Wendy Carlos

Wendy Carlos is pictured using a Moog Modular Synthesizer, as shown in a user-uploaded photo on Buzzfeed.

"That's one of the things I hope we get back on-having a machine that lets you move every overtone from moment to moment, in amplitude and in position; but that hasn't happened. Right now I use the old ones-I've got a Yamaha SY77."

Wendy Carlos discusses MOTU Digitial Performer.

Wendy Carlos uses the Eminent Solina String Ensemble, as depicted in the electronic music recording studio image.

Mentioned in Totally Wired: Artists in Electronic Sound, as transcribed in the June 1984 issue of Polyphony. It was notably used for the Tron soundtrack.

Then there was the soundtrack to Tron, Disney's science-fiction computer epic. Here, Carlos alloyed electronic and acoustic sounds in a merger as complete as chromium. Using the digital synthesis of the GDS (General Development System) synthesizer, Carlos had the orchestra and synthesizer reinforcing each other. To the casual listener, it sounded orchestral; and in fact, many Carlos fans were disappointed that it wasn't an overtly electronic score. To be sure, the Tron soundtrack was not as striking musically as other works by Carlos, but it did open up the possibilities of electronic sound for her. She could make it sound electronic, acoustic, or like sounds you've never heard and she could do it with a full orchestra or the most advanced computer synthesis. As she showed on her Sonic Seasonings LP, the possibilities of music are as wide as nature permits.

Carlos employs the GDS synthesizer not only to make music but to create the basic sounds, the actual "clay" from which she forms her compositions. She eschews the pre-programmed approach of most synthesists, instead seeking out new sounds and forms that offer her the timbral richness and texture that she loves in acoustic instruments. Her modular Moog system, custom designed and modified by Robert Moog, still occupies a prominent spot in her multi-track recording studio; yet one suspects that it will occupy less space in her future work.

(...) JD: When I listen to your early works like "Music For Flute and Magnetic Tape" and "Dialogue For Piano and Two Loudspeakers", there's a clear distinction between the electronic sound and the live musician. But with the Tron soundtrack, the acoustic and electronic sounds are much more intermeshed.

WC: Yeah, they came out of different things. Are you aware that at that time it was a deadly thing to play a tape at a concert? We all had our four-track tapes and we thought we'd just dim the house lights and leave a little light on the stage, announce the piece, step back and hit the start button and play the tape. It was horrible. No audience was ever able to get through more than a couple of minutes with feeling uncomfortable and you could feel it for them if you sat out there. We had to find something to do to focus the attention, which you get automatically with a live performance. So we just put the two together.

With Tron, it didn't matter one wit how you obtained any particular sound. It was the final product that counted. I was looking for the gradation of color that you can get by going from the most synthesized sounding electronic effects to the most orchestral and everything in between. In those earlier pieces you'd play up the contrast between the two — the mechanistic portions of the rhythm that you would get from the tape, versus the live performer who could be more rhapsodic feeling and improvisatory. I simply wrote a score with two lines for the left loudspeaker, two lines for the right, two lines for the solo instrument or in a four channel piece, a few more lines as well. And then I'd tediously realize that portion on tape until I had all the notes and timbres and everything was specified on the score. The performer would practice and synchronize with the tape and invent techniques to allow some freedom between where the synchronization points were. It was experimental in the execution, but the music was less experimental than the pure electronic music.

(...) JD: Do you think that electronic instrument sounds are not as rich as acoustic ones?

WC: Yeah! If you look on a graph they look like a computer plot. Live instruments look like someone tied a pen to a kitty's tail and it scrawled this plot while playing with a ball or something. Acoustic instruments have a wealth of detail, some of which is unimportant to the ear, but a lot of it is subtle stuff that important to the ear and produces a little friction in the ear that spices up what you're hearing. To me, synthesizers are like eating bland food like most Americans eat. Once you get turned on to ethnic food it's like acoustic instruments. You start blending all kinds of exotic spices and herbs, and you miss that when suddenly you don't have it. It is important and it does make a difference.

Until the GDS came along there was nothing on the market to allow you to cook with exotic herbs and spices. The GDS is the only instrument built that allows you to do things with the subtlety, precision and nuance — and the complexity — that exists in acoustic instruments. But no one has been able to fully realize that yet, including me. It's a ton and ton of work and specification to get the instrument to be able to do that.

