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Sign upSynthesizers, BPM, vocoders, mixing, choruses - how the sound works under the hood.
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14 January 1985: the first No Jacket Required single. #1 Billboard, UK #12. The nonsense word came from a drum improv; Collins tried “Julie” and “Susan” - sounded worse. Four days at The Townhouse with Hugh Padgham. The 3+3+2 syncopation lifted from Prince's “1999” - Collins admitted in 2016. Album 25M copies.
February 1986: Prince wrote “Kiss” for Mazarati then took it back. #1 Billboard for 2 weeks, blocking The Bangles' “Manic Monday”. Sunset Sound, one night. Three elements: a Hohner G3T acoustic, LinnDrum and Prince's falsetto. No bass, no synths. 1987 Grammy for Best R&B Performance.
May 1984: Prince releases a song WITHOUT a bassline. Warner Bros. refused to put it out; Prince insisted. #1 Billboard for 5 weeks - the best-selling US single of 1984. Sunset Sound, one day, Prince plays everything himself: LinnDrum + OB-Xa + Stratocaster. The lyric is autobiographical - about his parents' 1968 divorce.
October 1986: Jon wanted the song cut from the album - 12 New Jersey teens voting on tracks saved it. #1 Billboard for 4 weeks, Slippery When Wet 28M copies. Sambora's Heil Talk Box intro, key change E minor → F minor for the final chorus. Tommy and Gina - Italian-American names for the East Coast audience.
September 1982: Prince stacks three drum machines at once - LinnDrum, Oberheim DMX and TR-808 - with a three-vocalist trade-off. 8M singles and the idiom “party like it's 1999” entering English.
January 1981: Collins's solo debut. Engineer Hugh Padgham accidentally invents gated reverb through an SSL talkback mic. Three minutes of quiet, then an eight-second drum break - pop's most recognised fill. UK #2, US #19, 6M copies. The drowning-man myth is fiction: it's about Collins's divorce from Bertorelli.
October 1984: the Juno-106 at $1,295 - an affordable 6-voice polysynth with built-in chorus and MIDI. 66,000 units in four years, second best-selling 80s analogue after the DX7. Heard on Madonna's “La Isla Bonita”, Sting's “Russians”, a-ha, Human League. The BBD chorus burns out; in 2024 originals sell for $1,500-2,500.
The Yamaha CS-80 (1977) was the most expensive production synth of the 70s: $6,900 then, only 2,400 ever built. Vangelis (1943-2022) owned three and used them on Chariots of Fire (1981, Oscar), Blade Runner (1982), 1492 Conquest of Paradise. Polyphonic aftertouch - its unique feature, never reproduced digitally.
December 1982, Hamamatsu: Roland ships the TB-303 as “an automatic bass guitarist”. A flop - 10,000 units in 18 months, discontinued in 1984, leftovers dumped at $50-100. In 1987 Chicago's Phuture, working without the manual, cranked the resonance and stumbled on the “acid” sound. Today - $3,500-5,500.
January 1980, San Rafael: 25-year-old Roger Linn ships the first drum machine with digital samples of real drums. $4,995, Intel 8048, 12 voices, 8-bit. Prince owned ten and cut Purple Rain on them. In four years - 525 units sold and the sound of an era; Linn went bankrupt in 1986 and Linn moved to Akai to design the MPC60.
Late 1979, Sydney: Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel ship the first commercial digital sampler at $30,000 a unit. A light pen instead of a mouse, 8-bit sampling. Over six years the Fairlight rewrote 80s production - Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Trevor Horn's ORCH5 stab.
December 1983: Roland ships the TR-909 - a hybrid of analogue synthesis and digital samples. 10,000 units in 18 months and the line is killed as a loss. Ten years later a used unit costs ten times the new price: Frankie Knuckles, Larry Heard, Derrick May pick them up. Roland's flop became the pillar of house and techno.
May 1983, NAMM in Chicago: Yamaha unveils the DX7. In four years it sells 200,000 units - more than the Jupiter-8 and OB-Xa combined. Chowning's FM synthesis turned out near-impossible to programme; the E.PIANO 1 preset went onto half the decade's hits. A $1,995 box rewrote the sound of an era.
September 1981: Roland unveils the eight-voice Jupiter-8 at the LA NAMM show. In the three years before discontinuation, the instrument rewrites European pop's palette and becomes the spine of Milan Italo-disco studios. $5,295, 58 knobs, no MIDI - 8 voices, two oscillators each, five waveforms.
BPM describes tempo, not time signature, genre or energy. Calculate it by hand, resolve half-time readings, understand tempo maps and MIDI, and choose a useful value for mixing.
A detailed look at the mixing process for Italo Disco tracks in the mid-'80s - the technology, the approaches, and the engineers' tricks.
Tarzan Boy, Self Control, Boys Boys Boys - why can't you forget these choruses? A breakdown of structure, melodic devices, and the psychology of Italo Disco hooks.
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