UWEB Newsletter Vol. 1, No. 3

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UWEB Newsletter Vol. 1, No. 3 is the third newsletter published by the official Residents fan club, UWEB. This issue was published in Summer 1989.

The newsletter

HI-TEK HICKS

The band stays the same, but the music keeps changing. One of the reasons for this is that their instrumentation is constantly evolving. If I may generalize, there have been four major changes in instruments, and therefore changes in musical style.

The first period finds the personnel actually trying to play traditional instruments. This period ended with Meet the... (73), so we don't know much about this part of history. Perhaps it is just as well. This seems to be when they started taking recording as a serious contribution to music.

The second period was when the synthesizer was introduced to the music. This happened in the midst of the recording of The Third Reich N Roll (75) and basically continues even to today. The first synthesizer was an Arp Odyessy, and it still sits in the studio. It saw usage as recently as God In Three Persons (88)

Period three starts with The Tunes of Two Cities (82). The sampler had arrived. And that sampler was the Emulator, an instrument that in its early days was so associated with the band that E-MU Systems, developer of the Emulator, named their research and development room after our ocular friends. Three Emulators have sat in the studio, two tours with the band on both the Mole Show and the 13th Anniversary Show. One of them is still in the studio. It is the original one. The serial number is 0008, and it is in perfect working order. It was used on all the Pee Wee Herman scores.

The sampler reached its peak of power in 1988 on the strangely-symphonic God In Three Persons.

Four is very new. MIDI. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. This band now plays their instruments into a Mac II, manipulates the sounds, and then have the computer replay the instruments with dazzling perfection. The general public has not gotten to hear an album done with MIDI yet, but we sure have. The first use of MIDI was on Snakey Wake (UWEB 008), but we are the true guinea pigs with the Buckaroo Blues CD (UWEB 003), which is pure MIDI. Watch for CUBE E coming in the fall as the first "official" MIDI album and use of MIDI on stage in the coming show.

If any of you have not sold your copy of UWEB001, the CD has a nice comparison of these four styles.

For those of you who are equipment freaks and wonder what's new in the studio, it seems to be Roland, Roland, Roland. New MIDI-controlled Roland units are the D-50, D-10, D110, U-110, and 5-550. No surprise about the recent splash in the Roland Users Magazine.

Yamaha's RX-7 and TXB12, Castle's MIDI Sax, and a Korg vocal processor complete the current MIDI line-up. The Mac II is running Opcode's Vision with their Studio 3 interface.

Pretty high-tech for a bunch of bananas.