Keith Humble’s Optronic Workstation Featuring the EMS VCS-1

This instrument came into the MESS collection from the personal collection of MESS co-founder and director Robin Fox. Robin was given this workstation by engineer Jim Sosin. Jim was Keith Humble’s friend and technician and had worked alongside him for many years. With Keith’s passing in 1995, Jim inherited many of his instruments which he subsequently passed onto Robin. All of these instruments are in the MESS collection.

Raw and Untamed

In synthesiser terms, the VCS-1 is the essence of what you would find in any basic subtractive synthesiser. The VCS acronym stands for Voltage Controlled Studio and was designed to be its own small electronic sound workstation. As such it has a few additional features to allow for novel interactions with the sound it generates.

This machine, as with all the EMS machines, was built to a budget for compact size and maximum functionality. In order to keep these machines affordable, the circuit designs were kept slim. This could lead to unstable and unpredictable behaviour. The VCS-1 is the most raw and untamed expression of the sound which became the hallmark of EMS instruments. At the time this instability was seen by many as a disadvantage, but as the reputation of these instruments has grown over the years, the chaotic character of EMS machines is now highly prized by electronic sound artists.

MESS director Robin Fox has said of the VCS-1, "It's as close as you can get to shaping raw voltage into sound with your hands, without being electrocuted."

The story goes that after a concert of electronic music in London in 1968-9 Australian composer and performer Don Banks convinced Peter Zinovieff and Tristram Cary to accept a £50 commission (the equivalent of £700 in early 2021) to build him a portable synthesiser he could fit in a suitcase to take back home to Australia. They, along with David Cockerell, designed and built the Don Banks Music Box, later called the VCS-1 (or Voltage Controlled Studio 1). Once Don’s friend and associate Keith Humble got wind of this, he too commissioned Zinovieff, Cary and Cockerell to make a copy for himself. Humble’s VCS-1 wound up being folded into his Optronics instrument/workstation.

This story is touched upon in the following excerpt from Matthew Bate’s 2007 Australian documentary What the Future Sounded Like.

The interest of Australian composers Banks and Humble played a significant part in inspiring the creation of EMS Synthesisers, which with the development and release of the VCS-3 (aka The Putney) for the first time gave people the opportunity to buy an affordable electronic instrument. This history is detailed by New Zealand based artist, composer and academic James Gardner in his paper The Don Banks Music Box to The Putney: The genesis and development of the VCS3 synthesiser.

Prior to the VCS-3 electronic instruments were largely the domain of radio stations, universities and the very wealthy who could afford the high quality and expensive offerings from the likes of Robert Moog. With the VCS-3 and later the portable Synthi-A and Synthi-AKS, many people could now experiment with electronic sound. The roster of artists who use EMS instruments is long and includes many people now considered electronic music pioneers such as Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, Pink Floyd.

Afterword...

Interestingly, when MESS founders Byron Scullin and Robin Fox first started to work together, Keith Humble's workstation was being stored in a suburban backyard garage that Robin was using as a home studio.

Byron recounts, “I went over to Robin’s house and he had his studio in this old shed out the back of his house. I seem to remember it was pretty wild. I think it had partially been used as a greenhouse in its past, so there were glass panels on one side and a bunch of vines and greenery growing in through the gaps in the corrugated iron cladding. Like a lot of sheds in suburban Melbourne, there was not much to it other than a wooden frame and cladding - not exactly what you would call weatherproof! Anyhow, the Humble workstation was sitting up on a shelf in the shed and I remember walking in and it grabbing my attention right away. I asked Robin what it was, and his response was along the lines of, “It’s some old thing of Keith’s. I’m not really sure if it works. I plugged it in and it makes some weird sounds. It’s pretty heavy and I'm not sure if it's working properly"...

...At the time neither of us realised what an important machine this was. It was only through Robin doing some research that he came to suspect it was an EMS VCS-1 in the setup. This was later confirmed by research conducted by New Zealand based artist and academic James Gardner (formerly of Apollo 440) who confirmed for us the importance and significance of this machine. We both feel a little shamefaced at its treatment then, now knowing what it is."

It’s also not the first time at MESS that a rare piece of Australian electronic music history was discovered in a shed, dumpster or under a bed. For example the Transaudio 3 Oscillators were dumpster rescues, the Serge Paperface spent many years in boxes in a shed covered in dust and bird droppings and the EMS video synthesiser the Spectre/Spectron was found under a bed by composer David Chesworth.

The influence that these EMS instruments had on the development of electronic sound for artists, particularly in popular music, cannot be underestimated. It should also be noted that EMS led the way for many other instrument designers to found companies around their own ideas of how electronic sound could be generated and articulated.