Oh To Have the Confidence of an Apple Music Editor

Like many, my teenage years was the period where I formed a deep connection with music, fashion, and politics. This was during the 1980s, a time of upheaval in all of those areas. In particular, I gravitated to synthesisers and the other ground-breaking electronic instruments that were becoming reliable, affordable, and eventually, ubiquitous.

I saved up for and purchased my first synthesiser, a Yamaha DX-21, the budget model of the best-selling digital synthesiser of all time, the DX-7. I joined a band with schoolmates and later, when I started my first job, expanded my equipment to include a drum machine, and a sequencer—a hardware device that allowed me to record, edit and automate the playback of my naïve songs using a new digital protocol called MIDI—Musical Instrument Digital Interface.

MIDI became the lingua franca of the electronic music industry and is still in use today. It is the TCP/IP of the music world. Pre-MIDI, electronic music was like the time before TCP/IP became ubiquitous in computer networking. Electronic instruments all used different protocols, via analogue voltages, to enable the synchronising of different instruments and the playback of musical notes. Every manufacturer used a different voltage for on and off, leading to an industry of hardware boxes that converted voltages, allowing different instruments to (mostly) talk to each other.

When it arrived on the scene, the MIDI protocol was cheap to implement and (mostly) implemented in the same way across manufacturers, solving a problem that had plagued musicians for over a decade.

Strong Songs

One of my favourite podcasts is Strong Songs by Kirk Hamilton, a musician and music teacher from Portland, Oregon. Kirk's podcasts are completely engrossing. Every week he dives deeply into a song, pulling it apart and explaining in detail why it works. Along the way, he covers music theory, the context of the composition and specific influences that informed the songwriter and/or musicians involved. That could be very dry, but Kirk is a skilled presenter, understanding how to deliver information to the uninitiated in an engaging way.

The episode about Blondie’s 1979 global hit, “Heart of Glass”, was a case in point.

Kirk skilfully combined elements of Blondie’s history in the nascent New York punk scene with the influence of disco on the original demo version of the song, including the impact of early programmable drum machines. He mentioned how on the final version of “Heart of Glass”, the Roland CR-78 drum machine was interfaced with a synthesiser, probably a Roland SH-5, to generate the bass line in time with the rhythm. 

This connection was achieved, said Kirk, via MIDI—but… MIDI wasn’t available until 1983! It turns out that the CR-78 was sending trigger pulses to the SH-5 via Roland’s proprietary (and analogue) Control Voltage interface.

A simple mistake, and one that not many people would pick up. But for musicians like myself, it was an obvious error, and one that could have been avoided via a quick review of Wikipedia. 

Tsk, tsk, Kirk—I still love your work!

Apple Music

Neneh Cherry's 1989 hit “Manchild", from her striking debut album Raw Like Sushi, is still one of my favourite singles of the ‘80s. I can still remember the intense pleasure I felt on listening for the first time, as the string section arrives in response to Neneh’s introductory rap. 

Whenever I need a fillip, I listen to "Manchild" and am blown away all over again by the richness of that moment. So much emotion and beauty is contained in that sound, and in the rest of the verse, as the strings continue behind Neneh's plaintive vocals. So, it was annoying to read the Apple Music summary of the album. Here’s the paragraph that rubbed me up the wrong way:

Her 1989 debut album, Raw Like Sushi, also contained the woozy "Manchild" which blended Cherry's soulful vocals with a warm rush of synths.

Uh, what?! In 1989, there were no synths that could possibly emulate the richness of the humans playing real string instruments on that track. Even the venerable Fairlight CMI Series III, a sampler that cost as much as a suburban house in the late ‘80s, wasn’t capable of that. Thankfully, there’s a way to check on such baldly confident assertions: the Internet. 

And so it was—in an archived edition of the UK’s Music Technology magazine, I found an interview with one of the engineers on Raw Like Sushi, Martin Rex. Here’s the relevant extract:

Neneh Cherry's Raw Like Sushi required two very different skills; the first in recording excellence and the second involving a particularly open mind to experimentation. A couple of examples, Martin?

"With 'Manchild' I recorded a 20-piece string section at Abbey Road", says Rex, "which I chose to record with Dolby SR noise reduction. I recorded them on four tracks of the multitrack: two stereo pairs. One pair was close miked and the other was an ambient pair so that in the mix there was an option of bringing in extra ambience from the room rather than creating it digitally.

So, yeah, Unnamed Apple Music Editor—no warm rush of synths on that track after all.

And there you have it. While MIDI might remain the TCP/IP of the music world, it seems some music editors could use a protocol for fact-checking. 

But let's not be too hard on our Apple Music friend - perhaps they were just experiencing a warm rush of overconfidence. After all, in a world where drum machines can be mistaken for MIDI pioneers and phantom synths can masquerade as string sections, who are we to let a little thing like reality get in the way of a good story? Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to programme my software version of the CR-78 to send some trigger pulses to my MIDI-enabled Korg Opsix synthesiser.

Who knows? I might just create the next "Heart of Glass"—or at least a convincing Apple Music summary.