Pet Shop Synthesis

2021 Revision 

Pet Shop Synthesis is by far my most popular blog post and still seems to be providing people with enjoyment 13 years after I wrote it. However, a lot has changed since 2008, and whilst the majority of the text remains valid, there are a few inaccuracies and quirks of formatting that left the article looking a bit tired. Thus, I have revised the text and tried to bring it a bit more up to date. It's still not perfect, but I will endeavour to iterate and tweak it to keep improving.

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When looking at the musical equipment and synthesizers used by the Pet Shop Boys we must start with the Fairlight CMI. This instrument features on just about every Pet Shop Boys record between 1986 and 1993 and it helped sculpt the sound of some of their most important hits.

The Fairlight was a complicated and wildly expensive music computer that sprouted a whole industry around it. Companies hired them out, specialist programmers were needed to work them and someone had to move 50-70kg of gear around. Despite its shortcomings many bands used the Fairlight in the eighties and its abilities were highly revered.

Neil and Chris seem to have started using the Fairlight in 1985 when recording their first album "Please". During their performance on the BBC’s “Old Grey Whistle Test” in April 1986 they are using the CMI IIx model. In fact they are using two instruments as each CMI IIx was limited to 8 channels of audio. Former Bee Gees keyboard player Blue Weaver was handed the tricky job of synchronising the machines in order to create passable versions of "Opportunities" and "Later Tonight".

By 1987 the boys would more commonly be using the newer Series III and Chris even went on to purchase one the following year for the princely sum of £60,000. Tracks such as "Always On My Mind" feature the distinct drums, percussion and brass sounds found in the Fairlight. In fact the drums were considered to be some of the best samples around in the eighties and they appear all over the albums “Please” and “Actually”. The string samples from the Fairlight are also employed frequently on these two albums; most notably on the song “It Couldn’t Happen Here”. Due to time restrictions this track could not be recorded with a real orchestra so the Fairlight had to be programmed to mimic the orchestra note by note, attack by attack, and instrument by instrument. It achieved a very passable imitation of a full orchestra, something Chris liked as whilst the Fairlight sounded ‘real’, it also retained a unique timbre. The sequencer (page R) was another of the Fairlight’s strengths. Whole songs could be sequenced and stored to disk simply and quickly: something the Pet Shop Boys exploited frequently.

Another crucial element to the sound of early Pet Shop Boys records was the EMU Emulator sample library. The EMU Emulator, Emulator II and Emulator II+  were all favourites of Neil and Chris. "West End Girls" famously uses the distinctive marcato strings, trumpet and choir samples of the Emulator, whilst "Always On My Mind" is augmented with orchestra hits and choir from an Emulator II. The sound effects on "Suburbia", guitars on "So Hard" and the French horns on "Tonight Is Forever" are also provided by this sampler. One of the last times the Emulator seems to have been used by the boys was in 1992 when it provided the saxophone sounds on the demo of "Confidential" for Tina Turner.

 

However, the Akai samplers of the late eighties and early nineties formed the back bone of the live set up for the MCMXLXXXIX and Performance tours. These flexible and relatively inexpensive samplers offered much more versatility and clarity of sound than the Emulators. Eventually Akai killed off the EMU Emulator both in the Pet Shop Boys set up and in the music industry in general. 

 

One of the most commonly used synthesizers on early Pet Shop Boys records was the PPG Wave. This was one of the first keyboards Neil and Chris bought in around 1984 and has a unique sound thanks to its use of 'wavetable' synthesis. The sounds in the Wave inspired Neil to write the chords for “Tonight Is Forever” and in turn Chris used the PPG to generate the bass and organ sounds on the track “Violence”. Less prominent pads and string sounds from this instrument are used on much of "Actually" including the hits "It's A Sin" and "Heart".

Neil and Chris first used a vocoder on the album “Actually” on the tracks “I Want to Wake Up” and “Shopping”.  Which vocoder the Pet Shop Boys used is not entirely clear but the Korg VC10 or Roland VP330 seem likely candidates.  

