Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: MOTM

I was fantasizing this afternoon about a book where each chapter 
was a sound (for example: doppler train effect, explosion, flute) and 
the chapter broke down the start to finish construction of a patch. it 
would come with an audio CD that would have a bunch of tracks on it, 
one could pop the CD in a player and when prompted in the book hit play 
for "fig 3: noise", etc.

This is an interesting idea. The down side is the "encyclopedia of patches" concept -- this will quickly lead to an Encyclopedia Britanica size book which no one would ever look at (let alone write).

What would be really nice would be "An Intermediate to Advanced Users Guide to Analog EM Techniques." One that did a lot of work on the conceptual level of what modules CAN do beyond how they are typically used. For example, it's only recently that I've heard of people plugging the output of a spring reverb into its own input for chaotic effects (I think there maybe intervening VCAs or attenuators -- I haven't tried to yet, I'm too scared of blowing something up).

I really like the idea of having accompanying audio examples. I remember a book I used in an analog EM class about 20 years ago which came with a little 7" 33 RPM record which had many audio examples. Unfortunately, the book, "Synthesis" by Herbert Deutsch, is not very useful as a technical resource.

It is hard for me to imagine how to organize the topics in such a tome (and of course maybe it shouldn't be organized but rather just a series of essays). I can imagine certain chapters like "How to get interesting attack phase chiff sounds", or "42 short thoughts about VCO cross modulation", "1001 things your EM instructor told you not to do -- but was wrong!"

All that said, the Alan Strange book is a very good resource. "Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques, and Controls" is very much written from a users point of view. To avoid the brand specific manual problem which you mentioned, he uses many different brands of synth for examples. A great score section at the end which shows a bunch of complex patches. These are available in reprint (for about $45 to $50).

I'd recommend his book and Hal Chamberlin's "Musical Applications of Microprocessors" before the ARP 2600 manual I mentioned earlier. Some people (myself included) also like the Roland System 100 manual. I already mentioned the Serge manual (I think it's on the web somewhere -- very advanced, great for encouraging the weirdness that Serge was made to do, but very Serge specific). I also like a book (edited) by Appleton and Perera, "The Development and Practice of Electronic Music" -- though only a small section is dedicated to the VC synthesizer, it is very good (which was written by Joel Chadabe).

There were many other books from the 70s that were actually very good resources, though most of these books were written as textbooks and had the "smorgasbord" problem (i.e., a little bit of history, a little bit of composition, a little bit of acoustics, a little bit of electronic theory, a little bit of technical usage, etc.). I think you'd have to take those into account too.

Good luck,
John B.