Craig Anderton talks to Wendy Carlos, one of the world's foremost exponents of the synthesizer art. The result is an insight into the working methods, philosophies and frustrations of this unique musician.

You probably know that Wendy Carlos recorded the best-selling classical album of all time, Switched-On Back, did the soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Tron; and recently released Switched-On Bach 2000, a deep, complex, and expressive 25th anniversary remake of S-OB that benefits from 25 years of technological progress and Wendy's artistic progress. What you may not know is that Wendy can hack code, keeps a soldering iron ready in the studio for the many mods she does for her gear, is very involved with restoring soundtracks for classic films, chases eclipses around the world — and is one of the brightest people you'll ever meet.

Rather than conduct a traditional interview where my questions would take up a lot of space (you want to know about her, not me!), I've excerpted the 'greatest hits' of over two hours of casual conversation, loosely organized into various topics.

Why S-OB 2000 took much longer to make than S-OB

"One reason is that when you're doing a project like this, you always find yourself needing a voice you don't have, so you have to stop and rebuild it. Yet it's much harder to program synthesizers today. Look at what you're forced to use: a rotary knob/slider/buttons that all control the same parameter at the same time. You can't even control more than one parameter simultaneously.

"I usually worked 12 hours minimum to 16 maximum every day, and sometimes wouldn't even be aware of what day it was. Starting a session and just picking up where I left off was difficult, though, because every third day or so I'd have to troubleshoot some new major bug — was it one of the MIDI Time Pieces, the Mac II fx, peripheral equipment — I had more damn creative bugs! It was exasperating, because troubleshooting kills the pacing. The creative part would have to go on the back burner while the analytical side got involved."

What's wrong with synth film scores

"Typical synth-based film scores are done with an organ approach — something for the left hand, something for the right, then start the drum machine. Maybe you make another pass and put in some drones or string lines, but there's little awareness of the whole art of counterpoint or orchestration, where the instruments only play a fraction of the notes here and there. The important thing is the interlocking of all the lines coming in and out, and that doesn't come from two hands working on a Wurlitzer theatre organ."

On working as a solo artist

"Rachel (Elkind, who worked with Wendy on the original S-OB) was an extraordinarily fine producer. After she decided she didn't want to work in the music industry any more because of the jive people, chauvinism, greed and liars, it took a long while before I was able to really feel comfortable working alone. I find it very sad that we're so solitary about music these days. I certainly wouldn't mind working with other people again."

Unbalanced vs. balanced gear

"I've been using unbalanced gear since 1967, and never had a problem with it because I do it right. One copper penny attaches to the back of the card rack in the console; this goes to the aluminium screen underneath the carpet, which grounds to all the aluminium foil-backed sheet rock that turns this whole studio room into a Faraday cage [Wendy lives in the middle of New York and is bombarded with Radio Frequency Interference on a 24-hour basis]. Everything grounds only at one point — there are no ground loops anywhere, the power line comes in properly, and all the audio is +4dBu. The computer and MIDI cords come off on one side of each rack and are separate from the audio.

"There's another secret to making this work: outputs should be very low impedance, inputs should be quite high impedance — 5 to 10k or more. You should never draw current from an output, just pick off a voltage."

The golden ear syndrome and digital audio

"The question about any gear is 'what does it sound like?' When CD players first came out, there were all these crazies with oscilloscopes showing that the effect of a brick wall filter is to give a picture of a square wave that's not really ringing; it just looks something like ringing. So they designed these ridiculous circuits to make the picture look less like it was ringing, which resulted in a generation of CD players that sounded much worse — but they did make pretty pictures.

"That's what's wrong with the whole golden ear arrogance, you know, people who don't believe in A-B testing. The only reason I got the Akai 12-track was because I ran some tests. I recorded very high quality piano on two tracks, then fed the output through the console to two other tracks, then took that and fed it to two other tracks, and so on until I'd recorded on all 12 tracks. Then I compared the last two tracks with the first two. Aside from a little console noise, the sound was identical. You sure can't do this with any analogue machine, even with Dolby SR."

Why Wendy likes tape

"I'm a little old-fashioned. I cut my teeth on multitracks and like the idea of a medium that doesn't crash — my temperament isn't suited to the more fussy nature of computerdom. Everything ends up on the 12-track, and it's mixed from there. Sometimes I do need to premix, but S-OB 2000 didn't require that."

On Surround sound

"It's a compromise — a very good one, but a compromise. Dolby warns people doing film mixes that they should try not to have something coming from all directions at one time, because the whole matrix collapses into the centre of the room. What you really have is two sources that can be squirted out of four directions, and ghost directions anywhere in between, but if you have more than two active, dominant parts that instantaneously hit out at the same millisecond, they'll fight one another. The way to work with the matrix is to always break the entrances of events into different directions to favour either the left/right or front/back axis.

"I strongly believe the left and right channels should be quite far off to your sides. There should be energy coming from your extreme left and right; you shouldn't listen with only three speakers on the front wall subtending no more than 50 or 60 degrees, and a couple of speakers behind you — you're denying the ears one of the best parts of their binaural abilities. You're better off having a couple of side speakers, even if they only receive duplicates of the left and right channel signals.

