Hugh Le Fucking Caine
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
There are giants, and then there are BOLD ITALIC GIANTS. Hugh LeCaine is definitely of the latter group of giants. Pictured above, playing his 1945 creation, the Electronic Sackbut (sometimes this shit just writes itself, you know?), LeCaine is one of the baker’s dozen of people that can lay claim to having invented synthesis. The rest of HughLeCaine.com is chock-full of the sort of information that is only available in countries where you can get grants for making web sites like this. Check out the Instruments page for the Special Purpose Tape Recorder, a Mellotron fore-runner, and the Oscillator Bank, which, as the name implies, is a bank of 106 oscillators.
2 comments
have you seen the Alchemists Of Sound documentary yet?
LeCaine focused on creating new instruments. The Sackbut had some cool ways to manipulate pitch and timbre that allowed for virtuoso expression. He used odd ways to achieve this - coupling different waveforms into a controller through capacitance - that offer some fantastic possibilities for experimentation. Pity you can't still buy a Sackbut. By the way, for those who don't know, a sackbut was a kind of medieval leather trombone!
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