Before it got trendy to sample everything and recycle it bent out of shape, Larry Fast was doing it. He stepped out from behind his much-used Fairlight to tell Dan Daley the news behind the noise

IF PROGRAMMERS are the new breed of musician, like electric guitarists were thirty years ago, then Larry Fast must be the new Les Paul — or at least the Scotty Moore.

He may have been the first most people heard of obvious Fairlight usage; his work on Peter Gabriel's albums was breaking ground while others were merely breaking wind and sampling it.

He's not just a sample man, though — he's also renowned for his synth-programming ability. He's been called for sessions where he doesn't play a note but makes his presence felt with his touch on the sound generators. In addition to Gabriel, Fast's more recent work can be heard all over records by Hall and Oates, Foreigner and on his own series of solo albums, recorded under the name Synergy.

Fast, who grew up in Livingston, New Jersey, took piano lessons but switched to guitar in high school because it was more affordable. "When electronic instruments began to evolve, and it was a keyboard evolution," he says, "I really focused in on keyboards again." His fascination with electronics dates back to childhood, where tinkering with lightbulbs and batteries led to tearing apart tape recorders and then rebuilding them. "Electronic music was a perfect fusion of both of my interests: music and electronics," Fast explains.

It was Robert Moog's synthesizer that began it all for Fast. Moog and others like him "took music synthesis out of the institutional setting and the research labs and put it in the hands of individuals." Describing himself as "an advanced hobbyist" at the time, Fast's electronic talents were of value to the Moog company, and he became involved in the prototype stage of the Polymoog. His input was integral to the development of that seminal instrument. Today Fast stays in touch with the Moog people and with various other manufacturers such as Yamaha and Sequential Circuits, "I like having them bounce their ideas off me," he says. "I give them feedback, and I get a real good idea of where they're going next."

For all his technical competence, Fast, 32, doesn't dream in waveforms. For him, the melodic concept is primary and it "exists almost by itself. Then I've got to decide which of those electronic instruments will be the best one with which to get that expressed idea out of my head and committed to tape."

Fast's career began in earnest in 1975, when, he decided to pursue his ultimate goal: composing and creating music for the synthesizer by himself, and thus was born Synergy.

Defined by Fast as "melodically based, richly orchestrated electronic music," Synergy has proved economically viable over the course of six albums, with another album expected out this year.

Around the same time, Fast began playing with Nektar, an archetypal European art-rock ensemble. In 1975 Nektar invited him to play on their Recycled EP. The group then asked him to reproduce the recorded sounds for its 1976 tour, for which Fast brought along a Minimoog, a Freeman String Symphonizer (later replaced by the Polymoog) and a Moog model 15, which he still uses, though in some ways it almost constitutes a museum piece. A couple of early Oberheim sequencers rounded out his arsenal.

It was through Nektar that Fast connected with another pioneer in synthesizer music, Peter Gabriel. "Of all the people I've worked with," says Fast, "Peter probably has the most understanding of the equipment. He is capable of doing a lot of synthesizer work on his own, which frees me to really go chasing down the exotic and the esoteric for his records."

The track "Shock the Monkey" from Gabriel's 1982 album illustrates their teamwork. The synth line on that song was devised by Gabriel while working with a Prophet and a LinnDrum, and the sounds were a joint effort, with Fast combining a file sound he labelled "saxy — a sexy saxophone sound" and a marimba sound on a Fairlight. "They were combined into sort of a compiled file," he says, "so that it was an instrument made up of both the percussive front end of a marimba and the tail-off of a sax sound." The track was recorded with Gabriel playing the Prophet along with a LinnDrum, as well as with drummer Jerry Marotta and bassist Tony Levin. Then Fast went to work, adding the Fairlight and processing the signal with an Eventide harmonizer (and possibly a pitch shifter; his memory is vague on that detail).

In between tours and albums with Gabriel, Fast has also found time to work with Hall and Oates (X-Static, Private Eyes and H20), Foreigner (4 and Agent Provocateur) and Air Supply.

In addition, he's worked with producer Jim Steinman on Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and Barbra Streisand's "Left in the Dark."

Many of the calls he gets involve programming and processing rather than playing; "It's a matter of being a very specialized kind of record production rather than being a musician." Synergy actually functions as a sort of calling card for Fast, a sampler that displays his abilities and his repertoire of sounds.

When it comes to his approach to programming, Fast says, "Many times it will be a matter of working off something fairly conventional, a simulation of, say, an orchestral sound or some other pre-existing sound, and then taking it for a little trip and seeing where it ends up," he laughs. "Sometimes it's purely experimental and it's just a matter of some kind of serendipity with the music, whether it ends up as something interesting or not. Other times the programming approach will be more concrete. It might depend upon the piece of hardware that's being used, whether it's a sampling machine, a programmable digital machine, or one of the more old-fashioned analogue instruments.

"One of the beauties of electronic music is that you really have such a wide spectrum open to you. But I find that I still need a home base, a working vocabulary with which to start out. Otherwise, there's no way to get organized."

Is there such a thing as a Larry Fast sound? "I suppose there is. Other people tell me there is, but maybe I'm too close to it to tell." However, Fast is able to objectively recognize what it is that makes him so sought after. The acts he's played with were "looking for the special kind of production technique that I can bring to a record," he explains, "in an area where nobody else connected to the album has much expertise. The artists usually know what they want. It's up to me to know what the act sounds like and what kind of hardware I'm going to have to bring along to make it happen."

Computers are another favourite pastime, as is hooking them up to his synths. "That was another outgrowth of being an electronics hobbyist," he says. "When I left school I no longer had access to a computer, and I missed it terribly. So when the home-computer thing started around 1975, I was there right away." He began with early home computers and by 1977 was working with the Apple, on which he stores synth programs.

Ever the tinkerer, he relates: "Early on I had an Oberheim sequencer that was good but not overly flexible; it was not microcomputer based. By using a microcomputer, I could simulate what the Oberheim did and then enhance it. I came up with a sequencer that allowed for error correction, for moving blocks of notes around and stringing them together. If all that sounds familiar, it's because that's what current-day drum machines like the LinnDrum and current-day sequencers like the Roland family and others are now doing."

Fast's collection [is] eclectic yet not burdened down with one-shot toys. "The basic synths that I drag around to sessions are the Minimoog and a Yamaha DX7, both MIDI'd. The sequencer I've been using is the Roland MSQ-700. And I still swear by Moog modular equipment. I've got several racks of that. I've got an old Oberheim Xpander and another rack of analog synthesizer equipment made by RSF Kobol, a French company; it's very much like the Moog stuff but has a more European sound. I also have two Prophet-5s." In addition, Fast has access to a Fairlight owned by Peter Gabriel's organization.

He considers his outboard equipment as important as the synths themselves. "One of the things that I find in dealing with electronic music is that it is a very lifeless form of music if you don't give it some kind of acoustic environment," he says, "and I don't like to rely on somebody else saying. 'Sure, we'll put it on in the mix.'" His assortment includes an Eventide H-910 harmonizer, an MXR pitch shifter, a DeltaLab DL-2 stereo digital delay line, a Roland Dimension D ("for ambience") and a Lexicon PCM60 digital reverb.

This veteran of the synthesizer is pleased to observe that the use of synths and synthesized music in general is becoming more sophisticated, but, he says, "I tend not to take it too seriously, because it's all just for fun. I enjoy it and make my living doing it, but I try not to attach so much importance to it that it makes me crazy."