The passing of a visionary

Ikutaro Kakehashi has passed away at the age of 87.

One wonders what other opening sentences can be written... Yes, he was the founder of the absolute legend that is Roland Corporation, the inventor and maker of an astonishing number of instruments that not only shaped, but also created, entire musical genres. 

If one says TR-808 or TR-909, then one means the birth of hip-hop and Detroit techno. If one says Juno or JP-8000, well, not sure where to even begin to enumerate the impact of these keyboards. If one says Jupiter-8, then one is basically lost for words. 

But then... he was also one of the two godfathers of MIDI, the standard for the way in which musical instruments and computers can digitally talk to each other. 

So much quasi-sensationalist and utterly tendentious (plus ill-informed) press has asked the question: is MIDI out of date, is MIDI limited...

MIDI was and still is an absolutely breathtaking future-proofed invention of a standard interface that outlasted countless others, and it is still going strong.

There was the invention of sound recording, which we take for granted now without realizing what it meant to be able to take music from the performer into the homes and hands of countless people who maybe never ever had the chance to see or hear that performer....

Then there was the birth of MIDI... 

How many of us can truly realize nowadays what it meant to be able, for the first time, to record an improvisation - not in sounds, but in actual  musical score terms of what was played, and then be able to change and layer on top of it, building up vast arrangements? 

How many nowadays truly realize what MIDI allowed suddenly, in unprecedented ways, in terms of capturing the details of a performance and then giving the musician the ability to edit all the musical information it captured, all the keyboard and controller events during playing?

Also, in terms of an interface, it is the genius of future-proofing. Since the decades of its inception, and the decades since it was turned into practical reality by the likes of Ikutaro Kakehashi, MIDI has managed to allow vastly different instrument of vastly different core technology to talk to each other seamlessly. 

The evolution of electronic instruments, studio gear and music software has been mind-boggling since MIDI was born, and it still allows all these immensely different gadgets to talk to each other in a standardized way.

A technical Grammy award given to him and Dave Smith is just the tip of the iceberg of significance and recognition... 

Entire musical genres would not have been possible without Kakehashi-san and his immeasurable contribution to musical instruments. 

Active to his very last years,he never stopped thinking about music, musical instruments, and musicians... "I Believe in Music" one of his book titles says... very, very few people can say that apparent cliche to be actually true and not only an expression, but also a living proof of one's life's body of work...

Rest in peace, Kakehashi-san...

Resurrection of an Analogue

Photo: Engadget

Klaus Schulze (in)famously entitled one of his 1980s tracks Death of an Analogue... whilst entirely switched to digital gear, for a while at least... before reversed the admittedly overdone hasty switch-over...

In recent years we have seen a series of analogue revivals, after a long analogue modelling era... Most big names, just to think of Korg and Roland, have released "true" analogue synths and/or revived classics.

Now Moog, as also presented at the recent Moogfest, have revived the legendary Minimoog Model D. Well, actually the first ever Minimoog model that has seen the light of day as far as the public is concerned (previous models were prototypes).

Whilst it retains the original circuitry, it has a few additions like dedicated LFO and, of course, MIDI.

Aside from the news of the most recent resurrection of a true classic, on the surface one may feel that the rapid and increasing analogue revival trend is somehow the opposite of an expected continuous innovation in the field of electronic instruments...

As someone commented on a MusicRadar article, it is the pinnacle of irony how some artists and producers rave about their love for the vintage analogue sound, whilst they compress the life out of the music material...

However, this clash of worlds is not new by any means. There will be nostalgic adventures in what represents the past for many, there will be excesses and mistaken philosophies in using the vintage classics or the brand new 'true' analogue beasts.

As long as the market does not drive the manufacturers to a point where they scale back investment in innovation, while chasing the trend-guaranteed quick buck with their resurrected classics, nor do we increasingly define (as annoyingly certain camps do) the most here-and-now sound as the one based on the use of retro gear, it's fine...

Let's not forget that there have also been hundreds, if not thousands, of man-years of effort invested into the digital modelling of the vintage classics, whether in the form of HW or SW products - so in that sense, perhaps with different affordability in some cases, the resurrection of the 'real' things seems to make more sense... and one hopes that the research & development efforts can then go into the new innovative gear rather...

Surely, some riding the trend hastily and opportunistically get close to the point of heralding the Death of a Digital in a (misconceived) world where just using the vintage classics is automatically chic... but once the initial overshoots of the system settle, even in the case of this new-by-revival movement, we shall get the real gems, as always...