With the rise of the technology, the progress spans to almost every sector of human’s life. Starting with the industrial revolution up to the portable mini computing devices, it also left a significant remark on the music industry as well.
The music before the advent of analogue synthesizers
Before the birth of synthesizer, there had been times when people heavily relied on native instruments like guitar, bass, drums, organ or any other native instruments whose sound characteristics were limited to some point. Although organ did gave a possibility to manipulate sound but still the range of possibilities was limited. With the birth of synthesizers things changed a lot more than anybody could expected and changed the history of music and what musicians could do.
The very first synthesizers
The advent of synthesizers basically gave a rise to a new horizon for musicians or experimenter to go beyond typical limited characteristics of native instruments.
There had still been synthesizers out there before the birth of Minimoog in 1971. There was the invention of Moog synthsizer by then engineer Robert Moog, who changed the course of history of music scene onward. Somewhere around the same time period there was another inventor called Don Buchla. Yet, the Buchla Modular Electronic System could not make a huge leap as of the one created by Robert Moog’s. Still at that time, these synthesizers were a way too expensive to get ones hand on to unless the musicians looking for them were filthy rich.
To make things easier the first Minimoog launched in 1971 made it relevantly available to a large musicians. Also its portability was much reliable than Minimoog’s predecessors who were giants and massively inconvenient to move around especially in live shows, which were the top things of that time.
Throughout the 1970s there were others who equally contributed to the course of history of electronic music.
The musicians relying on analogue synthesizers
Analogue synthesizers gave a lot of new opportunities for experimenting with music and there is nothing strange in the fact the musicians who were particularly into the search for brand-new sounds applied this modern instrument. As you can imagine, progressive rock bands which are all about experimenting with music and musical instruments loved analogue synthesizers in particular. Some of the famous progressive bands of whole time such as Yes or Pink Floyd made a great usage of analogue synthesizers.
Certainly, there were also many musicians specifically specialising in electronic music such as for instance Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream or Jean Michel Jarre.