March 20, 1971: The Sonic V synthesizer

 

Another snapshot from a moment in history, akin to visiting the Glenn Curtiss aircraft plant in Hammondsport in the early days of aviation. The device that stars in this story, the Sonic V, was as different from early music synthesizers as the dial phone was from telephone switchboards. 

March 20, 1971 

New Synthesizer Gives

Any Sound You Want 

        If you ever get into Charlie Chaplin, I mean seriously, somebody’s going to clue you into the way Chaplin kind of eases into his movies.

        When he first comes on the screen, there’s no fanfare or attention-getting stuff. No, he’s always showing up on the side of the screen somewhere and he’s usually there for a moment before you notice, hey, that’s him.

* * *

THERE was plenty of Chaplinesque subtlety in Rosary Hill College’s Wick Center auditorium Monday as the Sonic V synthesizer made its first outing as a concert musical instrument. You scarcely knew it was around.

        Hidden behind a grand piano and a vibraphone and buried beneath the composer’s tape-recorded piano playing and sound effects, the amazing device was allowed only a hum and a few waveform variations while four performers thrashed and worried through Rocco DiPietro’s “Woman III.” It was sort of like asking an IBM 360 to do a multiplication table.

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THE SONIC V is a sound synthesizer like the week-known Moog and, in the words of its engineers, it has “infinite possibilities.” Meaning it can make virtually any sound. And there’s one extra possibility. The Sonic V might also make synthesizers as common as pianos.

        It’s evident why the brochure calls it “a great practical breakthrough” when you see a Moog model and the Sonic V side by side in a room at MuSonics Inc. headquarters in a former gelatin factory in Williamsville.

* * *

MOST synthesizers are built to order and built modularly – in parts. The Moog is several parts. A black box of circuitry controlled by knobs and plug-in patch cords. A separate keyboard. Separate speakers.

        The Sonic V, on the other hand, is a single, 40-pound, L-shaped, rectangular unit a little bigger than an electric piano. Knobs and switch controls work a panel which looks like a simple schematic diagram. The keyboard’s in front. The speakers are in back.

        “Three years ago, to buy the same machine would have cost you about $3,500,” says packaging engineer Tom Gullo. “By standardizing and shooting for mass production, we can sell it for less than $1,000.”

        Once it’s hooked into an amplifier, it should fit right in with a rock band. Plus there’s a jack in the back, so almost anything could be plugged in and played through it. A guitar, drum microphones, even a singer’s mike.

* * *

PART OF the cost-cutting and size-cutting comes from extensive use of integrated circuits – more than 50, in all – which compress the function of printed circuit boards into little gold-pronged chips that look like synthetic spiders.

        There are other synthesizer innovations in it, but MuSonics president Bill Kohler doesn’t think they should be let out. “Just say it’s today’s technology,” he says.

* * *

WHAT A synthesizer does, simply, is take an electric current and make waves out of it with devices called oscillators. On electric pianos and organs, each key has an individual oscillator that’s tuned in advance. The Sonic V has just two oscillators, but you can do almost anything you want with them.

        Ordinary synthesizers can use only one oscillator at a time, which limits them to one tone. Imagine how much over-dubbing it took to do “Switched-On Bach.”

        The breakthrough on the Sonic V is that it can use two oscillators at once, producing two notes, two very different sounds at the same time.

* * *

SETTING UP sounds isn’t so hard. You just start on the left side of the control panel with the waveform generator. Pick yourself some inaudible waves – triangular, sawtooth or square. Slow them down, speed them into a flickery blur or play them off one another in odd electronic rhythms and scales.

        Next comes the tone oscillator. It makes the waveforms audible and what you hear is repeating swoops or blips. Flip a switch one way and you go two octaves up, flip it the other way, two octaves down. And there’s pitch controls.

        For further thrills, you can run your sound through the ring modulators. These put in the kind of clashing overtones bells have. Nearby is a switch which cuts in white or pink noise, which sounds like what you hear in between FM radio stations.

        Then you reach the articulator, where the wave is shaped with attack (how fast it comes on) and decay (how fast it dies). And finally, there’s a filter, where you can even the waves out if you want to.

* * *

THE FOUR-OCTAVE keyboard is another way you put electricity into the oscillators. And each of the 50 keys, instead of having its own oscillator like an electric organ, has its own voltage instead.

        A dial adjusts the standard half-tone octave into quarter-tones, eighth-tones or as many tones as you like. A 50-note octave? Sure. Another dial adjusts note-to-note glissandos and pedals give you volume and filter control.

        “Oscillators are voltage-controlled,” explains engineer Gullo. “A synthesizer oscillator is much more sophisticated that an organ’s in that the pitch can be changed by voltages. In other words, instead of a straight pitch, you can make it change back and forth with any kind of a controlled voltage.”

* * *

“THE KEYBOARD is a convenient means of control that musicians identify with,” he adds, “but the keyboard is only one means of controlling the oscillators.”

        “It’s an instrument that has to be studied, no question about it,” president Kohler puts in, “but if a person is interested enough in the synthesizer, he can sit down with it four hours and figure it out.”

        Judging by early response, there are plenty of musicians who can hardly wait to spend some time with it.

