Jim Aikin

Interview by Brian Cowell.

Without a doubt, Jim Aikin has come to be known as the "father of all reviewers". From the mid 1970's till the present day, he has been one of the architects that built up one of the worlds leading keyboard based magazines KEYBOARD.

His job has been over the years has been a dream to many of us, review the latest equipment and point out the "pro's" and "con's" attributed with them.

Now he is Senior Editor at KEYBOARD magazine and a well known voice around musicplayer.com. Sonikmatter had a chance to talk with him and get some fascinating insights into the man whose name is just as synonymous as some of the leading edge equipment he reviews.

SONIK : How did you become a reviewer at KEYBOARD magazine Jim?

JIM : I started at KEYBOARD in December 1975. We didn't start doing product reviews until 1980, so I guess you could say I was grandfathered into it. For the first couple of years Dominic Milano wrote all of the KEYBOARD Reports. (We only published one per month in those days.) I don't remember exactly when I got involved, but it may have been when Dominic was ill.

SONIK : Who have been your musical influences?

JIM : The question of actual influences on my composing is a bit different from the question of what music I enjoy listening to. Also, the influences have changed over the years.

If I tell you I was influenced by Jefferson Airplane, that will sound silly in 2001, but in 1971 it made sense. In 1968 I practically wore out Judy Collins's "In My Life" LP. (The arrangements on that were done by Joshua Rifkin.)

More recently, everyone from Haydn to Thelonious Monk has had an influence on me, directly or indirectly. My dad used to play a Bob Scobey LP a lot when I was in high school, and I'd have to say classic Dixieland is an influence of sorts.

I tend to like intelligently composed and cleanly recorded music. I pretty much lost interest in pop music during the punk era, but the birth of techno made my ears perk up.

I do write songs with lyrics from time to time. Early Bob Dylan was a big influence (again, we're talking 1968). In recent years, Laurie Anderson.

The common thread here is the idea that it's okay for songs to have lots of words, and to convey actual ideas. Expressing raw emotion doesn't interest me much: I don't feel I have anything to say in that area that's fresh, or that listeners are likely to relate to.

SONIK : What instruments do you have in your own personal studio at home?

JIM : You don't really want to know. All of the gear I own was purchased a number of years ago. I don't think there's a single hardware item in my studio that is still in production, except for a few pieces of loaner gear I've taken home from the office to explore further.

My master keyboard is an 88-note Korg 01/W ProX.

I have two Yamaha TX802 modules, which I wouldn't part with for any amount of money, both because I like the sound of FM and because they have halfway decent tuning tables.

A lot of my drum tracks come from an E-mu Procussion processed through an Ensoniq DP/4+. That's a very versatile setup, because both units are highly programmable.

Lately I've been learning Csound. It's a terribly slow, difficult way to compose music, but it offers a number of advantages, including total control over tunings (are you sensing a theme here?) and many dimensions of control over timbre. My next equipment purchase will be a faster computer, both for Csound and so I can run realtime software synths.

SONIK : What 10 CD's would you classify as your favorites in your collection Jim?

JIM : You mean this week? Any answer I could give would leave out too many cool things.

The staples in my listening diet are Angela Hewitt's recordings of the Bach Partitas and French Suites, Murray Perahia's recordings of the English Suites, and Andras Schiff's recordings of Books 1 and 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier. That's 10 CDs right there, so I guess I'm off the hook, right?

I love Bach on the piano, but scrupulously avoid harpsichord recordings. What I like about Bach's solo keyboard music is that it has a high degree of formal structure, and doesn't have much to do with emotion. Also the Goldberg Variations, but not Glenn Gould's recordings of them. He's too eccentric to really enjoy listening to. I forget whose recording of the Goldbergs I have. Charles Rosen? Could be.

In the electronic realm, there's Headland, by Echo System (great CD, totally obscure). I was listening to Meat Beat Manifesto for a while, and before that to Rob Mounsey and Kit Watkins. I know I'm leaving some people out. I'll have a look at my collection tonight and see if anything jumps out at me.

SONIK : What forms of synthesis do you think should be explored more or be revisited again?

JIM : If you're using Csound, just about any form of synthesis I know of is immediately available to you. For free. What you explore or revisit is entirely up to you as a musician. Reading between the lines, then, it appears this question is about synthesis in commercial products. And that's a marketing decision. As such, it's not very interesting.

Sample playback is pretty boring, I'll say that. I think FM has a lot of potential that's still unexplored. Using FM as a tone source and then doing a little waveshaping can give you some really interesting sounds.

