Synth

Pleas
The digital delights of Winter

by Ian Monroe, photos by Vince Hobbs

KEYED UP: Joseph Rivers and a
sampling of his collection
12 : January 27 to Feburary 2, 2005 : ORLANDOWEEKLY
Inside an unassuming building
in west Winter Park, Joseph Rivers prepares to
demonstrate the frequency response charac-
teristics of his main mixing room. In this special-
ly configured chamber there are bass “cannons”
built into the walls, and finely attenuated moni-
tors power up silently, waiting patiently for the
signal which they must faithfully reproduce.
Rivers looks over with a grin, and asks, “You like
electronic music, right?”
With that, the first ringing notes of Prodigy’s
“Smack My Bitch Up” sneak out of the tweeters.
As the round, clean bass line kicks in, it’s clear
that the engineering that has gone into building
this room has paid off. The air vibrates with the
low frequencies (as do any loose articles of
clothing) but no audible distortion is present,
even at the extreme volume.
Rivers has used this room since 1992 to
record and mix albums for many artists, from
the local electronic act Prophecy and Southern
rockers Molly Hatchet to Rocket 88 to former
Yes/Moody Blues keyboardist Patrick Moraz.
Operating under the quite appropriate moniker
of Audio Playground, the complex boasts three
studios, fully equipped with an enormous
amount of high-end recording equipment, both
digital and analog. It’s a facility that can clearly
handle just about any kind of recording, for just
about any kind of artist. However, the most fas-
cinating thing about the Audio Playground isn’t
the studios, the vocal booth or the mixing facili-
ties. It’s the museum.
Audio Playground has the largest publicly
accessible collection of synthesizers and elec-
tronic music equipment in the United States.
With more than 1,300 pieces, many of which
are rare or one of a kind, Rivers has pieces of
vintage gear stacked up in every available
space — in the hallways, in the studios — yet
most of the pieces are housed in a huge muse-
um room, set up from floor to ceiling.
ARCHIVAL OBSESSIONS
About 14 years ago, Rivers found himself
released from the Air Force, but legally unable
to apply his specialized training in robotics in
the private sector. Music had always interested
him, so he took jobs as a DJ at clubs and private
parties. This interest eventually became a full-
time job as he accepted a DJ position at a
Dallas radio station. But radio was not where
his passion lay, so Rivers decided to pursue an
education in recording at Orlando’s Full Sail
Real World Education in 1990. By 1991, he had
graduated, and began building his studio in
Winter Park. Along the way, he decided to
devote some of the space to displaying his vin-
tage synthesizer gear.
Starting with his small personal collection, he
added piece after piece, to the tune of almost a
hundred every year. Scouring garage sales,
basements, attics and, more recently, eBay for
the remains of early synthesizers, controllers
and drum machines, he carted away these
obsolete treasures for repair and preservation.
“I started doing it because of the sound; it’s a
certain sound of the era,” he says. “Now it’s
being noticed and being duplicated digitally, as
best they can, but when I first started, [the gear]
was all being dumped … people were saying,
‘Oh, I’ve got to get into this digital thing,’ and
everybody was forgetting the original sound,
and after a while, people started going, ‘You
know, I miss that sound.’”
Archiving is an important task for any muse-
um, and Rivers takes it seriously. Each time he
gets an addition to his collection that is func-
tional, or repairs a broken unit, he takes the
time to preserve the sounds of the device by
recording a complete collection of those sounds
in high resolution. After all, many of the devices
in his collection rely on electronic components —
transistors, vacuum tubes and the like — that
are no longer manufactured, and thus spare
parts can be hard to come by. Ultimately, his
plan is to prepare interactive exhibits that will
allow visitors to listen to the sounds that each
device is capable of, building up a website that
will enable people to discover the basics of syn-
thesis and explore the various instruments in
the collection. His website, www.keyboard
museum.com (which is offline as of this writing),
will contain Flash applications that demon-
etic
ures
Park’s synthesizer museum
strate how many famous instruments work, such
as the famous Hammond B3, the Wurlitzer and
the Fender Rhodes electric piano. Rivers says,
“People will be able to come to the website and
play an instrument that was made in 1940.”
TEACHER, CAN I TOUCH THAT?
While that online exhibition will be widely
accessible, visitors to the physical museum can
get a more personal, guided tour by Rivers, who
takes time to expound upon the more interest-
ing pieces. Care to trace the evolution of that
most ubiquitous of hip-hop production instru-
ments, the Akai MPC? Rivers has an example of
each variant. Want to know which synth was the
