Electronic Dance Music Origin 6/14

Actually, that's all wrong. What am I thinking, electronic music didn't start in the 1940s. Stupid me. It started in the 1920s! Yeah.
1929, specifically, is when the first actual keyboard synthesizer was built by Edouard Coupleux and Armand Givelet,
only they didn't call it a keyboard synthesizer, they called it the "Givelet Electric Organ",
because it didn't have any preset samplebanks or patches or ADSR envelopes or noisegates.
But it did have oscillation! Though the oscillation was controlled by paper rolls, like those automatic piano players that have been around since the 1800s,
only these paper rolls could control more than just notes. They instructed electronic circuits to control pitch, tone, colour, loudness, and even note articulation.
It was a breakthrough in organ technology.

This might have gone down as the most important electronic instrument of all time, except for one thing:
four years later, a non-descript company called Hammond, working on a similar premise, released their own electric organ,
and the rest is organic history, hahaha. Sorry, bad joke.

By the 60s, Hammond had advanced their product into the B-3, also known as the greatest organ ever made.
The skill, quality, competence, and craftsmanship that went into that thing was so extraordinarily high that if Hammond ever tried to re-release the B3 today,
it would run retail of somewhere around $60,000. Ahh, but parts and labour were cheaper back then, and for a brief, blissful golden age,
it was the king of the somewhat electronic music devices that could actually make decent music. Attach one to a Leslie Speaker,
and you got the greatest electronic sound before there was electronic sound. It was certainly better than whatever the musique concrete guys were farting around with.
Dumbasses.

Organs are all about size. The bigger the organ, the fuller the sound, the more awe-struck the illiterate church-going masses are when they enter the cathedral,
striking real wrath-of-god-like fear into their feeble, mortal minds. Hehehe. But when digital technology came around,
it kind of made the art of making really fucking big musical equipment rather pointless. Maximizing acoustics was replaced by the raw power of sheer amplification,
and when that happened, organs ceased to have a place in this world.

It was like bringing a trebouchet to a fight against a tank--it doesn't matter how good or how big you build that thing, it's not going to win.

But it started here. With the foreknowledge that electronics could improve and probably replace the boisterousness of the gigantic organs.
Boy, were they ever right.

Fuente: Ishkur's Guide