Lessons from an Unforgotten Time: An Interview with Anthony Marinelli

Anthony Marinelli has some stories to tell. He was fifteen when he started getting calls for film soundtracks and pop records sessions because he had learned the basics of synthesizers. The demand for these instruments was growing exponentially as composers and producers were looking for sounds that could not be produced by traditional instruments. He bought his ARP 2600 from composer Jerry Goldsmith. Later came various movie score, sessions for Michael Jackson’s Thriller and he was launched.

We wanted to hear how Marinelli approached the work: what he listened for and how he chose an instrument. With his Think Like a Synth and Bass DNA courses, he’s now teaching what those sessions taught him about making sounds that fit the music.

In fact he recently announced an arrangement with Cherry Audio to offer their CA2600 plugin to anyone who signs up for Anthony’s Think Live a Synth course. Of course having a common platform makes the communication easier to understand. His latest course, Bass DNA concentrates on the low end, something Anthony has quite a bit of experience with. He was kind enough to take a break from his busy schedule to chat with us.

How did you get into music before there were synthesizers?

The beginning for so many…

I started piano lessons around eight. I liked the lessons, but I wasn’t practicing enough for the recitals, so I would improvise my way out of the pieces. I thought my teacher would get mad, but he didn’t. That was a breakthrough, although I didn’t understand it at the time.

He thought I had abilities and found ways to keep me around, paying me to wash windows or do other jobs. One day he played Wendy Carlos’s “Switched-On Bach” and told me about the Moog synthesizer. I heard it and thought, “What is that?” I wanted to know more.

What I really wanted to do was play sports: baseball, football, basketball, soccer, track. Anything that moves. Eventually, I saw a parallel. In sports there’s a script and a story, but you have to adapt. Music performance is like that, too. Looking at it that way helped me accept that I could do music.

How did that turn into professional work?

Pianists wanted jobs in pit orchestras, but they were being told they had to play synthesizers. Many didn’t know what to do. I developed a reputation as a 15-year-old who could teach them. I could figure things out and understood the musical application, so I could give them a quick way to get through the gig. By the mid-to-late seventies, I was getting sessions while still in high school. I’d get a note to leave school for a record date when another keyboard player wasn’t available. I did disco, television, movies, everything. I could sight-read and follow a conductor, which was how those sessions worked. My synthesizer teacher, Clark Spangler, was one of the best session players. He was so booked that he referred work to me. He also told me I had to charge double scale, even though I was fifteen and couldn’t drive myself there. He didn’t want people hiring me because I was cheaper and then replacing him.

Musicians could test you pretty hard. I held my own and made my share of mistakes, but you had to stay cheerful and laugh.

When did you realize you could make a living at it?

Then, at 15. At that age, you think everything will keep getting better and stay better. But it was a cutthroat business. I wanted to move into composing, and that meant working really hard. Getting established as a player didn’t mean the composing jobs would simply arrive.

What synths were you learning on?

The ARP 2600

The ARP 2600 was my main instrument. I bought mine from Jerry Goldsmith while I was in high school, after he’d done “Logan’s Run”. I had modifications added for live dates: octave switching and ways to change settings during a cue. These weren’t instruments where you could simply recall a preset.

I took Saturday morning lessons with Clark, and we checked out everything that came into the store: the Yamaha GX-1, CS-80s, whatever was new. He’d say, “A new one just came in. What would you do? Make me a tuba on it.”

I could read an orchestral score and knew the clefs. That combination of musical training and synthesizer experience was unusual. But I’ve never thought of myself as an engineer. Waveforms, the overtone series, and acoustics interest me because of how they apply to music.

This is all pre-MIDI, right…. At what point did some of those recording dates require a sync tone, or maybe even just clicks on tape, and somebody would want you to synchronize?

The Synclavier

That’s a good question. In the early days it was mostly me just playing the synths. But then in the early 80s, the Synclavier popped into the scene. And the piano store where I was taking the lessons, the owner David L. Abell, this guy was quite a mensch who gave my partner Brian Banks and I a $40,000 loan to buy one.

Wow. That’s faith…

Blue Thunder Poster

Yeah, it was a lot of money back then, but he believed in us. We were transcribing classical music: Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, Bach organ works, Debussy. We would use instruments including four Yamaha CS-80s and perform live on classical radio broadcasts.

Someone from Columbia TriStar heard a broadcast, which got us an interview for Blue Thunder. John Badham was directing, following his success with Saturday Night Fever. He wanted the sound we’d been getting in those concerts for this futuristic film.

We’d just bought the Synclavier and thought, “Let’s show it to him on the score.” That was the first time I synchronized anything. It wasn’t MIDI then or now. I still mostly just play everything.

How did you synchronize the instruments before MIDI?