        Kohler came back from a recent regional music teachers’ conference with 75 requests for demonstrations. For teachers, the synthesizer can help them not only in demonstrating musical sounds, but also in explaining what fundamental elements go into those sounds.

        Keyboard man Tom Bacon of Metamorphosis, a classical-rock group made up of Detroit Symphony musicians, flew here to inspect it last month and wants one as soon as possible. So does Lavender Hill, a local band which was lined up to test the Sonic V’s rock music possibilities.

* * *

KOHLER says the company has begun taking orders for delivery in 30 to 60 days. Two were finished by early this week. MuSonics is ready for volume production.

        “People look at this and say it’s different,” says Kohler. “Actually, it’s like traditional instruments, except the synthesizer gives you complete control over the sound you’re creating.

        “The synthesizer,” he adds, “has only been used to 10 percent of is capability. The only limitation really is the imagination and creativity of the performer.” 

The box/sidebar 

First Came the Idea 

        The Sonic V synthesizer is the first product of MuSonics Inc., a division of Venture Technology (another division specializes in industrial safety devices), and the idea for the instrument was born about a year ago in a meeting among musicians and electrical engineers.

        “The overall concept was agreed to by everybody,” says engineer Tom Gullo. “We came up with what we wanted in a machine and what it should do, then we sat down to design a functional unit.

        “We tried to take into account the needs of rock bands also. In the past, the synthesizer has not been a live-performance thing and that’s hurt it. People like to see a performer playing something.”

* * *

THE SONIC V prototype was first shown Dec. 6 at a music teachers’ conference in Kiamesha Lake and the response was encouraging. Even competitors took notice.

        “It’s the students and the young teachers that are coming through with a great deal of interest,” says president Bill Kohler, himself a clarinetist and a business management specialist who joined the company seven weeks ago.

        Occasionally, the synthesizer even engages in a bit of one-upmanship. Like at a recent convention in Cincinnati.

        “This woman walked up to me,” Kohler recalls, “and said if this is a synthesizer and it can make any sound, let’s hear it make an ocean. Well, I gave her some ocean and I played a little ‘Ebb Tide’ on the keyboard to go with it.”

* * *

THE PHOTO: Patrick Dunford performing on a prototype model of the Sonic V at Rosary Hill College (now Daemen).

* * *

FOOTNOTE: The Sonic V is very rare today, but it provided the impetus for MuSonics to take over its rival, the R. A. Moog company, and move Moog from Trumansburg to Buffalo. What was revolutionary about it was that it was a self-contained unit, with its own amplifier and speaker. You could just plonk it down and play it.

With a few slight alterations, the Sonic V provided the template for the Moog Sonic Six, which was built into its own carrying case. The Sonic Six was introduced in 1972 as an alternative to the Minimoog and was produced until 1979. Bob Moog himself used to carry one around for lectures and demonstrations. You can get a refurbished Sonic Six today on eBay for $4,499. Vintagesynth.com has this to say about the Sonic Six:

        “Not commonly seen, they are actually rather durable devices and used ones generally (if proper care was taken of them) are found in good working order. It was originally designed for educational and home use, so it is light and portable and even has a built-in amplifier and speaker. It’s a genuine Moog synth that is equally as obscure as useful these days. And its rather simple-looking front panel layout hides the uniquely flexible, powerful and great-sounding little beast it truly is!”

Meanwhile, the guys in this article are not the only main players in the Sonic V story.

The founder of MuSonics and the guy who bought Moog’s company for $250,000 – basically taking over its debts – was named Bill Waytena. An engineer for Bell Aircraft, he came up with an invention in 1961 – the radar detector – which saved me from hundreds of speeding tickets over the years. Had I met him, I could have thanked him in advance.

By this time he was into investments. According to Bob Moog’s memoir, Waytena made his life miserable. The board of directors paid Waytena off and sent him packing after a year. He went on to other ventures and died in Clarence in 2013.

Bob Moog departed in the mid 1970s and Moog Music was sold in 1975 to Norlin, a company that also had gobbled up Gibson guitars.

I also did not encounter Gene Zumcheck, the disaffected engineer who left Moog in Trumansburg, was hired by Waytena and conceived the Sonic V. Even the Moog synthesizer nerds who worship him don’t know what became of him. That’s because they don’t spell his surname correctly.

Most likely he's the Eugene M. Zumchak who’s an electrical engineer with a master’s degree from Cornell University, just 12 miles down NY Route 96 from Trumansburg. If so, he lives in Buffalo’s North Park neighborhood.

In 1982, when he published a book called “Microcomputer Design and Troubleshooting,” he was president of a consulting firm, Niagara Micro Design Inc., whose clients included the Air Force and the Navy. According to Linked-In, he’s been president of a company called EZ-Ware since 1990.

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FURTHER NOTES: The home of MuSonics was the old Chalmers Gelatin Factory at the foot of Academy Street, which was at the bottom of the escarpment in Williamsville. The plant was demolished in the 1980s.

Engineer Tom Gullo became the guy who kept the place afloat through the 1970s because it was always losing money. He became director of manufacturing with an office between Waytena’s and Moog’s. Moog’s memoir describes him as “a capable guy wrestling with big problems.”

President Bill Kohler, meanwhile, defies discovery. Waytena’s website identifies him as a management consultant and former  executive vice president of Hard Manufacturing Co.