Keyboard Magazine just reprinted this article from 1980 - wonderful trip back in history:
Apocalypse Now: The Synthesizer Soundtrack
The scenario sounds as if it were lifted from The Andromeda Strain:
Several Specialists are contacted by the Mission Director. Each is asked to leave home and report to Headquarters as soon as possible, to bring all of his electronic instruments, and to plan to remain with the Mission indefinitely. Once at Headquarters, the Specialists demonstrate their skills to the Mission Director, who selects a team of four of them to remain with the Mission. A thorough briefing follows. The team learns that the Mission is part of a Campaign of unusual importance and complexity. The Commander has been leading the Campaign for four years. He has given the Mission top priority in order to meet the schedule for the Campaign's completion. A similar Mission, manned by a different team of Specialists, did not meet the Commander's requirements and has been terminated. The briefing ends with the Mission Director explaining the Commander's overall strategy and stressing the need for teamwork. He discusses the duties of the team members without mentioning the grave dangers that lie before them....
The campaign, mission, and team of experts are all real. It actually happened. But despite the sci-fi overtones, there is no connection with visitors from outer space or high-level espionage. In fact, the commander was Francis Ford Coppola and the campaign was his epic film Apocalypse Now. The team of specialists were synthesists Patrick Gleeson, Bernie Krause, Don Preston, and Nyle Steiner; their mission director was producer David Rubinson. The mission was the realization of the film's synthesizer score, a unique multistage effort that tied up three of San Francisco's 24-track studios for seven months. The dangers that the synthesists braved were all psychological — many tempers were maimed and egos battered. But the mission was a success, the commander concluded the campaign, and the story of the Apocalypse Now synthesizer score can finally be told.
Scroll all the way down for some great photos - things have gotten so easy these days. The same advances that brought us today's computers compared to the boxes from 1980 also have brought us relatively inexpensive synthesizers that actually stay in tune and can interface with a computer for recording, arrangement and playback.
Full soundtrack here:
Gorgeous stuff.
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