High-Tech Notes : Synthesizers: Sour Sound to Musicians

The studios of Los Angeles are a long way from the assembly lines of Detroit, but a group of auto workers would easily recognize the anxiety in Bill Peterson’s voice when he bemoans his loss of work to automation.

Peterson plays the trumpet. These days, he says, he plays a lot less than he did three years ago. He blames his problems on synthesizers that he says are increasingly replacing him on sound-tracks for films, television shows, commercials and record albums.

“These machines are monsters,” said Peterson, 54.

In Michael Boddicker’s hands, they are modern marvels. At 32, he has ridden the high-tech revolution to the behind-the-scenes stardom enjoyed by an elite among Hollywood’s musicians.

Incredible Horizons

“There are all sorts of incredible musical horizons now,” he said, standing beside a synthesizer that looks as if it had been designed jointly by Steinway & Son and NASA. “The number of sounds that I have at my fingertips is up in the millions.”

The counterpoint between the two musicians’ fates reflects the shrinking horizons for traditional studio virtuosos and the rise of a new and more technologically minded generation of players. The advanced equipment is changing much of the music America hears, introducing variations on the old Hollywood themes of fear and ambition and prompting some industry insiders to wonder whether synthesized music isn’t eroding the humanity in a basic form of human expression.

Simply stated, a synthesizer captures, mixes, refines and amplifies the sound vibrations created by electrical currents. The equipment is usually operated by a keyboard, with which a performer selects musical pitches, and a switchboard used to shape and color the notes the keys play.

‘Evolution of Sound’

“There is an evolution of sound and we’re right in the middle of it,” said composer Henry Mancini, whose Academy Award-winning music has spanned decades and all forms of electronic media. “The art world and the business world and the commercial world are all banging their heads together and we don’t know where it’s going.”

Mancini, 61, said he has experimented with synthesizers for 20 years to enhance orchestral scores. He finds the equipment capable of subtle harmonic brush strokes beyond the power of conventional instruments. When he cannot manipulate the latest equipment, his 35-year-old son, Chris, does it for him.

Machines now make at least 50% of the music on television commercials, according to the Recording Musicians of America. The nationwide association’s members in Los Angeles are 500 of the city’s top studio players. Numerous pop and and rock recordings now use high-tech music as background; television and movies are doing so more and more. Examples include the TV shows “Miami Vice,” “Simon & Simon,” “Family Honor” and “Airwolf.”

The eclectic, hard-driving meld of pop songs and electronic textures for “Miami Vice” is composed and recorded by a musician named Jan Hammer, working in a house in Upstate New York that is filled with the latest musical technology.

“The Right Stuff,” “Risky Business” and “Desperately Seeking Susan” all drew on Boddicker’s talents. He also produced sweeping orchestral textures in the film “Witness” and the more futuristic tones in another movie called “Bladerunner.”

Boddicker said about 40 performers of his type work regularly these days.

In the music trade, Hammer, Boddicker and their fellow masters of mechanized music are called synths. Semantics help to map their impact: Players of conventional instruments are not simply “musicians” but a category, “acoustic musicians.” Boddicker won’t get specific about his earnings, but he said it is “easily in the six figures,” while others in the business said he was being modest.

Meanwhile, Peterson has taken up substitute teaching of history in public schools to supplement his income.

Inspired by Harry James

“When I was 12 years old, I saw a movie called ‘Best Foot Forward’ with Harry James, the best trumpet player at the time,” Peterson said. “He had a white tuxedo on and a gold Selmer trumpet. I heard that sound and I’ve been reaching for it ever since. It was great for a long time. I did ‘The A-Team’ this week, but it’s not what it used to be.”

Among the 1,500 to 2,000 acoustic musicians who steadily perform in Hollywood studios, the analogy to the increasing use of robots in Detroit has become painfully apt. In interviews with musicians in Los Angeles, they rarely failed to make a reference to Detroit when talking about synthesizers.

In the last two years, boxes filled with computerized technology that closely imitates the full range of orchestral colors have become fixtures on Hollywood sound stages. In addition, pointedly high-tech whirs, bleeps and swooshes are riding a wave of fashion that a tour of the TV dial at prime-time will quickly demonstrate.

One synthesizer can replace an orchestra, but performers often use several to maximize their ability to build a complicated quilt-work of sounds.

“I don’t need musicians,” one composer said. “I can do it all at home on synthesizers.”

Jobs Off About 35%

Vince DiBari, vice president of the Hollywood local of the American Federation of Musicians, estimated that recording jobs for acoustic performers have fallen off by about 35% in the last three years, largely due to synthesizers.

Economics play a part in the synthesizer’s growing musical influence, although a number of studio executives refused to respond to musicians’ charges that their employers often are merely trying to cut production costs.