Again, this recalls my old rule that for every parameter you can control, you must control. A lot of people aren't willing to get into that amount of work.

(...) This interview with Wendy Carlos is taken from TOTALLY WIRED: ARTISTS IN ELECTRONIC SOUND, a 26-part radio documentary examining the artistic development of electronic music through interviews and music of the artists. The series is currently running in most major markets on public radio stations through the fall and winter of '83 - '84. TOTALLY WIRED was produced by John Diliberto and Kimberly Haas. It was funded by Sequential Circuits, Inc., Yamaha Corp., the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, and the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts. For more information about TOTALLY WIRED, or to obtain cassettes of the programs, write to: TOTALLY WIRED, Box 5426, Philadelphia, PA 19143.

In creating Heaven and Hell, Carlos' primary composing tools were a pair of Kurzweil K2000s, one used as a rack and one as a keyboard unit.

Wendy has 2 Synergys in her studio as can be seen in this 80's photo.

Her synths were fed by two MOTU MTPs and an original Kurzweil Midiboard, plus several of JL Cooper's fine MIDI boxes.

There have been a few additions to the Wurly II in the past year which we ought include here. The most recent of these is a small "handheld" digital recorder, the Zoom H2.

Carlos' stereo 140 was sampled for Audio Ease's Altiverb, as featured on the impulse response page.

Wendy Carlos writes about her beloved plate:

"Welcome to the wonderful world of EMT 140st Plate Reverberation. As a gift to the industry, I'm making available gratis these samples of my near mint 140st, vintage early 1971. It was added to my studio when Rachel Elkind and I expanded it into the lower floor of her Manhattan brownstone. I'd become familiar with earlier versions in graduate school, as Vladimir Ussachevsky used one in the Columbia University Electronic Music Center, where I was a student of his. This model is the epitome of electromechanical design, with extremely low noise solid state electronics replacing earlier troublesome tube circuits."

In an article on Carlos's official website, Carlos explains the 2001 installation of a KS20, including photographs and a companion article for setting up the device.

Excerpt from "Something Old -- Something New" by Wendy Carlos (2004)

In the summer of 2001 I wondered if there was a way to add on some kind of MIDI pedalboard, even a small one, so that I might be able to practice some actual organ parts with it. I spent several weeks searching for something I could afford, and tried out a few of the options in the local music stores. Um. What I learned was that there were two distinct camps. You could find a few reasonable one octave pedalboards which supported velocity sensing, and some other convenience features from MIDI that would be depressing to give up. A few were rather flimsy affairs, and jumped around the floor when played briskly. Yuk. The other camp supported what you'd need for an electronic organ: standard organ pedalboard size, but no velocity or aftertouch, no program changes, or customization, other things I was unwilling to put up without. I also didn't have the tools, experience and parts to build my own from scratch, as Clark had. Nutz.

Then I remembered that my acoustic piano up in the front of the loft has a retrofit Gulbransen optical pickup system. It's a wonderful device, and has been dependable and powerful and most welcome. Unfortunately, it's not in the studio proper, where I do my composing and recording. So it's gotten less use that I hoped for originally, when it was given to me by some generous people at the company. I wrote again to my contact there, Jack Butler. Did they have any devices that could turn an old organ pedalboard into a good MIDI controller?

The answer I got back from Jack was sorta no and sorta yes. No -- they did not have an actual pickup device for pedalboards. Yes, they did have a solution that might work. One of their engineers had come up with an "off the record" modification to their KS-20 unit recently. It was one of those amusing stories, his daughter was a church organist, and had started to use a pair of Gulbransen pickups beneath the keys of the manuals, so she could save her performances and improvisations each week via a MIDI sequencer. Ah -- but the pedalboard -- what to do for that?! Was there any way her engineering dad could figure out to reproduce those notes as well?

The solution he devised was extremely clever and logical. I'd have tried cutting up a keyboard strip and mounting the individual note pickups along a wood strip, one pickup beneath each pedal key. Wire them together again. That ought work. But it was a lot of risky work, tearing apart the printed circuit boards like that, one might damage the whole thing. Instead he'd taken a full 88-note strip, disassembled it into the four 22-note boards that make it up, and then mounted them on wood supports in four overlapping segments beneath the pedalboard keys. There was at least one pickup on every note. THEN -- you'd tell the onboard computer what sensors were going to be played by which notes and "map out" the rest (many pickups fell in the cracks, only about a third would be useful, due to the vastly different note-spacings). The procedure was simple -- just play the pedals one at a time slowly, from lowest to topmost note. And a new software subroutine he added did the rest. Damn clever.

