vox2: 连接Stravinsky和 Bruno Mars的

vox2: The sound that connects Stravinsky to Bruno Mars

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I'll play it again.

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It's a sound effect called an

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orchestra hit.

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Bruno Mars, he's the king of nostalgia and he used that effect in

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"Finesse" to take you back to the 80's.

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Take a listen to any pop, dance, or hip hop

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song in the 80's or 90's and you're gonna hear a version of it.

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There are all types of orchestral hits.

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But the original one, this one here.

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Isn't from a few decades ago. In fact it was

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first played in 1910 at the Paris Opera.

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We can thankfully hear

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the greatest

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composer of our time, Stravinsky, performing his own works.

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Telling us all those

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subtleties of his musical wishes and intentions, which could never be fully

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documented in the cold black print of a score.

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This is the famed 20th century Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. He's about 80

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years old here, but when he first composed the Firebird Suite he was...

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28 years old. Holy sh*t.

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And during his adult life the

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world changed dramatically, two or three times.

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That's Robert Fink, he wrote a

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history of that sound you just heard.

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Firebird is his first major successful

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piece it made his reputation. Everybody loved the Firebird. Stravinsky is like

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one of those rock stars who has one huge hit early on in their career and then

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they have to play that song every concert for the rest of their lives.

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He adjusted the score a bit over the years but the jarring opener of one of

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the last scenes in the ballet remained one of Firebird's most dramatic moments.

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Right, because what it is is it's basically a gesture for the orchestra.

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It shocks the hell out of you, in the context of the original piece.

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So how

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did that --

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become so ubiquitous that in 1992, NWA said this about it on

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Straight Out of Compton?

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To figure that out you have to go to Australia.

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I'm Peter Vogel, I developed the first commercial sampling synthesizer which

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was the Fairlight CMI back in about 1975.

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The other person who was involved was

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Kim Ryrie.

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This is the Fairlight CMI. To put it

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simply it's one of the most influential musical innovations of the past 100

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years. It was one of the very first digital synthesizers, a digital audio

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workstation, and the first digital sampler all in one.

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With the aid of computers, you

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could create the music that you had in your head a lot more easily than if you

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had to sit down and learn to play instruments from scratch.

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It was really a

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lazy shortcut.

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You got to see this unbelievable machine, I don't even know if we can

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get a camera back here?

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Or do we have a camera?

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Oh he's back here already. Forgive me.

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This is showing one of the sounds, what the pattern looks like.

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Do me a favor: punch up let's see how the

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sales are in Omaha.

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The two major things that it introduced to music production

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were visual sequencing and digital sampling.

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It was the first instrument

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that had a screen based sequencer, that allowed you to actually compose complex

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pieces of music, have the machine play it for you.

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It was called Page R.

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Here's Herbie Hancock demonstrating it for Quincy Jones.

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And there's two ways to do it:

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you can either write it on the screen or you can play it on a keyboard. Oh okay.

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See, now if you write it on a screen...

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This is a tool that anyone

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today can take advantage of. Hell, I can sequence a drum pattern on my iPhone.

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In the early 80's sequencing like this was a revelation.

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There is a way in which the

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Fairlight's interface is incredibly far ahead of its time.

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I mean it's like a

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Star Trek thing, right? You're using a light pen to write on a cathode ray tube.

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Do something with a light pen.

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Well the world is going crazy ladies and gentlemen.

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Many of the musicians who used it sort of became the Fairlight's

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ambassador.

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Stevie Wonder was the first person I delivered one to in the United States

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and then people in the studio would gather around and they said hey I

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know someone would be really interested to see this.

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Next thing you know he's in London setting one up for Peter Gabriel.

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He introduced me to

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Kate Bush, there were some guys from Led Zeppelin there.

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What really made the

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Fairlight a game-changer, though, was the digital sampler.

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You could hook up a

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microphone to the Fairlight, record any second of sound, and then play it at any

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pitch on the keyboard.

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The Fairlight also came with a stock library of sounds too,

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on giant 8-inch floppy disks.

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So we started off with maybe one floppy disk

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with 50 different sounds on it.

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People who were using it would send us back

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floppies and say hey look at these samples I've created.

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While working

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on the basic song ideas, Gabriel was also compiling a library of sounds which he

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might use on the album.

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For this he used a computerized instrument called a Fairlight.

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Peter Gabriel actually broke the glass and Kate Bush used it in her music.

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There were baby screeches, smashes, drips, and rotary dials.

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And then there was the

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orchestra hit.

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Ironically the the orchestra hit was a

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complete accident which was sampled by me.

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I just happened to have a vinyl recording of the Stravinsky Firebird Suite

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nearby when I was messing around.

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That Orchestra hit, which I think was

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right at the beginning of one of the tracks.

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And I thought alright it's a good sound.

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Peter called the sound orch2 and put it on an eight inch floppy disk full of those

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other stock sounds.

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Planet Rock

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was the first smash hit record to use orch2. In the first two seconds of the song

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it's used five times.

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So the thing that you can know immediately about Planet Rock

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is that 50,000 people copied it.

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That 8-bit Orchestra hit started popping

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up in all sorts of songs.

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Within a few years of the Fairlight being around, all sorts of synths and

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samplers came with a stock variation of the orch2 hit. And they got crisper and

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cleaner with new technology.

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You can hear that transformation in the

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hit Swedish producer Max Martin made with Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys.

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But that original orch2 sample, it remains the most iconic. And it's

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probably why Bruno Mars used it,

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or at least a very close simulation of it, in Finesse.

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When you hear that orchestra hit, you're hearing something which is very

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much about the middle 1980's. It's actually something that was first

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thought of by a guy in 1909.

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It's like a moment where a whole bunch of times are

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sewn together.

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It is kind of timeless.

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That is the actual piece of vinyl that

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orch2 was sampled off.

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So you can tell it was a long time ago when you paid, $6.99

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for a record.

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So there are three links that are in the description below, one to

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Robert Fink's paper,

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another to a Fairlight CMI iPhone app which Peter Vogel helped create,

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Last but not least I made

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an orchestra hit playlist on Spotify.

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Enjoy it.