For most of us growing up the eighties, digital synthesis meant cheap Yamaha portable keyboards. These nasty little keyboards tended to rely on the Frequency Modulation approach to synthesis in which a sine wave is modulated by one or more secondary waveforms. The pinnacle of FM synthesis was the Yamaha DX7, and the less common DX1 and DX5. The picture on the left shows Neil and Chris performing with a DX7 in 1987 and they also used its big brother the DX1 on the recording of “The Old Gery Whistle Test”. Of their early recordings “Rent” features the DX7 quite heavily; the harmonica on “Why Don’t We Live Together?” and “If There Was Love” by Liza Minnelli and the bass on the original “Eighth Wonder” version of “I’m Not Scared” are also from the DX7. The famous bass sound from "West End Girls" is a layer of three different sounds; one of which is a patch from the DX7.

 

A little later in their career the “Solid Bass” patch from another DX synthesizer was featured on the “Bilingual” album of 1996. When Chris says of “To Step Aside”: “The bassline is from a keyboard that you only buy for that bass sound” it suggests the machine may be a DX100 or DX27 which feature only one useful sound: “Solid Bass”. But Pete Gleadall did use a Yamaha TX81Z for the bass on “Up Against It” and this is essentially an expanded rack mount version of the DX100/27. Knowing Chris’s sketchy memory, it may well have been this module rather than a “keyboard” that was used. The same patch is called "Lately bass" in the TX81Z. 

 

In 1990 digital synthesizers were the mainstay of the recording industry and a kind of mini revolution had begun as affordable samplers from Akai swamped the market. And where were the Pet Shop Boys at this time? They were locked in a shed with a collection of analogue synthesizers. Neil and Chris decided that they wanted something 'cleaner' for the “Behaviour” album and craved a sound akin to Donna Summer's "I Feel Love". Thus, it seemed logical to decant to the studio of former Giorgio Moroder assistant Harold Faltermeyer to get the analogue feel they were after.

 

However, the nearest Neil and Chris seemed to come to their goal was the track “Miserablism” which, ironically, was cut from the LP. What analogue sounds that do appear on the album were derived from the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 and a Roland system 700. Faltermeyer also used the Fairlight’s arch enemy the Synclavier II ensuring the album was not going to be an entirely analogue affair. Many of the drum samples on this album are generated and sequenced using the Synclavier. Despite their history with Fairlight, this was not Neil and Chris’s first encounter with the Synclavier. Trevor Horn and Steven Lipson had used this instrument whilst producing “Left To My Own Devices” two or three years earlier. 

 

Yet, to me the “Behaviour” era is more important as it signals the arrival of a machine that would go on to feature on many Pet Shop Boys records: the Roland TR909. “It Must Be Obvious” was the first Pet Shop Boys track I remember to specifically use the 909, it sounded awesome. Later releases brought us “The End of the World” “Bet She’s Not Your Girlfriend” and “Was it worth it?” all of which featured the unique sounds of the TR909. This drum machine soon became ubiquitous in both contemporary dance music and also Pet Shop Boys recordings. Another drum machine featured heavily on the “Behaviour” album was the Roland TR808, an analogue machine regarded (alongside the TR909) as one of the greatest analogue drum machines ever produced. This is because of their distinctive sound and excellent user interface. 

 

Another classic analogue machine much used by contemporary dance or specifically “acid house” was the Roland TB303 Bassline. This machine features on a few tracks by Neil and Chris but it made its first appearance on “The Sound of the Atom Splitting” in 1988. In terms of analogue synthesizers the Roland MKS80 “Super Jupiter” has to be the Pet Shop Boys favourite. The huge resonated sweeps on “Paninaro” and “Where the Streets Have No Name” or the filtered sweep on “Was It worth It?” come from this amazing rack mounted machine. The sheer number of MKS80 generated sounds on “Where the Streets Have No Name” means it is practically a demo for the machine. Another member of the  Jupiter synthesizer family, the Jupiter 6, provides one of the three components of the famous "West End Girls" bass patch too. 

