Storage and polyphony

Customers weren’t entirely satisfied with the Minimoog and contemporary synthesizers, however. Although musicians no longer had to contend with countless cords in order to play a synthesizer, they still had to deal with numerous knobs and switches before they could do something as simple as switch from one sound to another. Moreover, keyboardists were bored with playing monophonic melody lines on synthesizers—they wanted to play chords. Although dual-voice keyboards that connected two monophonic synthesizers were available as early as 1970, customers wanted more.

Attempting to satisfy these demands, two schools of thought emerged in synthesizer design. One approach called for an independent, monophonic synthesizer to be assigned to every key on the keyboard. To this end, designers married the design principles of electronic organs to synthesizer technology. Although this breed of instrument was fully polyphonic—all notes of the keyboard could be heard simultaneously—it wasn’t as versatile in its control options as a true synthesizer. The first fully polyphonic synthesizer to feature this type of design was the Moog Polymoog, released in 1975. Developed primarily by David Luce, it featured 71 weighted, velocity-sensitive keys.

In the second approach to polyphonic sound generation, a synthesizer was assigned to a key only when the key was pressed—in effect, semi-polyphony. As early as 1973, American company E-MU Systems introduced the Modular Keyboard System Series 4050, a digital keyboard that could be connected to up to ten monophonic synthesizers, and thus had ten-voice polyphony. The problem with this approach was that very few people owned ten synthesizers, and the amount of time and effort involved in programming a new sound was an overwhelming deterrent. Digital memory was still waiting to be developed, and, once again, the evolution of semi-polyphonic synthesizers required the qualities that only digital keyboards could provide.

The same prerequisite—digital engineering—eventually led to synthesizers that allowed sounds to be stored. Without the benefit of digital technology, early attempts at storing sounds included some unusual solutions. For example, a synthesizer with analog programmability required a dedicated row featuring all of the instrument’s control elements for every “memory” slot. In this case, a selector switch accessed one of the many identical control panels and connected it to the sound generator.

The first synthesizer featuring storage slots implemented in this manner was the 1975 Yamaha GX1. The control elements for the system’s storage slots were so small that they could be adjusted only by using jeweler’s screwdrivers and complicated tools—called programmers and comparators.

It was not until 1978 that the problem was resolved. The five-voice polyphonic Prophet-5, released by the American company Sequential Circuits, was the world’s first synthesizer with a global storage feature. All settings for each of its five onboard monophonic synthesizers were stored in memory slots—40 in the debut model. Moreover, all five synthesizers shared a single user interface, which simplified matters considerably. In spite of its initially high price, this instrument proved extremely popular and approximately 8,000 were built up until 1985. In addition to its digitally implemented polyphony and memory, the success of the Prophet-5 is due to the quality of its analog sound generation system.

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Storage and polyphony