Moog - The Electric Eclectics Of Dick Hyman

The Minotaur

Moog
The Electric Eclectics Of Dick Hyman

Original Compositions and Improvisations by Dick Hyman
Command ABC Records 938-S
1969

From the inside cover: The Moog synthesizer is a musical instrument that is still so new that not even those who have developed it know what its full musical potential may be.

Synthesizers have been used in recording studios before this, of course. They have often added freaked-out electronic sound to whatever a musical group produces with its regular instruments. They have provided decoration, color and feeling.

But now Dick Hyman has harnessed these provocative electronic synthesizer sounds. He uses the Moog synthesizer as a musical instrument – a total musical instrument – playing it three ways; unaccompanied, with accompaniment from live musicians, and even with accompaniment from a robot instrument.

"My objective is to humanize electronic music," said Dick, "as well as to humorize it and to play with it as a full performance instead of a collection of unearthly sounds."

What is a Moog synthesizer?

To the non-technical eye it consists of two short organ-like keyboards, and three cabinets with panels which contain knobs and jacks similar to a telephone switchboard so that various elements in the synthesizer can be linked or "patched."

When he sat down to play the synthesizer, Dick Hyman says he felt as though he were inside an airplane  cockpit. His link with reality was the fact that he has played all sorts of keyboard instruments from the piano and the organ to the ondioline and the nodes Martinot. As a result, he not only had confidence in his approach to the two keyboards but he had some experience and knowledge of the kinds of sounds he wanted to produce, particularly from his experience with electronic organs.

"I had to approach it as an organist," he said. "To me, the synthesizer is like a super-organ because it includes everything that the different kinds of electric organs can do. The difference is that it can produce only one note at a time."

Dick could work the keyboard – but that' part of the operation of a synthesizer. It also has to be programmed –  the linkages have to be made by patching to create the types of sounds that the performer wants. This requires someone skilled in the technical operation of the synthesizer.

So, while Dick Hyman manipulated the keyboard, Walter Sear, technical specialist in Moog equipment did the programming or patching.

"I would suggest the sound that I wanted," Dick explained, "and Walter would set it. Or he'd suggest a sound that he thought would fit in with what I was trying to do. Sometimes we'd stumble on something interesting while we were on the way to something else.

Some of the pieces Dick played were composed before he reached the studio. On these set pieces, he used live musicians along with the Moog – Art Ryerson and Jay Berliner on guitars, Chet Amsterdam on Fender bass, and Buddy Salzman, drums, with Dick on honky-tonl piano.

Other selections were improvised in the studio. Dick constructed his improvisations from the sounds of the synthesizer, just as a sculptor might be inspired in his creation by the texture of the stone he was working with.

"I found," said Dick, "that it was much more interesting to create freely on the synthesizer in this fashion than to bend the machine to any preconceived ideas I might have had. In playing my prepared compositions, I had more control over the final result than in any other recording situation I've been in but because the instrument is so new and so unexplored, the final results were more unrelated to what I started out with than anything I've done before. The pieces that were developed in the studio, when I went ahead and explored the instrument, went much more quickly, I'd say to Walter Sear, 'Surprise me with some sounds.' And he'd patch in something and I'd start to play whatever it suggested. That was the most fun.

In addition to the Moog synthesizer, Dick also used another electronic instrument on some piece: a Maestro Rhythm Unit, a robot drummer that is normally used by organists in cocktail lounges to provide accompaniment. It is an electronic box decorated with push buttons marked "samba," "rhumba," "tango," "fox trot," "rock and roll," "go-go," "boogaloo," "ad-infinitum. You push the button to get the desired rhythm and then adjust the machine to the specific tempo you want. The rhythm unit can be fed directly into the Moog synthesizer so that the unit's rhythmic aspects can be turned into tonal aspects.

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