Tom Oberheim and Robert Henke: A Conversation

Music is the result not only of the imagination, but the instruments and the interfaces which we use to express it. What strange new worlds could we conjure if we jettisoned the traditional models? This is the kind of question that drove Tom Oberheim and his company to explore new ways of shaping sounds, stacking oscillators and making musical machines talk to each other. Robert Henke has also made a habit of throwing out the rulebook, helping to found the now standard music software program Ableton Live, as well as creating dense worlds of dubby electronics and deep industrialized grooves as Monolake. As a musician and interface designer, Henke treads the tightrope between free-spirited artist and logically-minded instrument builder better than most.

As part of our 2013 book For The Record: Conversations with People Who Have Shaped the Way We Listen to Music, Henke drove to Oberheim’s small office tucked away in a strip mall in Moraga, California. He found Oberheim at his work table, tinkering with one of his signature SEM modules. Oberheim emptied a bag of potato chips into a wooden bowl and distributed beer. Henke seemed to be brimming with questions, scanning the workshop while still squinting from the Saturday afternoon sun. The conversation began immediately, unofficially, as soon as the door opened.

Robert Henke

It took me a while to purchase one of your machines, but as someone who's been interested in synthesizers since they could think, and who was carefully observing what tools all my heroes were using, Oberheim was a name you could see on all those panels. I was always fascinated by the visual appearance of groups like Tangerine Dream; where you had those people sitting behind these castles of equipment -

Tom Oberheim

“Castles of equipment.” I love that.

Robert Henke

The backsides of the keyboards were like castle walls. But, at the same time, they were such great advertisements. I remember that a friend of mine was a proud owner of an Oberheim Xpander. What amazed me was that he did all this music without connecting it to a keyboard, so for him it was just a synth.

Tom Oberheim

No MIDI, just knobs and switches.

Robert Henke

Exactly. And, for me, this was a strong experience. I thought music meant playing notes on a keyboard. Being exposed to a different concept was very striking. I really liked how it looked. The Xpander was so much more futuristic than all the other keyboards because it lacked a keyboard. Much later – I think around 2003 – I finally bought my own Xpander and I had a nice episode with it recently. The tunings went all false.

Tom Oberheim

They're getting old.

Robert Henke

I thought, “Oh my God, I need to find someone who can repair it.” But, at the same time, I got all of these fantastic microtonal things out of it. I was recording because I thought I would never be able to reproduce this sound effect. I wished I had spent more time with it in its “failed” state. It’s like Malcolm Clarke from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop once told me, “Never turn your back on a good accident.”

Tom Oberheim

Oh, yes. I’ve done that. I’ve been there. I once hooked something up wrong and I said, “Well this isn’t right but I’m going to keep it.” That’s absolutely true. When I got started in the synthesizer field in the early ’70s there was a lot of talk about how they’re not musical instruments.

Robert Henke

Of course - my music teacher said so.

Tom Oberheim

But then I lived through the period when Chick Corea played his Minimoog in such a creative way, and Joe Zawinul playing my machine on Birdland, and so on. It’s, like, “It's not the machine,” but I don’t like to think in those terms. It’s a mechanical or an electromechanical object, but it’s an instrument. There have been millions and millions of records sold where they don’t show the instrument.

Robert Henke

I think the point is the magic. The magic can happen on a recording or in a live situation, completely independent of the instrument.

Robert Henke

When Brian Eno was asked about the main qualification for electronic music, he said, “It’s not important that you can play an instrument. The important quality is judgment." You have the machines doing all the hard work for you, but in order to make something that has artistic value, you need to be able to say, “This part is good, this part is not so good.”

Tom Oberheim

I think it's a more difficult process now because there are so many tools, and maybe that’s why we see so much simulation. One of the things that excited me about being in the synth business in the early ’70s was that I envisioned a whole new field of musical instruments based on synthesizers and, well, that didn't happen.

At least, it didn't happen immediately. Because what did happen was that people tried to simulate existing instruments, and you couldn’t do it very well with an analog synth: you couldn’t make perfect strings, perfect brass, perfect Fender Rhodes. The whole process for me came to a halt when the DX7 came out. I listened to some of your stuff, and it’s a little sparse for my musical tastes, but I’m excited about the fact that I can’t tell what it is. Do you know the music of Weather Report?

Robert Henke

I’m a huge fan of Joe Zawinul.

Tom Oberheim

I’ve got to tell you this story. It’s 1977, I’m at my company in Santa Monica, and I knew Joe from back when he had a ring modulator. But I’m busy, he’s busy, and I hadn't seen him in a while. He calls me and says, “I got one of your 8-Voices, and it’s really great. Maybe you could show me a little about how to use it?” I went to meet with him, and I started talking about filter cut-offs and all this stuff, because that's the only…

Robert Henke

...language you had?

Tom Oberheim

He would listen, but I knew that he was just going to take it back to Guitar Center, or wherever he bought it from, get his money back, and that will be it. A few weeks pass and he calls me up: “Tom, you got to hear this thing I did with your machine.” I’m thinking, “What? He didn't take it back?” He played me a rough mix of “Birdland,” and it just blew me away. What I realized was that it was new to him but he’s a skilled musician, he took it, he learned how to use it. It certainly wasn’t an easy machine to use. It was on the same level as trying to make great music with a mouse. People will both overcome it – and it will evolve.