first to include a pitch bend wheel? (It was the
Minimoog, in 1971.) Curious about who made
the first guitar-synth? Rivers will tell you it was
Roland, with their GR-500, and will show you
one, as well as its superior derivative, the GR-300.
There’s an entire section devoted to key-
tars, those aesthetically questionable key-
boards shaped like guitars, popularized in the
’80s and now highly sought after by post-
modern synth-pop performers for their ironic
value. There’s a mountain of drum machines,
a plethora of controllers, as well as devices
that store audio samples optically on film,
magnetically on tape and in solid state
EPROMs. Practically every major develop-
ment in electronic instruments is represented,
from the very first polyphonic synthesizers to
the latest Roland Grooveboxes.
Education is an important goal of the
museum, says Rivers. His involvement with
Full Sail has not stopped with his graduation
— he lectures students about synthesis and
the history of electronic musical instruments.
He even has an “educational” version of the
Korg MS-20 (one of only 20 that exist in the
United States), which is a wall-mountable
pedagogical instrument used to demonstrate
the fundamentals of synthesizer construction
and use. And Rivers sees his museum as a
way to interest younger children in music as
well. “We do have tours for schools, and chil-
dren come through, but we’d like to make it
Some of the most
interesting pieces in
the Audio Playground
collection include:
THE OBERHEIM EIGHT VOICE
The first true “polyphonic” synthesizer,
this enormous keyboard actually has eight
different mono-synth modules that are
hardwired together, and can store 16
patches per voice. First produced in 1977,
the Oberheim was used by such legends
as Styx, Rush and Herbie Hancock.
THE TECHNOS AXCEL
RESYNTHESIZER
An extremely rare model (only a few
were made in 1980), the Technos Axcel
was an exercise in additive re-synthesis.
You’d feed it a sample, then it would algo-
rithmically re-create the sound using oscil-
lators, and the resulting sounds could be
played back — repitched — via the key-
board.
THE WURLITZER SIDEMAN
The world’s first “drum machine,” it had
10 different drum sounds and 10 preset
rhythms, each of which was delineated by
contact points on the outside of a rotating
drum, much like a music box. The electron-
ics are all vacuum-tube-based, and the
more accessible, and let them play with things
unit was encased in wood, designed to be
— theremins and things — so it’s teaching.”
mounted on the side of an organ for
What about the future? Rivers has plans to
accompaniment.
expand the museum by adding a second story
to the building which will allow him to more
comfortably house his ever-growing collection,
THE OPTIGAN MUSIC MAKER
This ugly brown and off-white machine
but since he supports his museum solely
was interesting because it had so many
through donations and funds raised by the
voices and used sampled sounds, but was
recording studio, this might take some time. At
completely mechanical. The sounds were
the moment, tours are by appointment only, so
stored on optical disks that looked like
as not to interfere with recording sessions. He
records — there were clear waveforms in
says that in the near future, he might start ask-
the plastic, and light shone through them
ing for a small donation for admission to the
against a light bar, much like an audio
museum, to support his restoration and archival
track running along the side of a piece of
efforts. Of course, occasionally he’ll sell off a
film. Always in tune with itself, but never in
vintage piece or two, but only as long as he’s got
tune with anything else, this massively
more than one of that particular model for the
heavy music machine of the early ’70s has
display.
been used by Devo, Tom Waits, Steve Fisk
For now, though, Rivers will continue to grow
and, of course, the San Diego duo
his collection and indulge his passion for the
Optiganally Yours.
technology of music. Artists come from all over
the world to record in his facility because of the
sheer scope of the equipment at their finger-
tips. “It’s been helpful to us in the recording stu-
dio because we can bring up any of these old
sounds off of original pieces instead of having
to try to sit there and emulate it,” he notes.
His passion for music and the machines used
to create it is infectious. After all, every key-
board — from the newest high-tech Kurzweil
production station to the lowliest children’s
Casio toy piano — has a story; taken together,
those stories form a large part of the history of
contemporary music. Indeed, by making the
evolution of musical technology explicit in his
synthesizer museum, Joseph Rivers demon-
strates that not only does music drive techno-
logical innovation, but technology drives musi-
cal innovation as well.
music@orlandoweekly.com
Audio Playground
Synthesizer Museum
699 Clay St.
Winter Park
(407) 628-2119
www.keyboardmuseum.com
ORLANDOWEEKLY : January 27 to Feburary 2, 2005 : 13