Bending the rules

In the early 70s, there was a fair amount of ‘expression envy’ from keyboard players towards guitarists. After all, guitarists could coax maximum expressiveness from their instruments, bending strings to produce a cool, smooth shift in pitch – awesome for soloing, in particular. So, to even things up a little, the Minimoog introduced a pitchbend wheel so that keyboardists everywhere could emulate that. The knurled plastic wheel to the left of the keyboard was used to shift the overall pitch of the whole instrument, but early adopters needed to be a bit careful, as although there was a central detent position for returning things to the normal pitch, initially these wheels weren’t spring-loaded, so had to be returned to the centre position manually – tricky! Other designs sprung up – ribbon controllers and joysticks, for example – but it wasn’t until the 80s that Jan Hammer finally nailed the combination of keytar, distortion, pitchbend and modulation to really make a synth sound like a guitar solo.