 

As we move further into the nineties, the Korg M1 begins to appear increasingly in Neil and Chris’s set up. The Performance tour of 1990 and the album “Very” of 1993 rely heavily on the sound of the M1 or more specifically the rack mounted version the M1r.  The song “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing” features the ‘finger snap’ sound and the choir sounds feature on many tracks including: “A Different Point Of View”,“The Theatre” and “Where the Streets Have No Name”. The distinctive M1 strings feature heavily on later songs such as "Positive Role Model" and the acoustic guitar sounds are used on "Discoteca" from the Bilingual album. Interestingly, many of the factory presets in the M1 were created by Pete Schwartz who later went on to become the musical director for the “Nightlife” world tour in 2000. 

The other key elements in the “Very” album’s sound were the Yamaha TG33 and the Yamaha TG500. These Yamaha modules provided the string sounds (except where real orchestra was used obviously) on this and the “Relentless” album. In contemporary interviews Pet Shop Boys programmer Pete Gleadall would stay very tight lipped concerning the source of string sounds on the album, even going as far as omitting the TG33 from the kit list. The TG33 is a cheap sound module intended for home users more than professionals; the TG500 on the other hand, is at the other end of the range offering higher quality sounds. The TG500 also features on “Bilingual” producing some guitar sounds on “It Always Comes as a Surprise” and “To Step Aside”.

 

The Studio Electronics Midimoog is a powerful analogue synthesizer that is essentially a modern reproduction of the original Minimoog. Listen to the bass on “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing” or “Dreaming of the Queen” to get an idea of this monophonic classic. Rumour had it that Neil and Chris bought three of these monsters with the intention of using them on tour. The cover of “DJ Culture” shows us how Neil and Chris changed their live “pod” system following the Performance tour to include the Midimoog and a MKS80 programming module. Also included in the new set up was a Waldorf Microwave which was a more modern implementation of the wavetable synthesis employed by the PPG Wave.

 

Piano sounds around this time were obtained from the EMU Performance Plus specialist piano module. Neil in particular likes its “mellow” sound and it is also a favourite of Moby. However, Bob Kraushaar the albums engineer, often had to mix the sounds of the Roland JV-1080 piano over the top of the EMU to make the sound brighter on the “Bilingual” album. The “Very” album also used samples of another classic analogue drum machine the Roland CR-78. For the track “To Speak Is a Sin” Pete Gleadall sampled the sounds from the machine and programmed them from his Akai S900 sampler. These samples were also later used on “It Always Comes as a Surprise” on the “Bilingual” album. 

 

With the advancement of digital synthesis and cheap samplers, the Fairlight became somewhat redundant. The Apple Macintosh computer along with Logic Audio software became the chief sequencing and recording package in the studio for “Very”. Songs Chris had written on his Fairlight were dumped into Logic and instruments assigned accordingly as the Fairlight was difficult to get synchronised with the other instruments in the studio. As time has moved on the Logic system has been replaced by Pro Tools.

 

More recently Neil and Chris have used a variety of gear including analogue modelling synthesizers such as the Nord Lead 2, Nord Lead 3, Nord Electro and Korg MS2000. This form of digital synthesis attempts to recreate the sound of old analogue instrument without the instability and tuning issues older gear. Pet Shop Boys have also used a newer “true” analogue instrument in the form of the Alesis A6 Andromeda. 

 

‘Virtual’ instruments that run entirely within computers now provide the sounds in Neil and Chris’s set up. The sounds of the PPG Wave are can be generated by a ‘plug in’ computer program rather than a giant lumbering keyboard and processor unit. Computer processing power is now so advanced that a simple laptop can hold samples or otherwise recreate the sound of every one of the instruments mentioned on this page. A modern computer is a better sampler, sequencer and recording device than almost anything that has gone before. Yet, somehow a laptop running Pro Tools is totally devoid of romance. Nobody will ever stare will jealous eyes at a laptop like I did to a Fairlight Series III in the eighties. Yet, I am glad that professional music technology is within reach of most people, including myself.