all vintage keyboards but, fortunately, financial pressures persuaded
them to develop a new-fangled portable keyboard thingy suitable for a
rock band. Using a modified Ensemble system in which the sound generator
was passed through three delay lines, each modulated out of phase with
respect to the others by a pair of LFOs, the Solina String Ensemble
appeared in 1974.
The 310 Eminent 'Theatre' variant certainly looked the part...
|
Based around a 49-note keyboard, the Solina weighed
in at a hefty 49lbs, yet produced just six sounds: Viola, Violin,
Trumpet, Horn, Contra-Bass and Cello. Of these, the Contra-Bass and
Cello were monophonic voices that encompassed the bottom 20 notes,
whereas the others could be played across the keyboard and used in any
combination, thus offering 15 timbres in total. The Solina's only other
controls were the global Crescendo and Sustain Length sliders that
controlled the attack and release rates of the single envelope
generator. Later dubbed 'paraphonic', this architecture had significant
shortcomings, because it was unable to articulate notes correctly if
others were already — or still — held. Nevertheless, a single envelope
was better than none.
Inevitably, the voices sounded nothing like their
names suggested. Without modulation, the 8' Viola and 4' Violin each
produced a nasal pulse wave more reminiscent of the thinner 'reed' stops
of a pipe organ than anything else. The 8' Cello and 16' Contra-bass
offered similar timbres but had slower envelopes. The Trumpet sound was
essentially the same waveform with a high-frequency component added,
whereas the Horn was more muted, with a lower frequency high-frequency
component (if you see what I mean).
The one thing that all of these waveforms shared was
a strong harmonic spectrum, although this was somewhat truncated for
the Horn sound. This meant that, like the Freeman String Symphonizer,
the individual sounds were brighter and more aggressive than those of an
organ. What's more, even with Ensemble off, there was a certain amount
of 'beating' between the notes in a chord, which made the sound more
appealing than it might otherwise have been; pipe organ-ish, while
remaining rather nasal.
Of course, it was the Ensemble effect that made the
instrument what it was. Described by Eminent as "three phase shifters"
the triple delay lines provided (according to the company's marketing)
"luscious, spacious, orchestral effects", and the Solina excelled at
producing high-pitched, ethereal strings — especially when helped along
by a bit of external reverb and echo.
Whatever Happened To Eminent?
Eminent spent the 1970s supplying string synths to
ARP, incorporating monosynths supplied by ARP into its own string synths
and organs, and, of course, selling organs. Unfortunately, the company
was to become one of the casualties of the economic recession of the
early 1980s. Demand for traditional home organs had collapsed, and
potential customers were far more interested in a new breed of low-cost,
portable keyboards manufactured by Casio, Yamaha, Technics and others.
This had a huge impact on sales so, in 1982, all the existing staff were
made redundant, and the company was relaunched with a smaller
workforce, building a new product range and performing assembly work for
other manufacturers. But even this wasn't enough and, in May 1984,
Eminent shut down for a second time.
Two months later, a new company —
Verkoopmaatschappij Eminent Orgels BV — was established to sell the
existing stock and provide servicing and spares for existing customers.
With just 20 staff, this proved to be surprisingly successful, so the
owners decided to continue building organs on a small scale. Some time
later, the company was renamed Eminent BV, and it still exists today,
manufacturing organs with the Eminent, Johannes and Aalborn brand names.
The ARP String Ensemble
|
While Eminent were distilling the Solina out of the
310s, a much smaller company in Massachusetts, USA, were also
experimenting with ensemble synthesis. The prototype of an 'ARP String
Synthesizer' was spotted a handful of times and was well received, but
it never made it into production. So the scene was set for one of the
strangest marriages in the whole of synthesizer history.
When its in-house project went down the pan, ARP
turned to Eminent and, while taking the Solina and rebadging it as the
'ARP Model 2100 String Ensemble SE-IV' hardly seemed to be a brilliant
ploy, it worked. Well, maybe 'rebadged' is too strong a word.
'Re-stickered' would be more accurate, since ARP simply put stickers
over the Solina name, except on the Perspex music stand, which still
proclaimed the origins of the instrument.
Eminent found their way to the USA via legendary synth makers ARP, who rebadged the Eminent Solina as the ARP String Ensemble.
|
ARP's advertising made much of the fact that the
crescendo and sustain functions "allow you to ease in softly and swell,
then die away gradually after releasing the keys. Try this on a
keyboard/tapes instrument. It won't happen". They also pointed out that
"The String Ensemble is a synthesizer. You can hold a chord till you
drop from exhaustion. That certainly beats the eight-second limit found
on other systems". Clearly, they had the Mellotron in their sights.
