Bryan needed help figuring this one out, so he called a high school friend of his named Keith Lofstrom. Keith is a computer genius, the kind of guy who builds his own computer chips and rewrites operating systems for fun. He didn’t learn to drive a car until he was in his thirties, but he got his pilot’s license at fifteen, because planes are cooler than cars. Keith is an interesting cat, and he has a brilliant technical mind.
With Keith’s help, Bryan figured out how to build a matrix of three keyboards, with a manual patch bay, that could control all the synthesizers I had. But in order for this to work, all the equipment had to be in an open-standards architecture, which meant we could plug different brands into each other and they would communicate. We thought this was brilliant, but not everybody liked the idea—particularly the synthesizer manufacturers. Open standards was an idea before its time, and companies had no interest in sharing technologies.
Bryan found this out quickly when he made a couple of calls to synthesizer companies to explain what we were doing:
I call up Bob Moog, and I say, “Hey, Bob, this is Bryan from Herbie Hancock.” And he says, “Oh, yeah, I love Herbie Hancock! How you doing? What are you up to?”
And I say, “Well, I’m going to hook my Moog into my Oberheim so Herbie can have the perfect sound.” And Bob goes, “Hmph, just buy more Moogs,” and hangs up on me. Which was unlike Bob, who in the past had always been very supportive.
This was not my idea of openness, right? And so I call Tom Oberheim, the inventor of the Oberheim synthesizer. And I say, “Hey, Tom, how are you doing?” He says, “Hey, what are you up to?” I say, “I’m working for Herbie Hancock.” And he says, “Oh, I love what Herbie and Joe Zawinul do with my instruments. What’s up?” I tell him, “I want to hook up my Moog into my Oberheim so Herbie can have the perfect sound.”
And Tom says, “I will void your warranty if you do that.”
And this gave us great pause, because these were $10,000 synthesizers that were just two weeks old. You’ve got to be very serious if you’re going to take the risk of drilling into them, knowing you don’t have a warranty. But that was the synthesizer manufacturers’ attitude at the time—they just didn’t get it.
Warranty or no warranty, we had to try this, so we went ahead and made the modifications. And finally I was able to play multiple synthesizers without having to be surrounded by multiple keyboards. I mean, if you look at the back cover of the Sunlight album, there’s a picture of me surrounded by eleven keyboards. That’s a lot for a guy with only two hands! But step by step we were using new technology to streamline the way I made music.
A few months after that I saw an ad in a keyboard magazine for a piece of equipment I’d never tried before. It was called a vocoder, which was shorthand for “voice encoder.” Originally developed in the 1920s and 1930s for scrambling and encoding speech communications, the vocoder was later picked up by musicians and vocalists because it could make other sounds mimic the human voice. The ad announced that the Sennheiser company was putting on a demo in a studio in L.A. for anybody who was interested.
I called David Rubinson and said, “Let’s check this out.” I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but a few bands had started experimenting with vocoders, including Kraftwerk, the Alan Parsons Project, and Pink Floyd, though for the most part they used it for background vocal effects. I had written some lyrics for a new song, and I wondered whether we could program the vocoder for lead vocals. It wasn’t really intended for that kind of use, so nobody had done it before—which is of course why I wanted to do it. I always wanted to be the first to try something new.
We went to the demo, and I got so excited by the possibilities that I bought one on the spot. This was a leap of faith, because those Sennheiser vocoders cost about $10,000, which was a small fortune in 1978. And if I was really serious about integrating it into my music, I’d have to buy two, to have a backup in case something went wrong with one on the road.
The vocoder was essentially a black box with rows of knobs and inputs where I could plug in my synthesizers, keyboards, and microphones. I brought it into the studio and handed it to Bryan Bell. “I want to use this for lead vocals,” I told him. “Can we do that?” I knew it wouldn’t be as easy as plugging a microphone into the box, but I wasn’t sure exactly how complicated it would be.
Bryan went to work on the problem with David Rubinson’s engineer, Fred Catero, an amazing producer and recording engineer who had worked with everybody from Janis Joplin to Santana to Sly Stone. He’d also engineered Mwandishi, Crossings, Sextant, and Head Hunters for me, among many other records. Fred was brilliant in the studio, and I knew that if anyone could figure this thing out, Fred and Bryan could.
For two weeks, night and day, they fiddled and tested, adding compression, white noise, and equalization to the microphone and synthesizer. They learned that the vibrato in a singing voice is actually three kinds of vibrato—the modulation of volume, pitch, and filter—all of which I would need to control on the synthesizer. It was like solving a complicated puzzle, but by the end of the second week they had managed to configure the vocoder to sound human enough for a lead vocal.
When they demonstrated the effect to me, I loved it. I’d written lyrics for only one song, but the vocoder just sounded so hip that I wanted to get lyrics for the other songs, too—to do a whole album with vocoder lead vocals. This was going to be cool.
In all the years I’d been performing onstage I was always hidden behind a piano or various keyboards. It was easy for a horn or guitar player to stand front and center, but drums and piano were always in the back or to the side. But now I would be singing lead in addition to playing synthesizer, so I said to Bryan, “I need to be up front.”
