Over the past couple of days I have been in contact with Don Tillman. Mr.
Tillman worked at the I.W. Turner Company that made the Electronic Music
Lab synth modules. There are pictures of these modules in our group photo
archive inside the "Mystery Mod Box" folder. I thought members here might
be interested in what he had to say about these pieces and he has given me
the OK to post some of his comments.
I will also post a pdf of this in our files section. Many thanks to Don
Tillman,
http://www.till.com/Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 00:37:04 -0700
> From: Mike <digiboy@...>
REPLY From: Don Tillman > Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 01:17:50 -0400
> Hi Don,
> I host a small yahoo user group list for those interested in
> vintage synthesizers that were made by a company called "EML"
> also known as "Electronic Music Laboratories" located in Vernon,
> Connecticut.
Hi Mike.
Ah yes, the old Electrocomp.
> One of our members found your website (Isn't the internet an
> amazing thing?). It appears that you worked at I. W. Turner
> around the time the modules were made and I wonder if you could
> shed any light on what they were all about. Was there any
> connection at all with the Vernon Connecticut EML company?
Yeah, that's me.
There's no connection at all between the Turner boxes and the
Electrocomp folks. "Electronic Music Lab" was used as a generic term
there.
> It's interesting because these pieces look like they may have
> been for educational use.
Exactly.
The founder of I.W. Turner, William Fish, was by profession an
accomplished high school music teacher and band director, and the
company's product direction was with music education in mind.
The first Turner product was an electromechanical metronome.
The Turner Electronic Music Lab was a collection of small synth
modules intended to introduce children to the elements of electronic
music in elementary school music classes. At the time this was
innovative, and I guess it would still be innovative today. As such,
the modules were not precision low drift devices, but were battery
powered easy to use units that didn't get damaged if you threw them
around (and wouldn't hurt anybody they were thrown at!). Students
could work at the units individually or in groups. The tactile nature
of an oscillator you can hold in your hand was considered important.
They were sold through distributors that catered to schools and not
through regular music stores.
[Don took a look at the images of the "Electronic Music Lab" modules in
our Photos section]
Yep, that's them.
The blue and red boxes are somebody's homebrew and not Turner units.
The Sequencer is there, meaning it's a later set. The Sequencer is
entirely my design and a very cool sounding machine.
The Ring Modulator is my design also. It's pretty decent.
I redesigned many of the other units. (Not the mixer and Theremin;
those stayed with the original design throughout their product life.)
Playing the Theremin with the Sequencer through the Ring Modulator is
an awful lot of fun.
> Do you recall if your IW Turner
> sequencer could be used to drive other synths or was it strictly
> meant only to work with their own modules?
No, it was completely self contained. None of the Turner boxes dealt
with control voltages.
There were two versions of the sequencer; one in a plastic box that
was sold with the Electronic Music Lab modules, and one in an aluminum
box that was actually sold through music stores.
The Sequencer was a square wave clock and a 4-bit binary counter, and
together those five signals effectively generated a 32-note binary
counting sequence, and the five bits were mixed down with
negative-zero-positive knobs to drive a sawtooth VCO.
Set the knobs to a positive binary weighting (full, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8,
1/16) and you get a staircase up, set the knobs to a negative binary
weighting and you get a staircase down, set the knobs to 12-o'clock
and you get a still pitch. Most other settings generated musically
interesting somewhat random sounding sequences.
Something like a poor-man's "Muse", if you've heard of that device.
-- Don