Jack suggested I might consider this kit, even though the company did not formally "support" organ pedal installations. Other customers already were using it that way, though, and all reported good to excellent results. I decided to give it a try, since my old and not often used Yamaha Electone E-5 organ has a very study and attractive 25-note pedalboard. If I could retrofit the new pickup boards beneath this, I might be in business, and it would cost a lot less than a new similar sized board, even forgetting for a moment about velocity and pressure sensing (btw- both poly and channel pressure are supported by Gulbransen -- hey!). Yes, it would be a compromise, the E-5 doesn't use a full AGO 32-note set of pedals, but the smaller flat but radiating 25-note version made popular on Hammond and other electronic organs. Since I'm no organist, and seldom would need the extra top seven notes, this seemed a reasonable place to start.

I could always change over to an AGO size later. With the limited space I have, and the clumsiness of using a computer beside the rig if the pedals sat over 10" above floor level to each side, I'm not convinced that the purist approach would be preferable. Concave is easier to play than flat, but for 25 notes the maximum difference is less than an inch (and Ethel Smith managed pretty dern well). Shux. I ordered the KS20 installation kit Butler suggested. When unpacked I found one long steel supported pickup strip, which I placed on top of the new K2600's keyboard to examine closely:

[https://www.wendycarlos.com/wurlynew/striptop.JPG] K2600 wi Gulbransen

The kit included sundry connecting cables, mounting hardware, complete instructions, plus the brains of the pickup system, the KS20 control box shown next (also resting on top of the new 2600), below left. It's a well-engineered device, I've grown very fond of it since using it. If you look closely at one end you'll get a good idea of the elegant way the sensor strip is arranged, below center. Those precision optical moving vanes resemble the famous Loch Ness monster prankster photo from 1934. (Robert Wilson, the prankish London physician and coperpetrator with Wetherell, later confessed in great detail, like the similar "crop circle" partners in crimininy sakes, Bower and Chorley. But by then many had grown too fond of the hoax to admit they'd been cleverly duped. Think also of Conan Doyle, far too proud and gullible to admit he'd fallen for two schoolgirls' cutout "fairies".) The manufacturer impishly calls them "Nessies." Unlike the modeling clay (plasticine) long neck and head on a toy submarine of that well circulated image (below right), the Gulbransen "Nessies" are not a "fake in the lake." So reports of seeing and touching them on a sensor strip count as verified "Encounters of the Tangible Kind" (wink nudge say no more)...

[https://www.wendycarlos.com/wurlynew/KS20.JPG] Gulbransen KS20

[https://www.wendycarlos.com/wurlynew/sensideCUsml.jpg] Some Real "Nessies"

[https://www.wendycarlos.com/wurlynew/nessfakesml.jpg] A Fake "Nessie"

[...]

NOTE: There may be other musicians who will want to assemble a similar MIDI pedalboard custom installation. I can definitely recommend the Gulbransen KS20 as a solution with a great deal of elegance, power and little compromise. (The company now has a new name, MIDI 9, a new website, new lower prices, and has replaced the KS20 with a new line of controllers, some of which provide for organ pedal installations -- yeay!) You will have to find a physical set of organ pedals from one of several sources (even eBay occasionally has these on auction), and be willing to attempt some modest woodworking assembly on your own, as the factory DOES NOT supply nor support custom pedalboard installation kits. If you do go ahead, I've saved a set of instructions that should be studied when you initialize your unit to operate with whatever pedals you choose (12 to 32-notes AGO or more). You can construct a full MIDI organ, or head in more innovative directions. Please note, these were written for my own purposes only, but I will post them here for curious, enterprising musicians to print out and refer to, if you wish. It makes initialization a straightforward series of steps, avoiding several pitfalls of this nonstandard application. Initializing Instructions for Pedalboard use of the KS20 HERE. (Opens a new window you may print from. Close that window, as with any of the photos here, to return here.)