“I think it’s getting to where producers who want to save money are going to a few very capable people who can manipulate technology,” said Blair Jackson, managing editor of Mix Magazine, a leading recording industry publication.

“It’s less expensive but not a lot less expensive” than conventional instruments, said Lionel Newman, former head of music for 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Newman, musical supervisor for numerous movies and TV shows, said he left his job at Fox recently after 46 years because he does not feel at home with synthesizers.

DiBari said it is hard to quantify automation’s effects on musicians. Rather than being laid off, like auto workers, musicians simply are not called with an assignment. Still, DiBari said, he knows it is happening. He said the union is doing all it can to study the problem and to protect the jobs of the musicians, who annually make from $30,000 to $100,000, and in a few cases more.

Fewer Musicians Now

A Universal Studios executive, estimating that about 50 musicians record on the lot every business day for the studio’s 16 current television shows, said the numbers of musicians now being used “are lower than they used to be.”

Describing the general sensitivity of synthesizers’ impact on employment, an executive at another studio said: “We have to stay on good terms with the union, and we have to exercise the freedoms we have to do what we want to do creatively. It’s a balancing act.”

The beam on which studios keep this balance is wide, however. The union’s contract includes a clause designed to prevent studios from using synthesizer musicians to replace conventional players. It says that musicians who use the machines must be paid for every layer of instrumental sound they manufacture.

But union officials said that it is impossible to listen to a finished tape and know exactly what number of instruments are making its sounds, and the clause is almost impossible to enforce.

“There’s very little you can do in the face of progress,” said Bernie Fleischer, president of the musicians’ union local. “This union represents the synthesists, too, you know. As long as they’re used properly, there’s nothing we can do but welcome them into the musical community.”

Responding to that, Buell Neidlinger, a string bass player, said bitterly: “This is the only union I know that licenses the replacement of live members by dead machines.”

Synthesizers stem from experiments with sound and electricity dating back to the late 1800s. Avant-garde composers in Europe and America intensified exploration of the machines’ artistic applications in the 1940s and 1950s.

In the following decade, they started to enter the popular culture.

With computers has come the widespread use of a controversial process called “sampling,” perhaps the single biggest step in the recent progress of musical technology. A better word is cloning: Record a single note by any musician, from guitarist Eric Clapton to violinist Jascha Heifetz, and you can use their tonal shadings in a synthesized performance of music they never intended to play--for a beer or a car commercial, for example.

Musicians describe jobs at which they played a series of notes into a mike, only to learn later that the notes were to be fed into a computer and rearranged into whole performances they didn’t play--and weren’t paid for.

Noticed Sampling Machine

Describing one such session, Neidlinger said a person who hired him “had me play every note of the chromatic scale.” Later, he noticed a sampling machine hidden in a corner of the room, behind a coffee machine. “Well, he had stolen my sound. If he had asked, I wouldn’t have done it,” said Neidlinger, a former member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He declined to say where this happened.

Mostly, synthesizer players pay for live samples or take them off records and tapes. They carry files of computer diskettes labeled “cello,” “flute,” “bass,” “male voices,” and can mix them together in any combination.

Boddicker took the sound of buzzing bees off a sound-effects record, programmed it down two octaves and found that it sounded “like very weird rich cellos.” He used the sound in a mini-series based on James Michener’s “Space,” where he said it “gave you this feeling of being way out in the middle of nowhere.”

To transform his instrument into 100 violins, 20 flutes, a male chorus or weird cellos, all he needs to do is pop one diskette in and pull another out. He can quickly record a layer of sound over another and play it back to accompany the melodies of a third instrument. For a wine commercial made a few weeks ago, he single-handedly brought parts of a Verdi opera to life.

Sampling technology has been developing for about five years. In 1980, a New York composer named Charles Dodge took the voice of deceased singer Enrico Caruso’s voice off old records and resurrected him--singing Dodge’s melodies. Now there is sampling equipment that can be adapted to various kinds of instruments. A drummer, for example, can pop into a computer a diskette that has been programmed with various sounds, such as someone’s footsteps on a rainy street or snapping celery. Then when he drums on electronically sensitized pads, just as he would beat his conventional drums, the sounds repeat and can be woven into intricate patterns.

Used in ‘Chariots of Fire’

Music from the the latest generation of synthesizers can accompany movies demanding high-tech sounds--or fit into a traditional context. In the film “Chariots of Fire,” which won an Academy Award for best motion picture in 1981, obviously electronic music from a synthesizer dramatized a traditional story about competition and the lure of glory.

“Witness” is one recent movie where the chameleon power of sampling convinced many viewers that they were listening to a traditional orchestra. It is a striking example: music created by the most modern technology helped establish the humanity and conviction of Amish farmers whose rural life is a refuge from modernity.

