(to be said in the voice of Vivian Stanshall...)

Yes but I've always been very fond of the bass guitar parts on METAMATIC.

I'm guessing at the forthcoming Metamatic concerts,
the line-up will be the usual John & Louis one,
and no-one will be along to play bass...?

Good point (LOL) - I think that Jake Durant was brought in as bass parts were very "manual" pre midi or reliable sequencers becoming availiable.Witness Chris Cross on the Systems of Romance material live.
I have shamelessly offered my services to John many times for guitar/bass should the material require it...............!!!

I don't think there will be any real bass.... nor will John be sporting his big blonde quiff!

Auch come on, nobody with fingers would need a sequencer to play stuff like the bassline to "Underpass".

I remember being slightly surprised though when I read John Barker explain that the WHOLE album was played manually - particularly the jiggerty octave bits throughout 'No-one Driving'!

I'm no expert but I like it when it turns out that things which seemed so hi-tech back then were really quite lo-tech and 'manual'. I read something similar in an interview with W Cann about recording Vienna .. a lot of it seemed to have been done on a biscuit tin.

Willing, able and ready to report for duty.

I wish...

:p

Davy.

The repeating tenor synth on No One Driving was done by hocketing with the Roland Space echo doing a close single delay. It required much rehearsal and a steady nerve, coupled with drop-ins.

Hope that clears up that one.

Yeah, but which brand?

Arnotts? lol ...


Thanks for that info, John.

A GIANT thanks for this information John. Usually technical informations about Metamatic, and pop-synth in general, are limited to devices only. This description looks like there is also a virtuosity aspect also involved in Metamatic?

I love it when John Barker tells us all these Metamatic facts

Lemme get this right though - cos I think I've "hocketed" many times myself, I just never knew that was what it was called! lol
The wikipedia describes it in terms of mediaeval music, but the synth equivalent is that thing where you have a monosynth, and if the note-triggering priority is the right way round, you can hold one finger on a low (or high, if it's the other way round) note and stab out other notes with another finger, leaving a gap between them so that the oscillator keeps zipping down to the held note in between them?
And then if you put an echo repeat on it of a suitable length you can get really cool sounding things as the echos overlap in different bits of the gaps ...

I also do the same with a roland sh-2000. I think it can even make a mono-synth better than a polyphonic since you don't have to bother with
chords with the left hand. In my case I let the mono-machine cut-off control make the hard part camouflaging the mistakes, and once it's
learned it is not difficult so it is a very good technique to compose-improvise. I find it tends to give the music a baroque flavour - maybe it
has something to do with the numbered bass concept at that point.
Since we're speaking here, I must have been influenced by the sound of Metamatic when I found it. I don't think any prog-rock group played that
way notwithstanding their interest in classical music.
I will experiment the echo repeat thing next time. Thanks again, and yes I'm a Barker supporter too.

well, you'll hear Rick Wakeman (arrrgh!) doing that style of monosynth playing a lot - if anyone is brave enough to hear that brown live Yes double album from 1972 ("Yessongs"), when he does his solo spot with the Six Wives of Henry VIII stuff, he does a couple of miniMoog widdles using that note-priority-monosynth trick thing - but he doesn't use echos to build it up into anything nice and hockety, he instead just plays it as fast as he can lol

So I fear it was not only Metamatic.
A school mate's older sister had The six wives and it was too early to prevent the damage.
However, speaking of progressive, I think the alienated way Curved Air played synths could predate some new wave styles (and don't you find the presence of violin has some resemblance with the first Ultravox formation? apart the singer looks more close to a hippie Siouxie), and even the first Kraftwerk and various Kraut rockers were born under these kind of influences.
In general there is an ingenuous way these interchanges happen that is exciting showing music living more from kitsch than from good taste so to say.

ah now you mention it, I'm sure Irmin Schmidt of Can used to do his fair share of hocketing with the old two-finger stabbing technique. He'd also wear chainmail on stage
Good old Can.
I had the pleasure to join Damo Suzuki on stage a while back there on one of his impro gigs, it was marvellous fun (for us if not for the audience ;-)

Exactly, Can was one of the names I omitted for brevity.
A live inventory of techniques sharing like this is useful for a homegrown lifelong project I have you know. It's about the idea of musical figures in new wave synthetization being acknowledged in their distinctive way like those of jazz varieties are, so to experiment academic improvisations and eventual fundraising.
I'm delighted for your lucky experience with Damo. Thanks.

I saw Apparat Organ Quartet last year and those guys are playing everything manually as well.
Check out this live performance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTIAvopghRg

Wow! So unusual to see a band actually all playing stuff with their fingers like that!
Transformed it from being a really naff cheesy retro thing into something really quite exciting!