The other half of the equation is, how much trouble do you want to go to in order to get your hands on those fresh, exotic sounds -- and how much money do you want to spend?

This is partly dependent on the genre of music you're into.

For some musicians, a decent General MIDI sound set is perfectly fine. You can put together very respectable pop arrangements and never have to get your hands dirty worrying about LFO waveforms or filter resonance.

I'd be curious to see a commercial synth with a flexible implementation of granular synthesis, but I'm not convinced musicians would flock to buy it.

Scanned synthesis looks to be interesting, but I haven't tried it yet. In any case, these techniques are more useful for experimental music than for mainstream pop (used in Csound).

SONIK : What would be the funniest thing you've seen happen in the music industry?

JIM : The industry isn't exactly a barrel of laughs, in my experience. I got food poisoning once from eating lunch at the L.A. Convention Center, but that's only funny if you think barfing all night long in an expensive hotel room is a hoot.

Here's a mildly amusing anecdote for you:

Once upon a time there was a little tiny company trying to market a high-end digital synth that would compete with the Fairlight and the Synclavier. It was called the Synthia, and it had a sexy touch-screen interface. The developers brought their prototype around to our office. This was just after the release of the DX7, so it would have been 1984 or thereabouts. The Synthia used additive synthesis based on a bank of sine waves -- rather like a Hammond organ, but with no balls whatever.

Wondering desperately whether I could somehow contrive to get an interesting sound out of this cheesebox, I asked them how fast they could crank up the LFO. I was thinking, if the LFO would go up into the audio range, at least you'd have a primitive form of FM. They obligingly pushed it up to the top of its range, which was about 20Hz. I played a chord on the keyboard.

When I let up on the keys, the sound continued for several seconds rather than stopping. Eventually the notes halted, one by one. I tried another chord. Same deal.

What was going on, I deduced, was that the designers were using one microprocessor to both scan the keyboard (sensing what keys were pressed) and generate the LFO waveform. At a fast LFO rate, the poor processor was so busy it didn't have time to check the keyboard for new notes.

After that, we never heard anything more about the Synthia.

SONIK : Where do you expect to see both hardware and software in the future?

JIM : As a science fiction writer, I try to avoid predicting the future. One inevitably gets it wrong. Hilariously so, more often than not.

Having said that, I do expect the trend toward computer-based music-making to continue. The cost of developing and releasing a visionary new synthesizer or effects processor in software is so much less than doing so in hardware. Hardware companies have to be conservative in order not to go broke. Conservatism leaves precious little room for innovation.

What I'd love to see (and this is my own idea, not anything I've heard rumors of) would be a dedicated music OS for the PC. Perhaps a streamlined variety of Linux. The reasons why people avoid computers have to do with their perceived complexity and unreliability, and the steepness of the learning curve. If a manufacturer were able to develop and support a dedicated OS that was stable, powerful, and easy to learn, it would offer musicians a lot of advantages, and probably attract a lot of adherents.

SONIK : Do you have any criteria by which you judge musical instruments?

JIM : I try to look at a new instrument from as many angles as possible. That's my job.

First, do I like the sounds?
Second, does the user interface make sense?
Third, assuming we're looking at a synthesizer, is there a reasonable set of programming features I can use to create my own sounds?
Fourth, is it a good value? How does it stack up to the competition at the same price point?
Fifth, does it have a reasonable set of smooth-feeling realtime performance controllers?

In the case of other types of instruments, other criteria will come into play. With a digital piano, the question of keyboard feel becomes very important, as does the question of how well-matched the samples are. With a hardware sampler, sample editing becomes a big factor: How easy or difficult is it to do the half-dozen types of edits you'll most often want/need to do?

The things I can't evaluate in a product review -- I don't think any reviewer can -- are how well an instrument will hold up on the road, how good tech support is (when writing a review, I usually have a direct pipeline to a tech), and how well the manufacturer will support the instrument two years from now.

If the power supply turns the motherboard to toast, will they be able to supply you new parts?

Will they even answer your phone calls? I dunno. When -- if ever -- will the new OS be released with those long-promised features? Your guess is as good as mine.

SONIK : What product were you reviewing when you made the famous quote:
"They'll have to pry [the unit] from my cold, dead fingers"?

JIM : I honestly don't remember. (Fortunately, my fingers are still doing just fine, thanks.) I seem to recall that it was a Lexicon processor of some sort.

SONIK : What do you think of the many musicians who now use the phrase to point out that they are very happy with a particular product?

JIM : It's fine with me if a phrase I use gains some currency. I'm in the phrase-making business, after all.

