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Brian Eno released Discreet Music in 1975; the majority of the album is taken up by its 30-minute title track, which was one of Eno’s first experiments in the quiet, unobtrusive music that would go on to define his career, as well as ambient music. The songs concept was conceived by Eno when he “discovered” a new way of listening to music, where at low volumes the sound is on the verge of vanishing, and merges with the background noises of the environment.

In this article I’ll explore how Eno created Discreet Music using a simple but clever system that utilised early synthesizer sequencing and sound-on-sound tape looping. I’ll also recreate the sounds using Arturia Synthi V and Soundtoys Echoboy.

 

















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Discreet Synth

Eno recorded Discreet Music using an EMS Synthi AKS, a portable analog monosynth released in 1972 with modular and sequencing capabilities. Eno was a big fan of the EMS synths; he famously used an EMS VCS3 on David Bowie’s Heroes, and they were his synths of choice until the Yamaha DX7 came along in the early 80s.

As well as the digital sequencer, which I’ll discuss more in-depth later in the article, the EMS was also notable for its unique patching system. Whilst many modular synths of the 70s used large form factors and patch cables to make complex routing possible, the Synthi used a patch matrix where the user would place pins to create connections. Different coloured pins could be used to control the amount of attenuation and modulation. This setup made the synth small but powerful. Other interesting features are the joystick, allowing for hands-on controls of certain parameters, and the built-in spring reverb.

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Arturia recently released a software version of the EMS Synthi, called Synthi V, which recreates the EMS Synthi, with some welcome modern additions. The Discreet Music patch is relatively simple to patch, and makes use of oscillator blending and the onboard reverb. Start by initialising Synthi V by opening the menu and choosing New Preset… to start a fresh patch.

For oscillators, the sound is a mellow sine/triangle wave made more interesting by mixing a small amount of sawtooth oscillator. On the Synthi, each oscillator outputs two different waveforms, which are routed to the filter via the patchbay grid. Oscillator 1’s sawtooth is patched by default, and we can also patch oscillator 1’s sine wave and oscillator 2’s triangle wave by placing a pin on the matrix dots 3H and 6H, lining the oscillator sources on the left with the filter input above. Balance the volume of the sawtooth wave by lowering oscillator 1’s saw level knob down to the 3 mark.

Set the filter by lowering the blue frequency knob in the filter oscillator section to just below halfway (0.472). I also added some subtle vibrato by patching oscillator 3’s triangle to the oscillator 1 & 2’s control inputs (I8 and J8), setting oscilator 3’s frequency nice and low, and the triangle’s volume level low to control the amount of vibrato modulation. Eno also would have likely added some built-in reverb from the Synthi, which will add ambience as well as darkening the sound, so raise the reverberation mix knob to 9.

 

















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Discreet Effects

I made Discreet Music using (by today’s standards) the primitive tools of early electronic music: an AMS synthesizer, with a simple sequencer, a graphic equaliser (this allows you to modify the timbre of the synthesizer’s output), a Gibson Echoplex and 2 Revox tape recorders. All of those tools were quite fallible. The synthesizer tended to slide gradually out of tune as it warmed up and anyway the keyboard was not a standard ‘equal temperament’ keyboard such as you’d find on any commercial synthesizer now: you began work with it by tuning the octaves, which, along with the sliding pitch, left some leeway for variation. The Graphic Equaliser was slightly the worse for wear and some of its faders crackled, so I didn’t use those frequency bands during the recording of the piece. The Echoplex used a loop of magnetic tape which rather erratically circled round a series of playback heads. The tape was old and didn’t reproduce high frequencies; the ‘wow and flutter’ produced by the slippage of the tape created a gentle and sporadic chorusing effect on the echoes it delivered. - Brian Eno

 

















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