In the pre-MIDI days Dr Click could sync anything to anything

I used a Doctor Click, and I still use it. The Synclavier sequencer worked like a recorder, with buttons for record, start, punch-in, and continue. I’d put it into sync mode, bring the click into Doctor Click, and that would trigger the synchronization.

We prepared many of the tracks, and the orchestra played against them live on the scoring stage. You can imagine the looks we got when string and brass sounds came out of our equipment. The Los Angeles musicians’ union was upset because we weren’t charging enough. Their argument was, “You’re two guys making the sound of fifty. You need to charge like fifty people.”

I remember reading that in the UK they actually required a union string player to be present at recording sessions, if a Mellotron was used.

It was similar. Harry Lojewski, who headed music at MGM, called us into his office. We walked down this long hallway, and there he was with a cigar. We thought we were getting a nice greeting. Instead, he pointed at us and said, “You’re never going to work again. How dare you charge these rates?” There didn’t seem to be any way to win.

And to make it worse, on an early session, we got the clicks wrong. I didn’t know film sessions used frame-based clicks rather than simply beats per minute. We showed up working in beats per minute, everything was out of sync, and the orchestra had to wait. The whole date was disrupted.

Ouch. That must have been expensive.

Nobody was happy about it. Then I built a studio with a 24-track machine behind my parents’ house. The studios objected because they said you couldn’t run a business out of a backyard. Compare that with today, when everybody works at home.

Let’s talk about the online tutorials for synth players you are doing now.

Think Like a Synth was the first one. And I just released Bass DNA on September 1st.

Bass riffs and sounds are often the major hook of a tune, and over the years you’ve done that many times. Do you have a favorite session that you can remember, or sound, or riff that you did that you’re especially happy with?

The most famous are “Billie Jean” and “Thriller.” “Billie Jean” has Louis Johnson playing bass, but the overall sound contains four different bass components. That’s one of the most interesting examples. “Baby Be Mine” is another. I also wrote the music for the “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” commercial, which has been covered by artists including Gorillaz, Rick Ross, and KRS-One. Mike Dean does it in his live set. It’s interesting how something like that takes on another life.

YouTube/zKzcR0sUvV0

How did “Billie Jean” come together?

I’d already been doubling electric bass with synthesizers while working with Lamont Dozier. That was becoming a trend in R&B, and some of that experience carried into Thriller.

Louis Johnson’s part was already recorded. The question was, “What can you add?” We put a Minimoog on the downbeats. That approach came partly from what I’d learned about orchestration from Arthur B. Rubinstein, the composer of Blue Thunder.

You see similar ideas in Rimsky-Korsakov or Ravel: a bass line might be played by bassoon and cello, with pizzicato bass reinforcing only the downbeats. You’re giving it a pulse. We were applying that kind of orchestration to pop music.

Then we doubled the complete line with an FM sound on the Synclavier and added another component, a strange, high digital hash. It’s a sound you would never expect. I’ve made a video about it, and once you know it’s there, you may hear that little “ch-ch-ch” sound on the record.

Were you also creating the bass lines?

On songs like “Thriller,” Rod Temperton already had the lines worked out in his demos. My job was to make a sound that resembled his but improved it, or to develop it in the moment with everyone responding.

Greg Phillinganes also played on those sessions. I’d dial the sound into the performance. If he was going to slide between notes, we might use the Minimoog because of its single-trigger behavior: the envelope wouldn’t retrigger with every connected note. You could get that sliding Stevie Wonder kind of sound. The result evolved through playing and listening.

People now analyze every choice and ask why we selected a particular instrument. Sometimes the answer is that it didn’t already have a sound on it. If the ARP 2600 held a melody sound we might need again, I wouldn’t erase it to make a bass. We’d use the Minimoog or Jupiter because it was free.

How did you save the sounds?

Mostly patch sheets, drawings of the front panel where I marked the settings. Quincy also took Polaroids, and we experimented with that. But recreating a sound was never exact. Every small setting could be slightly different.

The same thing happened with mixes. People put police tape across a console to keep anyone from touching it because the mix wasn’t automated. Preserving a sound could determine what you did next.

The sound developed through practical decisions as much as planning?

You were responding to the performance and the people in the room. Everyone might be saying, “Oh, yeah, great,” while I kept dialing it in. The playing mattered to the programming. A slide between notes could change how you wanted the instrument to behave. Those details became part of what you hear on the record.

Who are you thinking will most benefit from your courses?

Primarily songwriters and producers, but recording engineers can benefit, too. It’s a different way of thinking about sound. Engineers often have to create sounds themselves, and this knowledge also helps them guide artists.