This presented a whole new set of challenges, because keyboards weren’t really portable at that time, so I had to be wherever they were—unless Bryan could figure out how to create a portable keyboard with its own vocoder switcher, so I could turn the effect on and off. It was a typical Bryan assignment: Hey, can you do the impossible? And can you have it finished in a couple of weeks?
Here’s how Bryan remembers it:
I told Herbie, “The only way you can be down front onstage is if we make a portable keyboard, and then we have to include all these special controls on it, to control and switch different vibratos.”
We had to be able to switch the signals for the vocoder from the portable keyboard, too, because Herbie had to use the microphone to talk to the audience. There was a mic-only mode and a synth-only mode, so he could solo the synthesizer parts, and then there was a vocoder mode, which took the mic and the synthesizer and put them into the vocoder.
We had about four weeks. The record was done, the tour was booked, and it was “Oh, crap! Now we have to build the world’s first portable keyboard, which hasn’t been done; build the first vocoder switcher, which hasn’t been done; and by the way, while we’re at it, put in a remote control for the switcher.” We just threw in all the technology we could.
This was five years before MIDI [musical instrument digital interface, which revolutionized the world of music by enabling digital interconnection among equipment]. We were doing a lot of the basic architecture of MIDI from the beginning of Herbie’s system, and it just kept getting deeper and deeper as we went.
Once Bryan figured out the vocoder and created a portable keyboard, there was another problem to sort out: If I was planning to move around between my keyboards and the front of the stage, where would my microphone be? Bryan took a headset microphone and attached it to my glasses using a wire tie, and then he used a wireless guitar transmitter for audio—and that’s how he made one of the first wireless headset microphones ever used for lead vocals.
Like everything Bryan and I developed, these were brand-new technologies. We could have tried to patent or sell them, but that’s not why we were inventing things—we just wanted to find new ways to cre
ate cool sounds and play them seamlessly onstage. Both Bryan and I were happy to share these breakthroughs, and we were also happy to switch as soon as somebody else created something better. Here’s how Bryan describes it:
As soon as a portable keyboard came out that was made of fiberglass instead of wood, or that used a five-conductor cord instead of a fifty-conductor cable, we went, “Hallelujah! This is groovy! I can get rid of mine and have this, which is faster or lighter or more ergonomic.” Anytime there was a new commercial product that was better than our custom one, we just took our stuff out of service and moved on.
I was always putting Bryan under crazy deadlines, but he managed to figure out all these modifications just in time for our European tour in 1978, in support of the new record, Sunlight. I couldn’t wait to try them out.
For the first time I was front and center in shows—and I loved it! Suddenly I was up there like a rock star, playing my portable keyboard and singing lead. And particularly during our shows in the United Kingdom there always seemed to be beautiful girls in the front row, dancing and singing along. The single “I Thought It Was You” didn’t make much of a ripple in America, but it was a hit in Britain, and everybody at the shows seemed to know the lyrics. I’d be singing, Just a glance from behind / happened by chance or design, and I’d look out and see half the audience singing along. Of all the records I’d done, this was the first where most of the songs had lyrics, and performing them onstage was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.
The funny thing was, as much as the English audiences loved Sunlight, the audiences in Germany hated it even more. They apparently still wanted Herbie Hancock, acoustic piano player, but instead there I was with my portable synthesizer, singing some disco-inflected songs through this strange device, making electronic music that bore almost no resemblance to jazz as far as they were concerned. The Germans went crazy, booing and sometimes walking out.
Those audiences seemed to believe that the artist should be doing whatever they wanted him to do, even if it meant staying stuck in the past. But there was so much new and exciting electronic technology—and so much more on the way—that there was only one way to go, as far as I was concerned: into the future.
In 1979 Bryan and I decided it was time to get a personal computer. We knew everything was moving to digital, and this was the logical next step, but PCs were so new that we didn’t know much about the various brands. So Bryan called his friend Keith Lofstrom again, to ask his opinion.
“What should we get,” he asked Keith, “a Commodore Pet, a TRS-80, or an Apple II?”
Keith said, “Get the Apple II. They’ve got the interface figured out, and it’s open architecture—they have slots, so you can make your own stuff.” He also told us that Apple was about to release its Apple II+, which had a whopping 48 kilobytes of memory, up from 32K in the Apple II.
So Bryan and I got in the Cobra, drove down to a little mom-and-pop place in Santa Monica, and bought two Apple II+ computers, which basically looked like flat beige typewriters. One was for us, and one was for Fred Catero, who’d handed me his credit card and said, “Herbie, whatever you’re getting is cool, so get me one, too.”
I was excited to see what we could do with our new Apple II+, but first Bryan wanted to show me something that had nothing to do with music. At the store he’d also bought me a 100-baud modem, and when we got back to the studio, he hooked everything up: the modem, the computer, a TV monitor, and a telephone line. The modem came with a subscription to something called The Source, so Bryan dialed up, using the modem, and connected to the service.
“Okay, now what?” I asked, looking at the black screen with some glowing numbers and letters. Bryan started flipping through the booklet to figure out how we could connect to the “chat” function.
