JS Bach - Prelude in D Major (BWV532)
This 1981 performance features the second generation of my live setup. The ARP Omni-2 was replaced by a custom 8-voice Oberheim OB-X. The other instruments are an ARP Pro/DGX (on top of the OB-X), an ARP Odyssey (on the right), and an ARP 2600 (on the left and used for the pedal part in this piece).
The tonal palette was limited by several factors. The OB-X was not multi-timbral and could therefore play only one sound at a time. The keyboard was not velocity sensitive, so any variations in sound had to be done with volume and/or timbre pedals. The Pro-DGX and Odyssey could be used only for occasional solo lines. The busy manual parts in this piece left very little time for realtime tweaking. In spite of these limitations, I tried to include a few sounds from the "switched-on" era, which already seemed like the distant past in 1981.
The pedalboard was built in 1978 by the Custom Engineering Group at ARP. A Reisner 32-note AGO pedalboard was fitted with the keyboard electronics from the ARP 2600.
This piece is one of the few that Bach wrote with two pedal parts. Near the end, you can hear the pedal notes jumping from unison to biphonic mode when I momentarily let go of one of the pedal notes - the wide intervals made it impossible to play continuously legato.
So yes, it was primitive by today’s standards, but it was fun and challenging to play Bach live on synthesizers back in the early days of synthesizer polyphony.
Apologies for the low-res video and audio (which is from the mic on the camcorder).
Cheers,
Don M
PS - If you're feeling more traditional, you can listen to my 1970 performance of the prelude on a four-manual pipe organ on this channel.
Негізгі бет Bach Live on the Oberheim OB-X (1981) - Don Muro
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