If you start with a preset, you may leave a lot to fix in the mix. When you understand how to build from the oscillator up, you can choose the components you need and make something that fits the song.

The questions are: What does the song need? What are the other parts doing? Where is the space? A bass sound isn’t good in isolation. It’s good because it fits, leaves room where it should, and supplies low end when that’s needed. If the song doesn’t need more low end, you don’t want the bass covering the kick drum.

How do you make that manageable for someone learning on the different synth?

Bass DNA begins with five oscillator configurations. It’s a simple starting point. I believe those configurations can help you make bass sounds for any style or genre because that’s the method I used. If you like the work I’ve done, I’m showing you how I approached it. As the course develops, we get further into the relationship between the sound, the part, and the arrangement.

anthonymarinellimusic.com/collections/courses/products/bass-dna

Will this become a broader educational system?

Yes. We’ve developed an academic course with Daniel Keown, a professor at Youngstown State University. We ran a pilot a couple of years ago, and now universities are adopting it.

It includes grading rubrics, suggested projects, and tests. I don’t teach the university classes; the college instructors do. We’re also developing ear-training elements and tools to accompany the material.

What does “ear training” mean in this context?

Recognizing a sine wave or sawtooth is part of it, but we also ask why they sound that way. What are harmonics? Can you hear them? We take students through the overtone series.

We’re developing a tool that’s like a synthesizer without knobs or sliders, where you learn through block diagrams. Think Like a Synth uses diagrams to teach the language of synthesis, almost like learning to construct sentences.

If you’re learning Spanish, you can also learn to read and write it. I think that kind of understanding helps you visualize sound. A musical score represents something, but different players see different possibilities in it. Representing a synthesizer sound through words, diagrams, or pictures can open your mind in a similar way.

Classical music has an established teaching tradition, and jazz does now, too. I want to help build that kind of approach for synthesizers: understanding them from the bottom up, why they exist, what they can do, and how they communicate emotion and contribute to a story. That brings me back to what first made music meaningful to me: the narrative.

Why is visualizing sound so useful?

A score is a representation. Different musicians can look at the same page and see different things in it. With synthesizers, representing a sound gives you another way to understand it. The diagrams aren’t just labels for controls. They’re part of learning a language, so you can think about what you’re making and imagine the possibilities.

Do you see parallels between the fear of synthesizers then and the fear of AI now?

There are some parallels. There are crazy things happening, but phenomenal things, too. We had only mono samplers, and a five-megabyte hard drive cost something like $20,000. Yet when people heard what it could do, they were amazed.

We recently needed to reconstruct the edit of a long video on our YT channel television special. I jokingly suggested trying AI. Our engineer Ben Rachlis tried it and reconstructed an hour of video from the audio, drawing on footage in our archive and restoring the mouth synchronization. That was extraordinary.

I try to use the things in front of me in ways that make good music. Technology drives art in many ways. People talk about the good old days, but I was there for some of them, and they weren’t always good. There was noise, hiss, bad recording, and bad songs that didn’t last. Artists also got treated badly. In many respects, I think things are better now.

So your own working method remains very performance-based.

I’ve always worked with an engineer who records me. I don’t sit in front of a DAW. Looking at those bars and shapes interferes with how my brain works. I’d rather look at trees.

But I’m not anti-DAW, anti-MIDI, or anti-AI. I’m pro-imagination and keeping that pathway clear. Sometimes tools can get in the way of that. What matters is how they help the music.

Hearing Switched-On Bach changed your direction. For me, it was seeing Keith Emerson with The Nice at Fillmore East, opening for the Byrds. When he moved into synthesizers

The remarkable Oscar Peterson

I listened to The Nice, too. I hung out with Oscar Peterson around that time and he told a story about initially dismissing the idea of a rock keyboardist, but after hearing Keith and recognizing what he could do, he changed his mind. In fact Oscar traveled with a Synclavier in his hotel room. I’d visit and show him a few things, and then he’d show me a few things. He might say, “You know ‘Stella by Starlight’?” Then he’d put the chords into the sequencer, add a bass line, turn up the tempo, and solo over it. Then he’d say, “Take a chorus.” And I’d think, “Okay…” He could transpose the sequence and play through all twelve keys. That was a big capability then. With tape, changing speed changed the pitch and character of the sound. This let him practice differently. I asked, “Is that what you use this thing for?” He said, “Yeah.” It was essentially a $100,000 practice machine, and he traveled with it.

Did he ever do any recordings with it?

He did. He had a studio—you could check him out online, he has a synth room with a lot of synths: Prophet-5 and all kinds of things. He was a remarkable person, a lot of fun, with so many stories. He came straight out of Art Tatum, and extended it…

YouTube.com/shorts/rPApqKu-zQM

He was remarkable. Thanks Anthony.

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