"Dolby matrix is also a good way to mix for regular stereo and headphones because it has both in-phase and out of phase information, which you can't get with normal pan-potting. Just remember that when you put things on the surround channel, to mix in at a much lower level into the front channel, with a slight delay and a little treble rolled off, so that if people hear it in mono they won't lose the out-of-phase track completely. It compromises the matrix slightly, but this is so slight it's good insurance for mono systems."

Wendy's home-made console

"There are no equalisers on the inputs, only on the busses; the mixer is basically a passive console with the fewest number of gain stages possible. I'm using Spectrasonic preamp cards that are quite old now — but they still sound a whole lot better than the op amp consoles I've used. I've rebuilt the mixer three times; it's clean, quiet, and has very little distortion. Yet it's a small console by today's standards and has very few bells and whistles. It certainly doesn't look like anything on the cover of a recording magazine."

The Swiss Army Knife of audio

"I think I'm an equal opportunity engineer and will use any gear if it does the job properly, except that I tend to be very prejudiced against boxes that give you a compressor, limiter, phaser, expander, denoiser, delay, reverb, and microwave oven for $400. When you're working on something you need a specific tool so you reach for a good screwdriver or hammer, not a Swiss Army knife — you use that only when you're camping or on vacation. There's a lot of good, inexpensive single-purpose equipment and that's mostly what I use."

One motive for doing S-OB 2000

"I wanted to make people more aware of alternative tunings. If we don't use the great resource of alternative tunings that manufacturers have permitted us, they'll eventually vanish.

"I did an interview on National Public Radio where they compared things like the last few seconds of the 'Jesu' from the first album with the new version, and it's clear that the first version is much rougher-sounding and fluttery because of the even-tempered tuning as opposed to the mean tone tuning that I used on the new version. It's plain as day. The only reason we tolerate equal temperament is because we've had nothing else — it's like our own body odour, we're used to it.

"Tuning comes into play when people attempt to make synthesized orchestras; a real orchestra generally does not use pure equal temperament. The harp and the piano will try to, woodwinds are a variation of some equal temperament and some just intonation, brass is definitely just intoned in several keys since they're playing natural harmonics. Strings are tuned in fifths, so they're Pythagorean, and string players tend to favour just intonation when they're holding chords for any length of time, without knowing it (as do a cappella singers).

"Mixture ranks on a good classical pipe organ are tuned justly, since equal tempered overtones vibrate badly. It's a very heterogeneous mix of tunings we live with, and our notation developed more out of mean tone; a C# and Db, are not the same pitches except when we reference them to pianos. Tuning is a field that's open to experimentation — I don't know what I'm doing completely; I'm experimenting just like anyone else at this point."

The virtues of tempo changes

"With sequencers, you can 'conduct' the tempo — put in the ritards and pick the tempos — at the end of the composition process, which is wonderful. It makes the music feel more alive. I don't normally tap in the tempo; I use trial-and-error, working with one piece for an afternoon until the whole thing feels right. It takes longer than tempo tapping, but is more accurate."

Changes in synthesis over the last 25 years

"There haven't been enough of them! Kurzweil's 150 FS was heading in the right direction, but then they went to the usual big sample engine with a bunch of processors on it. If I want to bake a cake, I'd like to start out with my own flour and yeast — I don't want to start with a Betty Crocker package, add a little cocoa powder, and call it my own.

"Two-oscillator FM synthesis alone is lousy. What I'd like to see is the combination of quite a few oscillators with complex frequency modulation available between all of them, where you can define your own patches, not just be limited to a few basic algorithms that the company deems good ones. But the main thing is to be able to create models that vary from low note to high note, while also from ppp to fff — what I really want is the equivalent of separate parameters on each note, with perhaps more envelope slewing here, or more brightness there. We need smart acoustic modelling that allows for variations similar to those with acoustic instruments.

"The job (of creating instruments based on electronic sound) is still there. It's like the old joke about the guy looking under the street light for his wallet, and a friend comes to help and says, 'Hey, where did you drop your wallet?' and the guy says 'Over there.' The friend asks 'So why are you looking here?' Answer: 'The light's better.'

"It's time to admit we've been looking under the street light, but where we dropped the wallet was a few blocks away. We better go back there and do the real job.

"I'm thankful for the steps we have made, and a lot of good things have come out of it — digital tuning is so stable, for example — a computer base is great too, with software like Performer and StudioVision. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but I am impatient that things haven't moved very far. We all have limited life spans of productive careers, and I'd like to go to the next step soon."

"I was nervous about buying an ADAM — I had wanted a Sony digital multitrack, but couldn't afford it. Now I'm glad I couldn't get the Sony. The ADAM is small, has a neat locator box, and 12 tracks is more than enough for this kind of work when you have MIDI available as well. During S-OB 2000 I maintained the heads and used good quality tape, and didn't have a single ADAM-related problem.

"However, I did modify the analogue I/O. The Japanese insist on designing transformerless circuits in their audio gear, and it's a grave injustice that a myth of inferiority has been promulgated about transformers. I made a transformer-based box to interface the 12-track to my unbalanced console, and the sound is much better. The only transformerless box I've heard that sounds very good is Digidesign's Pro Tools interface."