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The Swedish company Teenage Engineering has won over kids — and professionals — with a revolutionary idea for a synthesizer: Make it simple, according to Ryan Bradley, writer in Los Angeles.
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| Photo: Lernert and Sander for The New York Times |
Derrick Estrada,
an electronic musician who performs under the stage name Baseck, had
just showered and was nursing a cup of yerba mate in the back room of
the Los Angeles home that a musician friend dubbed the “synth
flophouse.” It was 10 a.m. on a recent Thursday; very early, he
explained, for a house full of musicians.
Estrada
had promised a demonstration of a remarkable new instrument, one that
had changed the whole way he made music. Two walls of the room were
dedicated to racks of synthesizers — row after row of buttons and knobs
and unwieldy wiring, a veritable museum of advanced technology spanning
decades and costing thousands of dollars. Estrada ignored all of it.
Instead, he plucked a small device from the spot where it was hanging
from a hook. It looked like the exploded innards of a calculator, with a
splat of knobs and buttons. There was no keyboard. Estrada plugged it
into a set of speakers, held it in both hands and hunched over it
slightly, as if handling a phone while texting, and began to play...
Estrada was playing a Pocket Operator, a device released four years ago
by a Swedish company called Teenage Engineering. To date, the company
has made nine different models of the same basic design, and it has sold
more than 350,000 of them worldwide, making the Pocket Operator one of
the most popular synthesizers in history. The Korg M1 — famous for
producing the sound of Seinfeld’s slap bass and Madonna’s “Vogue,” and
one of the best-selling and most influential synths of all time — is
estimated to have sold 100,000 fewer units over nearly twice as much
time. The “portable” version of one of the Pocket Operator’s earliest
forebears — the telharmonium, constructed more than a hundred years ago —
cost more than $5 million to build in today’s dollars, weighed 200 tons
and required a team of specialists to achieve peak performance. A
Pocket Operator costs about $60 and fits in the palm of your hand.
Source: The New York Times