SONIK : Do you like the trend with companies going back to naming their synthesizers?

JIM : Yeah, the sex appeal of a model number has been way overblown. (Somebody should tell Akai.) Maybe model numbers are okay for microphones. I can't quite imagine a mic called "Pistol," "Mudsucker," or "Ultra-Breeze."

SONIK : What sort of "sci-fi" do you write, Jim?

JIM : Most SF writers prefer not to use the term "sci-fi." It conjures up visions of a 1950s B movie with bug-eyed aliens. (To be fair, there was at least one good 1950s sci-fi movie -- "Forbidden Planet." The soundtrack was all-electronic, and the movie had other virtues as well.)

My first novel (Walk the Moons Road) was published in 1985, the second (The Wall at the Edge of the World) in 1992. Both are out of print, but I have friends who have managed to pick up copies on Amazon. I'm working on a new one at the moment, and I think it's going to be good. The exigencies of book publishing being what they are, I can't promise when it will be published.

I have complex opinions about science fiction as a genre, and about the process of writing fiction. This interview probably isn't a good venue in which to explore those subjects. Let's just say that musicians enjoy a tremendous advantage not afforded to novelists: Music doesn't have to make logical sense. If you like the way it sounds, that's a perfect and complete justification for whatever you choose to play or compose. A story-teller who tried to use the same rationale would have no hope of publication. Zero. The big challenge for a fiction writer, in my opinion, comes under the heading of plausibility: You try to figure out, in general, why people do things, and then to figure out what a particular set of characters can reasonably do that will actually make for interesting reading, and then to convey the characters' thoughts and feelings in a way that readers will agree is how people in those circumstances would actually think and feel. It's a craft at which my success is rather intermittent, I'm afraid.

SONIK : Did you ever think that keyboards would be where they are today?

JIM : Well, the keyboard has a long and distinguished history, going back to before Bach. I think we felt from the beginning, here at the magazine, that the days of guitar-dominated rock were numbered, and that keyboards would move more to the fore as time went on. What none of us really envisaged -- at least, I didn't -- was the influence that computer technology would have on keyboards. But remember: In 1977 someone at IBM declared that there was no reason why ordinary people should ever need to have a computer in their home.

I try very hard to avoid making predictions about what the future holds for keyboards, or anything else. That may seem a strange position for a science fiction writer, but if you read any of the SF that was popular 20 or 30 or 50 years ago (and doing so is highly advisable if you're going to try to write the stuff) you quickly discover that most of the predictions made by the smartest minds in the field were not only wrong but horribly, laughably wrong.

Here's my favorite example: When Isaac Asimov started writing his famous Robot series, he gave the robots vacuum tubes for brains ("positronic" tubes, but tubes nonetheless), because the transistor hadn't yet been invented, much less the integrated circuit. Today we can build machines that will do millions or billions of calculations per second, but those machines still can't be trusted to mow your lawn without supervision. And of course Asimov's 21st Century men all wore hats and smoked cigarettes, and the women wore aprons and stayed in the kitchen. His social vision was as inadequate as his technological vision.

So trying to predict the future is a pointless exercise; all it does is reveal your own limitations. I do expect that digital technology will continue its inexorable march across the keyboard landscape, but what direction that march will turn is not something I feel qualified to speculate about. I'd love to see someone build a music laptop with velocity-sensitive keys and high-quality DACs, but that's today's technology, not tomorrow's. It's a marketing issue. And while I have opinions on marketing, I probably know at least as much about it as Asimov knew about robots.

SONIK : What "non musical" sites do you like to visit on the internet?

JIM : I find the idea of "liking to visit sites" a little bizarre, actually. (But then, I don't own a television, so possibly I'm in the minority.)

I don't find the Internet a very persuasive or engaging entertainment medium, for a variety of reasons, including excessive download times, terrible organization, and dorky content. I use the Internet for tracking down information (or trying to). That's what it was originally intended for. When I've got the information I need, why would I ever to visit that site again? Life is full of meaningless distractions. I try to filter them out.

If you like, you can read this as part of a curmudgeonly editorial that I might write someday. If I wanted to rant about the Internet, I'd say something like this:

"Kids, if you've got a site, get rid of the damn gimmicks! The worst offenders are the people who insist that I have Shockwave or some crap like that to view their ultra-spiffy site. I bail immediately. Also on my shit list are people who code their site so nothing will display on the home page until about 50 gifs have loaded. You're not that important: Get over it."

Many thanks to the people at KEYBOARD MAGAZINE and MUSICPLAYER.COM for allowing us to interview Jim Aikin.

DECEMBER 2001