Synclavier

...

so it was, like, a weird thing, but I loved that, and I found this school, Cal State Dominguez, not only had that, but they had a Synclavier, which was definitely state-of-the-art in the future as far as I thought.

So I went to that school, which is basically Compton in the middle to late '80s.

That's where I lived.

People have created applications that try to replicate Foley.

There was a time where people were doing it with a keyboard, like a musical keyboard, like a Synclavier or something, trying to perform Foley in real time on... you know, keyboards or, you know, that type of thing.

And as a drummer, there's many correlations between being a musician and a drummer to Foley.

And one of the things as a drummer, you know, I came up in the 80s learning to play drums.

In addition to being a more standalone work than Big Science, Mr. Heartbreak has more traditional pop rock elements, such as Laurie Anderson using a more conventional singing style, as well as the aforementioned guitar work, largely performed by Adrian Blue, generally best known from his work in King Crimson, but I'm more familiar with his solo work.

Adding a consistent through line is the use of the synclavier on every track.

The Synclavier was an early synthesizer and digital sampling system.

I've briefly touched on the Moog or Moog Potato Potato through the Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones episode, but it will for sure return, most notably on the Abbey Road episodes.

And while I haven't talked much about the Mellotron...

So you could create a wavetable and then apply FM to it.

And that's kind of the basis of the Synclavier.

And then sampling happened later.

And then you were able to mix and match.

The Synclavier didn't have a filter, but it allowed you to very easily send out control voltage, which I did all the time.

And I used Roland filters.

I used the Roland 100M so I could do what the PPG was doing, which is a beautiful sound to be able to still filter, you know, wavetables.

It was in 1983-ish.

I used to stand right behind him.

He'd be at the Synclavier or sit by him.

He played things for me.

I could ask him questions.

And a friend had another o- opening at a jingle house, which doesn't sound nearly as cool as the Hit Factory, but, um, I got to do all kinds of stuff.

Rather than just set up small, you know, little bits of gear here and there and be around big-name people, instead I was getting to engineer, I was getting to-- I learned to build Pro Tools systems for the studio 'cause believe it or not, when I moved into this jingle house, the main recording system that they had, the main multitrack, was a Synclavier, um, what do they call it? Post Pro, which is like a 16-channel 100 KHz sampling, you know, hard disk recorder that's like six feet tall and could heat your whole apartment.

It ran so hot and it was, it was a dinosaur.

But it, it worked, and we used it for many years.