Motown's Raymond Scott Electronium Breaths New Life

You might remember the Electronium Restoration Project from this previous video post.

Jeff E. Winner, one of the men behind the critically acclaimend documentary film on Raymond Scott's life, Deconstructing Dad, wrote in on The MATRIXSYNTH Lounge that they have made progress on the restoration and the Electronium is now producing sound!


A little history via wikipedia: "The Electronium, created by Raymond Scott, is an early combined electronic synthesizer and algorithmic composition / generative music machine.

Its place in history is unusual, because while in intention it is analogous to the digital algorithmic composition systems that would follow it, it was implemented entirely as an analog electronic machine.
The exact time for the beginning of Scott's efforts in making the machine is not known, but it is estimated to the late 1950s or early 1960s, with a workable unit by 1969. Scott, however, never ceased to modify and further develop the device by the time of his death in 1994.[1]

It was one of the very few electronic creations of Scott to be sold to a customer, as he was normally highly secretive about his devices[1]. A single Electronium machine was sold to Motown records, following a 1969 meeting between Scott and Motown’s Berry Gordy. The initial contract required that Scott visited Motown for three months to teach staff how the machine is used. This culminated in the 1971 hiring of Scott to serve as director of Motown's electronic music and research department in Los Angeles, a position Scott held until 1977.[1][2] No Motown recordings using Scott's electronic inventions have yet been publicly identified."

via Jeff E. Winner on The MATRIXSYNTH Lounge:

"It's Alive! Yesterday I received this email from Darren Davidson, who is attempting to restore the Motown Electronium:

On Nov 28, 2012, at 1:18 PM, Darren Davison wrote:

Good Morning!

Last night a few Electrical/Egineering freinds of mine and I were trying to get to the bottom of why the Electronium would still not utter a sound. After about an hour of tinkering and following the initial setup procedure Raymond wrote up, the machine began to make very simple and crude sounds. We recorded the sounds and although they are hardly musical, it is a fantastic milestone.

Most of the tone generators, but of course, there are more questions than answers. The voltages delivered by the power supplies are still not quite right and many of the pot switches are so sticky, that adjusting them is like steering a car in ice with a flat tire. The recording and "Auto-composing" portion is still not working and my feelings were "just get it to make some kind of controllable sound" first, then work on getting fancy.

I am sure this will accelerate things, and I have been in contact with Alan Entenman and am sending him photos of the internals of the Electronium in hopes of refreshing his memory of how some of it should work on the recording and keyboard side.

Anyway, I am hoping that by March, even if it is not recording or auto composing, the sounds are less harsh and that some of the other features such as the "Bass generators, "counterpoints", and other features are working.

I will send a copy of the sound files as soon as I can, most likely this evening. It's on the Engineering guys phone and he is having trouble sending vide for some reason. The whole thing was recorded on an Iphone and there is a 4 min? video of me adjusting knobs and such. In all fairness to their help, their names are Guy Lewis and Pete Levno.

Now I think we will start picking up steam!

—Darren"

Also on http://raymondscott.blogspot.com/2012/11/electronium-restoration-update.html - you can track the site for updates on everything Raymond Scott.

You can also see the Electronium and Raymond Scott labels directly below, at the bottom of this post, for all posts here on MATRIXSYNTH.