By the late 1960s and 1970s, solid-state electronics made analog synthesizers more inexpensive and practical, and Robert Moog in particular developed a series of synthesizers which had keyboards as interfaces and began to attract the attention of musicians. A breakthrough occurred in 1968 when Walter Carlos released ''Switched-on Bach,'' an LP of Bach piece which he "realized" on a specially-built Moog synthesizer. These synthesizers were still not performance instruments; they could only play one part at a time, and Carlos had to assemble his pieces on a multitrack recorder. The genuinely musical quality of his "realizations" took the synthesizer out of the realm of a novelty or a source of sound effects (like the [[Theremin]]) and touched off a wave of synthesizer use. | By the late 1960s and 1970s, solid-state electronics made analog synthesizers more inexpensive and practical, and Robert Moog in particular developed a series of synthesizers which had keyboards as interfaces and began to attract the attention of musicians. A breakthrough occurred in 1968 when Walter Carlos released ''Switched-on Bach,'' an LP of Bach piece which he "realized" on a specially-built Moog synthesizer. These synthesizers were still not performance instruments; they could only play one part at a time, and Carlos had to assemble his pieces on a multitrack recorder. The genuinely musical quality of his "realizations" took the synthesizer out of the realm of a novelty or a source of sound effects (like the [[Theremin]]) and touched off a wave of synthesizer use. |