| The PERSIMMON PHILOSOPHY By FRED WILDER |
| My philosophy like color TV is all here in Black and White. What strange creatures are these that have been collected together here their soul purpose to bark squeak and howl for your educated delight. Yet twas not fate that set them together but the thoughts of the philosopher and electronic composer that has cajoled and beguiled them so and arranged these strange beasties just right.
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| No.1 Why that singular tree left standing at the end of each season laid barren of leaves or fruit from the winters harsh grip of frost and cold breath. The variety of other fruit trees on my Grand Father's small plot of land had all become quite plump with green and full of sweet delicious fruit that filled the many small thin wooden boxes my Grand parents loaded into their car and took to the open air auction each weekend during the warm months of the year where they sold them on the sly to bolster their meager income derived from combined social insecurity checks. It was long into the growing season in Sacramento, California and still that single tree looked gray weathered and twisted not a leaf in sight. And every season my Grand Father would began sharping his axe before telling my Grand Mother that the persimmon tree had died the previous winter and he would now have to cut the tree down for fire wood. My Grand mother was a very strong woman but this always got her goat each year and the argument would ensue leaving my Grand mother in tears begging grandad not to cut that tree down saying it is alive it will bloom and bear fruit you just have to wait and be patient. Not this year my grandfather would reply. But he recanted and laughed after he made his wife cry. It was a cruel joke played out each year but some how it made me recognize late bloomers of all description even some people have longer growing seasons than others each will bloom in their own particular way. I wanted a synthesizer when I was a young man in my teens but all I got were words of discouragement some harsh that made me cry some that made me give up on myself but only for a while. You learn the hard way to keep your most precious desires a secret not seeking help from anyone but yourself or else they will use the knowledge against you and hurt you just to watch you cry. Keeping your talent hidden from others can become habitual in that you became afraid to show it even to yourself turning your joy to dark pain. Don't let this happen bring your talent into the light when you can afford a moment of solitude remembering that all is temporary and all things and conditions must pass. Break the habit and you break that bad spell. You will achieve your goal in time and no thing and no one can stop you forever. I decided to make the best of my time in my youth building towards my goal I collected books of electronics, scrounged old radios, and discarded television sets for parts and eventually taught myself to build my own circuits. I have been working with audio equipment, tone generators, filters, processors, and broken children's toys rewired for maximum chaos ever since but it was a long time in coming for my own Persimmon Synthesizer to grow from that original seed of desire and now the fruit is weighing heavy on the branches a veritable audio feast is ripening on the tree.Time to thrust in my sickle and reap the rewards of a job well done.
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| No.2 Serge Tcherepnin was a synthesizer designer and builder unknown to me as I began designing my own machine from scratch. As I poured over my engineer note books full of my years of experiments and rummaging through old books on analog computers and analog synthesizers looking for the perfect circuits to add to my Persimmon Synthesizer I would occasionally run into a photograph of a synth that had used banana plugs for connectors and these appealed to me after many fruitless searches I eventually discovered some makers of music machines from the 1970s with banana plugs and the one that intrigued me the most was Serge Tcherepnin his synthesizers seemed to be following my own designs and the more I learned about them I could see that they did so I was eventually influenced by Serge to some degree in the layout of my own synthesizer. The beauty of the banana jack is that they can stack where there is only room for one plug to be filled by one jack with phone plugs there can be two or more with banana jacks. This ability to branch in ways other synthesizers can not do is very appealing to my analog computer programmer mind so Banana plugs it is!
These older analog synthesizers also have a warmer richer body to their sound and can be programmed to play by themselves without or with just a little human interaction great for electronic experimenters like myself. The modular system is basically a Hot Rodded analog computer who's Op Amp circuits have been engineered to make the best of the audio region of oscillations and provide the programmer / operator with circuits at the ready configured for music making and sound effects. This is the part of the beauty of analog modulars like the Persimmon Synthesizer is this ability to program it to behave as an electronic organism with operational amplifiers for neurons and voltage controlled oscillators, filters and amplifiers forming its vocal cords. A competent programmer can create an analog computer algorithm or patch that sings the body electric. Metaprogramming is possible being implemented by complex algorithms based on fractal geometry, number sets like PHI the golden ratio, and chaos theory. All the governing mathematics that make manifest the cosmic instruments of our orgasmic Orchestra. Digital synthesizers are about keyboard players and MIDI and do not lend themselves to the same experimentations I have performed over the years with my previous minimalist equipment. A modular synth utilizes C.V. (Control Voltages) to articulate the various filters, oscillators, and audio processors contained within the rack cabinet. The control voltage can be supplied by any electronic source inside or outside of the synthesizer and it does not have to pertain to the 12 tone scale or any scale for that matter. New ideas for electronic music circuits can be assembled on a bread board with a handful of electronic components and made to perform a particular task if need be and then patched into the modular synth with banana cables. A Control Voltage system opens up new fantastic worlds of emergent complexities only limited by the engineer/composer's imagination. I have found that the MIDI system has its limitations and by its nature it removes all possibility of real experimentation with electronic music and tonalities.
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| No.3 The Trinity in everything. I am not possessed by a religion having been failed by preachers, teachers, policemen, father, mother, brother, so I stand alone relying only on my self. But that was just my experience yours may have been different it does not matter in the final analyses I am and always have been a spiritual person. Religion is for those that are afraid of going to Hell. Spirituality is for those that have been there. Reading from the books of many religions and texts on metaphysics you will find as I did the powers of numbers and the virtue of understanding all is a perfect mathematical equation you just need to enter the right variables and do your sums to differentiate the correct answerers for yourself. So it is with the Hindus so it is with the Christians so it is in the Buddhist temple I visit form time to time the great shrine holds three large Buddha statues representing to this mathematician Thought, Mind, and the Wrought Spirit. The writings of the Anti Nicene Fathers read, When the Father and the Son are held in congress they spirate the Holy Ghost, Spirit. This simply put means that when you hold your own Mind to think in accordance with the way of nature, the laws of physics, with the Truth of all being, when you both Know and Feel that you posses that Good which you desire then it shall be made manifest unto you. All form is spirit in nature even though it took western scientist until the 1930s to rediscover that all matter is pure energy, spirit, none the less this fact has always been true.
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| No.4 The fruit of the persimmon tree has four sides the young green fruit looking box like on the branch. Taking this into our equation and allowing for variables and strange attractors the sum compliment of modules is found to be divisible by four that is to say where one may do four would do far more. The first rule of government spending why buy one when you can have four at four times the price, or in my case merely twice the price. There is some truth in that even if you are not superstitious. Many of the integrated circuits contained on a single silicon chip makeup four individual operational amplifiers. so rather than make waste of op amps every effort was afforded to bring them to the forefront by utilizing them in a circuit design instead of electronically tieing them off left unwanted and unused. Inside the Muku cabinet that holds all of the Persimmon Synthesizer modules with some rare exceptions are found four of each. 4 integrators, 4 VCF, 4 VCO, 4 VCA and on and on, Like 4 as 4 is 4 into 4 is 4 more and more is more especially in the project studio at 3 AM in the morning where after a long day of recording the last thing you want to encounter is a lack of sound processing equipment of any sort especially patch cables that seem to adhere to the old axiom the lack of the required patch cable is directly proportional to the need. It is always good to have more.
Fred Wilder |
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