May 3, 1975: Synthesizer repair whiz Alan Pearce

 

Meet the man who tuned up Billy Joel’s Mini-Moog. 

May 3, 1975 

Alan’s World: Fixing Off-Key Electronic Music 

“YOU CAUGHT ME JUST IN TIME,” says the man who does almost all the synthesizer repair work for Moog Music Inc. in Williamsville. “This is my last week.”

          Alan Pearce’s next words are drowned out by a loud electronic voop from elsewhere in the shop – someone testing out a new Mini-Moog fresh off the assembly line.

          Next week, Alan says as the sound dies, he’ll be in business for himself, under the name Polyfusion, designing special electronic devices for audio and video artists.

          For the past two years, whenever a Moog synthesizer went wrong, they called for Alan. If the instrument was portable, they’d send it back to him. If it wasn’t, he’d come out and fix it.

          Alan straightened out piano man Billy Joel’s Mini-Moog when he was in town (dirt in the keyboard). Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake & Palmer sends in his two Mini-Moogs every four months between tours.

          “I’ve done some custom work for Emerson too,” Alan reports, “a lot of little things, mostly. I’ve given him a limited pre-set capability, so that by pushing a button he can get a certain sound.

          “Most of the problems we get are mechanical. Contacts on the keyboard get dirty. Occasionally, we get broken solder joints.

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“EVERY ONCE in a while we get in a batch of components which tend to fail. There’s been oscillator instability in the Mini-Moog, which is caused by one faulty integrated circuit. It was my job to come up with one which wouldn’t fail.

          “Actually, the workmanship on the Moog stuff is extremely good, which accounts for the fact that a single person can do almost all the company’s repairs. Keith Emerson’s modular system has outlasted four steel shipping cases.”

          Another factor is there simply aren’t that many synthesizers. Alan estimates the entire output of Moog since 1964 has been about 6,000 Mini-Moogs, 1,000 Sonic Sixes (another small unit) and maybe 600 studio-size modular systems.

          “The synthesizer has been losing ground as far as avant-garde music is concerned,” he says, “but it’s picking up on the commercial level.

          “Now a good deal of the large systems are going to private individuals who happen to have $10,000 to spend.”

          One of his final chores is to put composer Judith Martin’s Syn-Ket synthesizer back in working order for a State UB Creative Associates Evening for New Music Sunday at 8 p.m. in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery auditorium.

          Alan and former Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten will accompany her in a synthesizer trio performance of two of her pieces.

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HER SYN-KET is as exotic as it is temperamental, having capabilities equivalent to three Mini-Moogs in equipment built in the late ‘50s using radio tubes and transistors.

          Parts of it sit on Alan’s cluttered worktables between boxes of printed circuit boards, files of warranty cards and letters like the one from the kid in Redondo Beach, Calif., who wants to know if he can play guitar through his Moog.

          Alan says there are two ways to do that. The easy way is to run the guitar notes in and play with them same as the synthesizer’s basic oscillator signal. Or else you could get into – he chooses a computer term – interfacing.

          He and Robert Moog are working separately on an interfacing device called a frequency follower which would translate guitar electricity into signals for the synthesizer.

          “The problem is how to get a reliable signal from the guitar,” he says. “Dr. Moog’s is further along than mine is and from what I understand it’s very good.”

          Alan’s prime interest is live performance. For himself, he’s concocted a five-module synthesizer that can play four notes simultaneously (the Sonic Six does two, the Mini-Moog, one) and sports a bank of knobs that would put the cockpit of a 747 jet to shame.

          Growing up mostly around Washington, D.C., he began as a violin player, later switched to viola and picked up an interest in math and electronics from his father, who installed computers for the Burroughs Corp.

          At Colorado State College, where he majored in music composition and minored in math and physics, he was among a group which built a synthesizer for a lab experiment.

          He came here in 1970 “because the graduate program in composition at UB is the best in the world.” He joined MuSonics, which later merged with Moog, that fall, answering a 3-by-5 card on the Baird Hall bulletin board for someone to demonstrate synthesizers at trade shows.

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TODAY HE’S a year away from a PhD in composition and he’s bringing his performance urge to the field of video synthesis, making live abstract patterns on a seven-foot TV screen with a local video group called Apparition.

          “For my doctoral dissertation,” he says, “I’m composing a piece commissioned for the North Amherst Ministers Association.

          “It’ll have a chorus, orchestra and soloists and there’ll be synthesizers in the orchestra. There probably also will be video synthesizers. It’ll go an hour to an hour and a half.

          “It’s going to be performed in September 1976. It was supposed to be ready for this September, but I just haven’t had the time to finish it.”

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THE PHOTO CAPTION: Alan Pearce adjusts a Mini-Moog synthesizer.

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FOOTNOTE: In forming Polyfusion, Alan and a partner, Ron Folkman, hoped to go beyond the Moog modular system. One of their achievements was the 1979 Polyfusion Series 2000 “monster” that was built for Toto keyboardist Steve Porcaro. They eventually drifted away from synthesizers, though, and Polyfusion went into designing and manufacturing custom electronic systems.