He started reading off instructions to me, and I typed in commands until we somehow got connected with another user. I typed “Hi,” on the screen, and whoever it was typed “Hi” back.
I typed, “We just got an Apple II! This is my first time chatting.” And whoever it was typed back, “Congratulations! My name is Fritz.”
This was cool! I had no idea who or where this guy Fritz was, but here we were, just chatting with each other over our computers. What an amazing invention! We kept typing, this slow back-and-forth of green letters on a black screen, and Fritz asked me what I did for a living. I typed that I was a piano player. “Do you have any records?” he asked. I typed, “Yes, about twenty of them. What do you do?”
He wrote, “I make beer. Kind of like you with your records—I make a lot of beer.” And then he typed, “Actually, I’m the owner of the Anchor Brewing Company.”
Wow! This blew my mind, that the owner of Anchor Steam beer and I could randomly meet over the computer. The idea that he was up in San Francisco, typing away, and I was sitting in my studio in L.A., and we were getting to know each other—it was like science fiction. I was laughing at how amazing it was, but pretty soon Bryan got a serious look on his face. He said, “Oh, my god, Herbie—if recording is going to be all digital, and we can communicate digitally by computers, you know what that means? It means one day we’ll be able to sell music over our computers.” This was in 1979! But Bryan saw it as clear as day, even then.
That was a long way in the future, of course—because as advanced as these new computers were, they were still pretty primitive. Floppy discs were available only as an external accessory, if at all, so some of the first personal computers had no storage device save for the small internal memory. If you wanted to buy a program, you had to order it by mail, and digital data was usually stored on cassette tapes. You had to hook up a cassette player to your computer and play tapes to transfer information. And you’d better have a pretty high-quality player, because otherwise the data might be compromised.
After Bryan and I had fiddled around on The Source for a while, we turned to the big question: How could we use this new machine to make music?
At first I thought I would use it mainly to write music. The computer had audio, so I thought I could develop different sounds and then play them back. Beyond that, I wasn’t really sure what to do with it. We knew the Apple II+ had lots of capabilities, but computers hadn’t really been used for making music before, so we’d be making stuff up on the fly. And neither of us knew how to speak the computer’s language, Applesoft BASIC. But Apple had included a programming manual with the computer, so Bryan decided to teach himself.
He created a piece of software called Cosmic Keyboards, which created pages for each song that we could store on the computer: a page for lyrics; one for chords; one naming all the instruments used, how they should be hooked up, what cables they needed, what the settings were, what programs they used. His goal was to create a computer-based system for tracking all the data for each song, complete with diagrams. Nothing like that existed yet.
But that was only the first step—Bryan had much more ambitious plans. He felt that all the automated parts of our setup were too slow, so he actually started thinking he would build his own 16-bit master computer, just to speed up our processing. The Apple II+ would still be the terminal, but Bryan wanted to build a program that would enable us to do more things in less time.
I thought he was crazy. “Bryan, you’ve never even written code for the Apple II,” I reminded him.
“Well, I have this book,” he said. “I’ll learn how.” He’d bury his head in the programming book and then start typing things in, essentially hacking this brand-new Apple II+. We’d be in the recording studio, and he’d disappear in between takes to mess around with his programming, with his Applesoft BASIC book open at his side.
Bryan was fearless, making stuff up as he went along. He not only built that 16-bit master computer, he also added the first disc drive on a synthesizer keyboard and, with Keith Lofstrom, built the first automated patch bay for music. His inventions and modifications helped me write
more music than I ever had before, and between 1979 and 1981 I released six albums: Directstep, The Piano, Feets Don’t Fail Me Now, Monster, Mr. Hands, and Magic Windows.
Most of our technical advances were used for the Headhunters, since V.S.O.P. and my duets with Chick Corea were entirely acoustic. But it was at a V.S.O.P. show in Japan in 1979 where we saw the next great vision of where music technology was heading.
I was still touring with V.S.O.P. in between Headhunters tours, and the band was particularly popular in Japan. Wayne, Ron, Tony, Freddie, and I went on tour there in 1979, and as we were setting up to play and record a live album at Denen Coliseum in Tokyo, the great Sony recording engineer Tomo Suzuki came up to talk to me. “We have a top-secret product that we are revealing for you today,” he said. And he showed me a little box with a three-inch silver disc.
“What does it do?” I asked.
He said, “It plays back digital audio.” Now, I hadn’t seen digital audio recording since being shown the Dynabook three years earlier, so this certainly got my attention. He said, “Herbie, we are going to record your concert today with a digital device, instead of audiotape. Then we’re going to make something called a mini-compact disc.” This was Sony’s music product of the future, intended to replace vinyl albums and cassette tapes, and we were getting a first glimpse of it.
Sony knew I was an electronics guy, so they wanted to give me the honor of being the first concert they recorded on this new technology. CDs as we know them didn’t come out commercially until early 1985, so nobody knew yet what Sony was up to, which meant that Bryan and I were once again witness to a pivotal moment in the history of technology. But even though we didn’t have to promise not to tell anybody about it for five years, I’m not sure people would have believed us anyway. That’s how fast everything was moving.
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