Vintage Gear: Malcolm Cecil's TONTO

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VINTAGE GEAR

Malcolm Cecil's TONTO
The Original New Timbral Orchestra

By Mark Vail

AUDIO SAMPLE

"Melodious Wind Song" - MP3

Audio Sample from Malcolm Cecil's 1981 LP Radiance (running time 1:29)

Contemporary electronic musicians have been spoiled by 1U rackmount and smaller multitimbral synth modules. Imagine a polyphonic multitimbral synth measuring 20 feet in diameter and six feet high!

Feast your eyes on TONTO, The Original New Timbral Orchestra. Malcolm Cecil began putting it together in 1970, and he's still expanding it. It began with a Moog III modular owned by record producer Bob Margouleff. Later added were a second Moog III, four Oberheim SEMs, two ARP 2600s, tons of modules from EMS and Serge, some digital sound-generation circuitry, and a collection of sequencers including a heavily modified EMS 256. Additional custom modules were designed by Serge Tcherepnin and Cecil himself.

Malcolm Cecil's TONTO (pictured here) includes modules from Moog, ARP, Oberheim, EMS, and Serge, along with many custom-made components. While the keyboard at the upper center came from ARP, the angled keyboards at the bottom were dual-manual Moogs. All were made by Pratt-Reed, and the rubber grommets inside have begun deteriorating.

Calling themselves TONTO's Expanding Head Band, Cecil and Margouleff cut a groundbreaking record titled Zero Time (1971). In his January '84 Keyboard article on Cecil, John Diliberto described the record as "the first purely electronic album to take the synthesizer to the limits of its liberating capabilities while still making music that laymen could enjoy listening to." Zero Time attracted none other than Stevie Wonder, who subsequently worked with Cecil, Margouleff, and TONTO to produce four classic albums: Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, and Fulfillingness' First Finale.

Although Cecil and Margouleff then parted ways due to business reasons, Cecil continued working on and with TONTO. He went on to collaborate with an impressive list of artists including Steven Stills, the Isley Brothers, Bobby Womack, Joan Baez, and Ravi Shankar. What possessed him to assemble such a monstrous system? "I wanted to create an instrument that would be the first multitimbral polyphonic synthesizer," he says. "Multitimbral polyphony is different than the type of polyphony provided by most of today's synthesizers, on which you turn to a string patch and everything under your fingers is strings. In my book, 'multitimbral' means each note you play has a different tone quality, as if the notes come from separate instruments. I wanted to be able to play live multitimbral polyphonic music using as many fingers and feet as I had."

As shown in this photo, TONTO could produce five independent timbres simultaneously. After working with Armand Pascetta on a digitally controlled polyphonic keyboard that could respond to velocity, release velocity, and aftertouch, Cecil increased the voice count to 22, with two additional channels for pitch transposition. More recently he added MIDI input to the system.

Early on, TONTO didn't look like it does here. "When TONTO got to be nine feet long and we were running from one end of the instrument to the other towing a trolley behind us with the keyboards on it, we decided there had to be a better way to lay the instrument out," Cecil told Diliberto in '84. To improve the instrument's ergonomics, Cecil and Margouleff enlisted the help of John Storyk, a Buckminster Fuller student who designed Electric Ladyland studios. Storyk drew up plans that gave TONTO the look of a starship's bridge, with control panels mounted at convenient angles -- even from overhead. The resulting instrument formed the inside of a sphere, obviously influenced by Fuller, who was famous for spherical geometry and the design of geodesic domes.

You can't simply flip a bunch of switches and make great music, though. "TONTO isn't for the faint of heart," Cecil asserts. "It wasn't intended for those who want quick, pushbutton results. It takes a long time to program TONTO, and it takes time to get all of its components working together. But it's really worth the effort, because you end up with an unusual piece of music that couldn't be produced any other way."

Vital Stats:

Description: Polyphonic multitimbral analog modular synthesizer system.

Produced: Assembly began in 1970 and continues.

Number in existence: 1.

Manufacturer: Designed and built by Malcolm Cecil using components from Moog, ARP, EMS, Oberheim, and Serge, as well as custom one-off modules.

Insider information: TONTO creator Malcolm Cecil is a jazz bassist. Before moving to the U.S. in the late '60s, he played in Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London and was the principal bassist in the BBC Radio Orchestra. Until he got a green card, he couldn't join the U.S. musicians union, so he worked as the chief engineer at Media Sound in New York, where he met Bob Margouleff.... Cecil and Margouleff appeared with TONTO and Billy Preston on the '70s TV show The Midnight Special.... Cecil released a solo TONTO LP called Radiance in 1981. He's currently working on a new CD.... Five 125' cable harnesses conduct signals throughout TONTO, carrying audio, control voltages, digital data, communication information, and power. The low-voltage, high-conductivity power cable was left over from a NASA Apollo spacecraft.

Original investment: over $150,000.

Current value: at least $150,000.

The second edition of senior associate editor MARK VAIL's Vintage Synthesizers book is available from www.backbeatbooks.com and fine bookstores everywhere.