automat - automat [lp 1978]

AUTOMAT

Music and sounds conceived, arranged and played by ROMANO MUSUMARRA and CLAUDIO GIZZI all tunes realized entirely with sounds programmed by MARIO MAGGI using the "MCS 70" (Memory Controlled Synthesizer)
sound engineer: LUCIANO TORANI

music recorded circa December 1977


'Everything on Automat was generated by the MCS70 even the drum sounds. This was my essential condition to accept the job, my idea was to utilize the album as the demo disk for the MCS70.

All the tracks was programmed on an analog sequencer, a Sequential Circuits 3 row by 16 steps. I syncronized the sequencer to the 16 track recorder using a track filled with trigger pulses. This allowed to overdubbing a ton. Remember, it is monophonic... My work was mainly to program the sequencer since the 64 programs in MCS70 memory was more than enough for the album. We had only some problem with the studio time, four weeks in all. For this reason the last track, Mecadance , was left somewhat incompleted.

The other studio equipment I remember was: EMT digital reberation unit
Two Horban parametric equalizer
A 30 band graphic equalizer
A natural echo chamber for reverberation
A 2 track recorder for delay effects
A 16 track recorder

- It has wonderful synth tones...
Linear FM + Amplitude Modulation + LP & HP filters...
and an exclusive waveform I introduced in the MCS70:

. |----- period -----|
.
.
.............
............./|
............/.|
.........../ .|
. ----| ../ ..|-------
......|. /
......| /
......|/
......'
.
essentially it is a triangle with the descending half commutated to zero. The armonics it produces are impossible to obtain mixing conventional waveforms. This was responsible for the pipe-organ like tone on the side A.

Mario Maggi'