Yesterday’s post brings to mind this story from the start of my teaching career. As a fledgling prof at Centre College of Kentucky, I took it on myself to establish a small electronic music studio. The central instrument was the Korg M1 music station, a 1990s 61-key workhorse and contender for all-time best-selling synthesizer.
I was trying to learn the instrument enough to teach an introductory class. In those pre-Google days, the most useful tech support resource was the printed manual. Maybe there was a relevant internet forum, but I didn’t know about it. And the M1 manual had issues.
When I found myself properly stuck I reached out to David Borden, a pioneering composer of minimalist synthesizer music and founder of the first all-synth performance ensemble. David directed the digital music studio at Cornell, where I had done my graduate work. I told him of my frustrations with the sketchy M1 documentation.* Familiar with mass-market synths of all kinds from their very inception—David was “Chief Idiot” in the idiot-proofing of the landmark Moog synthesizer—he gave me privileged information about how synth manuals are created and translated.
Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 12:23:07 -0400
To: FEURZEIG@centre.edu
From: ...@cornell.edu (David Borden)
Subject: Re: Free advice Part IIHi Dave--
About the manuals; not many people know this, but they're (ALL of them) written in Tibet, and are used there as extended Zen Koans for the most spiritually advanced students. Then after the students are through with them and have added ideas of their own, they are translated into English and are auctioned off to various synthesizer manufacturers around the world. The Synth model doesn't matter. The various companies then sort of tailor the whole thing to their model names, but basically, they're all the same kind of thing.
I think of this every time I deal with an incomprehensible manual, and my heart is made light.
*A more frank assessment is conveyed by David’s email summary: “Sounds like the Korg is driving you out of your fucking mind.”
Ha! Sounds about right from my experience. Every now and again you come across one that is a marvel of clarity and organizational elegance, but ... verrry rarely. I'm a big fan of Roland keyboards, but they definitely need to start insourcing their documentation from Tibet...
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