Nowadays, there's a huge amount of apocrypha and
misinformation floating around about the Solina, largely concerning the
nature of the relationship between Eminent and ARP. The confusion is
exacerbated by rumours suggesting that Philip Dodds of ARP (the man who
communicated with aliens by playing the ARP 2500 in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind)
claimed that ARP invented the Ensemble effect, and that ARP selected
Eminent to manufacture the instrument because the Dutch company had
expertise in top-octave divide-down technology. I very much doubt that
Dodds would have done so, because Tijmen van der Kooij, an employee of
Eminent BV, patented the Ensemble effect in Dutch. Nevertheless, it's
true that ARP later developed and patented re-engineered Ensemble
circuits. Another area of confusion lay in the fact that some Solinas
(and, for that matter, some ARP String Ensembles) lacked the Ensemble
button. This led to a rumour that some versions lacked the Ensemble
effect, whereas all they lacked was a button to switch it on and off.
Yet another significant difference lay in the number
of sockets on the rear panel. Early Solinas had just three: low output,
high output and an input for an expression (volume) pedal. Later ones
added the so-called System Interface jacks (trigger and gate outputs)
which, when used together with the Ensemble on/off button, provided the
final trick stuffed up the instrument's sleeve. When passed through an
ARP Axxe, Odyssey Mk2 or ARP 2600, the polyphonic sound produced by the
String Ensemble replaced the monosynth's internal oscillators and made
full use of the filter, filter envelope and amplitude envelope of the
subsidiary monosynth. This paved the way for a much more flexible range
of sounds. Of course, the monosynths could only respond to single
triggers and provided just a single filter for all the notes played on
the Ensemble, but this 'paraphonic' technique was also used (more or
less successfully) on later single-filter synthesisers such as the
Polymoog, the Korg Poly 800 and the Korg Delta. ARP called the
Solina/Axxe combination their 'Polyphonic System' and it proved quite
capable of producing brass ensembles, pipe and electric organs, and a
few piano-like, clavi and other percussive sounds.
This ARP String Ensemble boasts the 'System
Interface' gate and trigger outputs that allowed the string ensemble
sounds to be passed to an ARP Axxe, Odyssey Mark 2 or 2600, to make use
of the connected synth's filter, filter envelope and amplitude envelope.
|
The final revision of the ARP String Ensemble can be
recognised by the LEDs that tell you which timbres are active, and
seven sockets on the back panel, with independent left and right
channels to enhance the spatial effect of the Ensemble sound.
There were many revisions over the life of the
Solina and the ARP String Ensemble, some with significant modifications
to the octave-dividing circuitry and the ensemble unit, and some that
used different BBD chips. But whichever revision you consider to be
'the' Solina, it could have been a commercial flop. Let's face it: it
had no means to mix sounds in any proportions other than zero or 100
percent, and its envelope could choke, re-trigger or even re-introduce
previously released notes. So why is it today one of the most revered of
all vintage keyboards, and how does it command prices many times those
of later, ostensibly better string synths? As always, the answer lies in
the sound; people thought that it sounded great, and players and bands
as diverse as Jon Lord, Gary Wright, Elton John, The Carpenters, Stevie
Wonder, Herbie Hancock and Pink Floyd soon adopted it. For a while, it
sold in bucketloads.
The Solina String Synthesizer
In 1975, ARP released a strange little monosynth
called the Model 2900 Explorer I. Not quite a programmable synth, it
wasn't quite a preset synth either, and was built cheaply. So, despite a
couple of nice touches, it would have been doomed to obscurity were it
not for the fact that it was with the Explorer I that ARP repaid Eminent
for allowing them to rebadge the Solina, supplying the Dutch company
with synthesizer circuit boards for inclusion in Eminent's own
instruments.
This meant that some Eminent organs ended up
incorporating Explorers, which must have been a strange hybrid of
concepts. More importantly, the Explorer I was married with the Solina
String Ensemble to create one of the rarest of all keyboard instruments,
the Solina String Synthesizer. This might have been no better than
having a String Ensemble and an Explorer sitting side by side, but
Eminent re-engineered the Explorer circuitry so that the Ensemble's
sound could pass through the synth's filter and VCA. This was what ARP's
Polyphonic System offered, but combined in a single instrument. Mind
you, it was a heavy beast, so it's quite possible that players would
have preferred to carry two separate keyboards. Whatever the reason, the
String Synthesizer was not a commercial success and only 100 were
manufactured. Today, this makes them rather desirable as collectors'
items, but in 1975 the String Synthesizer appeared — and then
disappeared — without creating even a ripple on the collective
consciousness of the keyboard-buying public.
Epilogue
Ken Freeman had blazed a trail with his String
Synthesizer prototypes, but the Eminent 310 Unique proved to be the
progenitor of almost all subsequent string machines. The Solina, revered
as it is, was a mere shadow of the 310, desirable only because one
person could carry it! What's more, and contradicting a common
misconception, it wasn't even the first of the portable string machines;
the Solina had lagged behind the first of the 'modern' string synths by
many months. Indeed, by the time ARP rebadged the Solina in the United
States, it was just one of a host of excellent string synths available
from manufacturers such as... Ah, but that's a story for another time.
No comments:
Post a Comment