The dozen acoustic musicians on the “Simon & Simon” sound stage for a recent recording session played percussion, string and wind instruments. At one point, a convincing chorus of string basses flowed from the banks of equipment surrounding Boddicker. Then, later, came a wave of notes from a mass of violins. But the only basses and violins there existed on two of Boddicker’s diskettes.

As he spoke during a short break, Boddicker tinkered with his equipment. A sound very much like an oboe’s arched into the air. But, in that room, no one was playing an oboe. He inserted another diskette and a men’s chorus responded to the quick passage of his fingers over one of the keyboards.

Some studio executives, composers and musicians worry that computerized instruments are robbing recorded music of its human dimension.

“I know something is lost,” said an executive at Universal Studios. “I know that when you have a string section and 20 people, each one touching their string with a bow, but each slightly differently, each musician having a different personality, that the note they play together will reflect the warmth of those personalities.”

The Universal Studios executive was describing an old-fashioned recording session. And though increasingly rare, they can still be found, at Universal and elsewhere. That is what it is like at Paramount, when they record the music for “Dynasty” with a 34-person orchestra.

The musicians, dressed in the casual mode that seems to be a professional habit, play in a studio visible through the large glass window of a control room.

Lush, Symphonic

The music is lush, symphonic. Performers wear earphones that transmit clicks by which everyone can grip a common beat. The conductor on the podium speaks by microphone to the control room behind him. He stands on an elevated podium, a large round clock at his elbow. In front of him, wordless, passes an episode of “Dynasty,” on a huge screen on the studio’s far wall.

He and his orchestra stitch the film and the music together--stops and starts and lingering rests, all of it mapped out on scripts and scores.

It comes time to record the swelling “Dynasty” theme for the end credits. If a studio musician can ever be a star, it’s the one who plays the trumpet for the “Dynasty” theme, the most prominent instrumental solo in the title melody of a show that is among America’s most popular.

The trumpeter for this taping was having a bad day.

The first time he played the melody, it crumbled. The conductor stopped the orchestra and they start again. And again, the high notes of the trumpet cracked.

Trying It Again

“Let’s go at it again,” said a man behind the knobs and dials in the control room. “Everything’s perfect but the trumpet. Let’s do it for the trumpet.”

The trumpet player, an older man, wiped his hand over his face. He twisted his mouth, limbering up the muscles. He ran his fingers silently run over the trumpet’s keys. Then he tried it again, and it worked.

“Good for him!” said one man in the control room.

“Beautiful!” said someone else.

“There’s a human element here that’s really wonderful,” said an assistant to “Dynasty” producer Aaron Spelling after the trumpet solo ended. “Aaron likes the big full sound of an orchestra. Can you imagine a synthesizer doing this?”

Even Boddicker said that he cannot replace the richness of an orchestra. “If you can make things sound human and natural, rather than mechanical and unnatural, that’s the key to a good synthesist.”

He counts “Witness” as his most ambitious effort to get under the emotional skin of an audience. And he succeeded as far as one connoisseur of film music is concerned.

Mancini, a winner of 20 Grammy Awards whose credits range from “The Glenn Miller Story” in 1954 to this year’s “Lifeforce,” said his trained ear immediately told him that Boddicker’s “Witness” music was formed by machines. But he liked what he heard, even though he speaks of an “honesty” no synthesizer can achieve.

When Mancini watches a film, a large part of the experience is musical: “I see a score going in front of my eyes at the same time I’m watching,” he said.

Effective Use

Watching “Witness,” Mancini said, he realized how effectively the music helped depict Philadelphia police officer John Book’s sojourn amid the rural beauty of the countryside that becomes an unlikely backdrop to his violent story.

Mancini compared his viewing of “Witness” to the experience of seeing other films that used synthesizers: “There’s that point where you first sit down and you go, ‘Oh, here’s an orchestra,’ or, ‘There’s another synthesizer.’ But as you got deeper into the movie, you realized the guy was doing it well, rather than just faking it. . . .

“That picture (“Witness”) was several cuts above your average TV show,” Mancini continued. “There were beautiful visual and musical images in that picture, great attention to setting moods. You remember the wheat fields? The music was like playing this great modern mystical sound against the lives of these traditional people.”

If a synthesizer-produced sound track could draw such exultation from so discriminating a viewer, what could the future hold for the Bill Petersons?

Permanent Fixture

At first, Mancini speculated that the current fad of high-tech music might go the way of the once-faddish Bossanova, a dance whose downward popularity curve in the early 1960s he recounted. But, finally, he said, synthesized sound was a more permanent fixture in the musical landscape, to which those people trying to maintain musical careers in the studios must acquiesce or adapt.

“I think Detroit is a perfect analogy,” he concluded. “It is technology vs. the human element. It’s happened in newspapers. It’s happened in many industries. As Charlie Chaplin said, it’s ‘Modern Times.’ ”