The New Original Timbral Orchestra (TONTO)

[punkdrew]

The first polyphonic multi-modular synthesizer, built by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff (in 1969!)



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[Parts]

It looks like the bridge of a spaceship   Very easy on the eye but a bitch to have to move somewhere

[earthboundmisfit]

What does it do? How does it work?

[matthe]

its a massive modular analog synth.

it makes all sorts of synth sounds by patching the modules together, turning the knobs, and prolly hooked to a keyboard to trigger the sounds.

basically it takes a ton of knowledge of oscilators, filters, LFOs, sequencers, etc, just to make a single sound.

i could prolly make it make noise after hours of fooling with it, but id deffinetly need a klonapin. its a signal flow nightmare and a lot of work to get one sound. no memory too, so if you want to recreate patches at a later date, you need pics of all the patches and settings and a good hour and lots of luck to get it back to where it was(which is actually impossible)

in a nut shell,

what does it do? ----it makes really cool fucking sounds
how does it work?-----thats a really long answer

[matthe]

technological advances have made these smaller, more riliable, and easier to use, but they dont sound quite the same. i can appreaciate the old stuff but i prefer something like this...

[earthboundmisfit]

^^That does the work of the monstrosity punkdrew posted?

[punkdrew]

Practically, yes. Malcolm Cecil has been working on a touring version of TONTO (basically a "virtual TONTO") and that module would handle a lot of the work. In fact, Cecil featured the virtual TONTO at a music festival in the UK earlier this year.

Cecil and Margouleff started with a Moog Series III, then added two more, and kept adding patch bays, modules etc. until they had a mutli-performer polyphonic unit. Due to circuits heating, pitches were constantly shifting, which made recording TONTO a very...interesting task.

They recorded several albums with TONTO, the first being Zero Time. This album also features their first attempt at vocal synthesis (on "Riversong," and no, I don't think that's them singing through a Vocoder). This attracted the attention of a young musician named Steveland Wonder, and the results were Talking Book, Fullfillingness' First Finale and Innervisions.

TONTO did manage one live performance--either for The Midnight Special or Don Kirshner--in the mid-1970s, with Margouleff, Cecil and Billy Preston running the Mad Queen's Race. (If you can find the clip, you'll see what I mean.)

[matthe]

^^That does the work of the monstrosity punkdrew posted?

it does it using microprocessors, that model the analog circuits from tonto and the like. it actually has far more capability than the tonto, but the downside is it has the sterile quantized sound of digital circuits, unlike the fat warm earthy and gritty sound of analog. much like tape vs cd, vynl vs ipod or mesa boogie vs a pod.


MOTU (a badass company) has some very cool software that now allows analog synths to be controlled by computer via control voltage and audio signals through a standard audio interface. this means no more repatching(if you got the money for lots of interface), automatic real time tuning, memory, automation, etc. this is truly the best of both worlds, using the nice sounding analog circuits with the flexibility of computer control.

http://www.motu.com/products/software/volta

[matthe]

Practically, yes. Malcolm Cecil has been working on a touring version of TONTO (basically a "virtual TONTO") and that module would handle a lot of the work. In fact, Cecil featured the virtual TONTO at a music festival in the UK earlier this year.

Cecil and Margouleff started with a Moog Series III, then added two more, and kept adding patch bays, modules etc. until they had a mutli-performer polyphonic unit. Due to circuits heating, pitches were constantly shifting, which made recording TONTO a very...interesting task.

They recorded several albums with TONTO, the first being Zero Time. This album also features their first attempt at vocal synthesis (on "Riversong," and no, I don't think that's them singing through a Vocoder). This attracted the attention of a young musician named Steveland Wonder, and the results were Talking Book, Fullfillingness' First Finale and Innervisions.

TONTO did manage one live performance--either for The Midnight Special or Don Kirshner--in the mid-1970s, with Margouleff, Cecil and Billy Preston running the Mad Queen's Race. (If you can find the clip, you'll see what I mean.)

live show on that? youd have to have 10 min intermission between songs, and a orgy of patch monkeys... or VOLTA^^

[punkdrew]

and lots of Klonopin or pharma equivalent, as previously noted.