Robert Henke

We consider this as a known technology. Until the mid-’90s, a lot of electronic music production was based on new instruments coming in all the time. New instruments meant new sound. Somehow, we have reached a stage where the novelty aspect of electronic music has reached a plateau. Nowadays, if a new software or hardware comes out, you don't expect a user interface that is completely new. You just expect a more matured version of an instrument.

I like this, because this plateau allows us to look backwards, and that’s why I believe that there is so much retro stuff going on. We are looking down the canyon, and saying, “This was cool, I heard about it. I need to go there and try it out.” I believe in the near future, new creative things will come out of merging all those influences into new things.

Tom Oberheim

Oh, sure.

Robert Henke

But the new things might not be as much technology-driven as the old things, because the technology is so known. What is the medium that people are listening to music through these days? It's YouTube. They use YouTube as their radio. That means they have visual information, too. I don't know yet what kind of influence it is going to have, but if a generation comes up for whom the connection of video and music is the norm, the CD is going to die. All of these mediums - formative mediums in hardware, which tell you audio has two channels, 74 minutes max - these are things of the past. I’m expecting a lot of interesting changes coming from the plateau situation.

Tom Oberheim

Certainly. I think there hasn’t been a real breakthrough to where many hundreds of people standardize on something, so it's really a very fertile field, and very quickly changing. In my lifetime – and certainly in your lifetime – it will be very different.

Robert Henke

Well, I hope so, because it became a big mess. We have all these programs, and they are very powerful. More powerful than what we have ever had before. At the same time, it’s more and more difficult to work with all this power, because we became bookkeepers of our own technology.

Tom Oberheim

There’s a commercial aspect. It starts with Microsoft and the unending new versions of their programs that don’t really do anything more than they did 20 years ago: it's the impediment to it really blossoming. So many companies are putting features on software products, and maybe they’re not advancing the art.

Robert Henke

Yeah, but that’s different from the issue of having too many choices. The one issue of course is if a company or product matures, it becomes this big ship - and to change the course of the ship becomes more and more difficult. But, if we just assume all these companies don’t exist, and the big ships don’t exist, then still the question remains: What do we do with all of this power? What do we do with all of these machines?

If I look at my own music and practice, I spend so much time with organization because of all of these options. If I only have an eight-track recorder, one reverb unit, a small mixing desk, two or three keyboards and a drum machine, I’m limited. In retrospect, I’m limited in a very positive way because I have to be decisive. If tape is expensive, I make up my mind before I record something and I get the result pretty fast.

Now, I have unlimited un-do: terabytes of hard disc space, with 10 million different plug-ins, and I can store a new version of a document every five seconds. I feel a big topic of the future is not so much if we are still using a keyboard, or if we create music by mind control. I think that the bigger challenge is how do we organize? How do we make sure that the creative moments don’t get lost within this abundance of exercises?

A lot of successful artists I admire know surprisingly little about technology, and this allows them to use the technology with innocence, but also with informed, artistic ideas. This is extremely powerful. This is not a working path because I understand what’s going on. The type of resonance I need to seek between the machine and me is a different one. I need to find the fascination among the things I know, or on the edge of the things I know. I’m not fascinated anymore by turning the cut of the frequency of the filter.

I’m fascinated when there’s suddenly some non-linear distortion going, which creates overtones I was not expecting. Suddenly, the machine comes alive. I understand what is going on, but at the same time I’m touched. These are the moments I’m looking for, and this is the basis for my exploration.

But then, of course, I’m in a dangerous situation; the engineering side of my brain can say, “Ah, I like this phenomenon. I need to improve the instrument so that this phenomena is getting more prominent.” Then I start changing the machine instead of saying, “I have the phenomena which is here, and I need to make use of it.” This puts me in a position where I live in the constant fear of spending too much time improving my tools instead of actually working with them.

Tom Oberheim

The thing I wonder about, especially since I’m at the age where I could be gone tomorrow… I’ll never find out is if there will be analog synthesizers that look something like this in a hundred years.

Robert Henke

I will not know - unless Ray Kurzweil is right and I’m jumping over the fence, which I doubt.

Tom Oberheim

And then that leaves the question: Will there still be old Oberheims floating around?

Robert Henke

And will they still work? I’m so worried about my old machines. I have to tell you. Because I know enough about them to understand thermal stress, it’s not good to turn them on and off: they heat up, they cool down. It's bad. However, if you don't use them at all, things get worse too. The other thing is cosmic radiation, which kills the chips sooner or later anyway. Capacitors dry out.

Tom Oberheim

I would argue that the technology, the stuff in these particular modules, there's no reason why it won't be working in 50 or 100 years for the most part.

Robert Henke

But, what do we do with the early digital stuff?

Tom Oberheim

Well, that's a problem. A lot of the early digital stuff you’re talking about – the stuff that came out in the '70s and even into the '80s – it’s really not… it's due to chemicals more than the environment. I've heard about chips going bad. When I first started hearing about it I thought, "Oh, these chips will last forever." That's not true.

Robert Henke

I'm mostly worried about the early '80s stuff.

Tom Oberheim

Yeah, well. I only of course know about my own stuff, and there's plenty of two-voice, four-voice, eight-voice Oberheims that need to be changed, because what most people don't realize is that they do have a fixed lifetime. But, you can replace them with modern versions. A lot of equipment will be running for a long time. That leads, of course, to the question of, “What should I try and improve, as an analog designer?”

Images: Sabina McGrew