Larry Fast

The Electronic Realizations of a Synth VisionaryBy Randy Alberts

Ask anyone involved with the history and continuing performance of synthesized electronic music to list the genre's most influential names, and they'll mention Larry Fast. His pioneering works under the Synergy moniker are classics. The landmark Electronic Realizations For Rock Orchestra in 1975 literally defined just how realistic and artful a synthesized symphonic string section can be, and his signature synth work was integral in forging the earliest arc of Peter Gabriel's solo career. Fast's many producer credits, numerous musical projects, and ability to enhance a number of other artists' works (including Kate Bush, Foreigner, Bonnie Tyler and Nektar) have kept him busier than ever the past 20 years—and caused his most devoted fans to wonder when the next Synergy album will be released.

"It's weird because people who still have the original Synergy albums always ask me, 'Why did you stop doing music?'" says Fast. "Well, I didn't, at all, I've always had one foot in creative electronics and the other in creative music."

Considering the massive musical output he's recorded the past decade—including for Disney's Sea Tokyo Theme Park, hundreds of XM Satellite broadcast sound logos, and his continued recording and world touring with the Tony Levin Band—devoted fans would be happy to know that, if compiled as such, Larry's output from those projects alone would equal more than twice the Synergy catalog released to date.

"Everything else I've done musically since those early Synergy albums has sort of remained invisible behind the scenes," Larry notes. "But it's always been music I'm doing. I really thought there'd be more Synergy albums coming, and there are in a sense. Now that we're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on our house restoration and the new studio—and that the Tony Levin Band touring will spin down a bit after this trip to Mexico—maybe I'll be able to catch up on the Synergy stuff. I'd love to do a new Synergy project or two in the new studio."

Helping Others With Electronics

Fast, a longtime Peak user since the System 8 era, and his wife are wrapping up a large historically accurate restoration project on their 100-year-old New Jersey country home to which they're adding a new studio. Working the past 27 years in a small, cramped audio space, Larry's excited about how his new studio will affect his ongoing work on the music, producer, and hearing impaired audio research projects he's developed. For the latter undertaking, in which his wife is involved on the theatrical and court services side, he's developed since the '90s a patented infrared audio assisted listening device for those with hearing disabilities in public places that's now part of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

"As a long time rock 'n roller," laughs Fast, "I guess maybe it's payback time that I'm doing work that's contributing to the improvement of life for those with hearing disabilities. I'm still involved pretty heavily on the design side in this area of pro audio having to do with helping the hearing disabled. It's the same sort of creative process that goes into developing synth modules or software products where I still find myself on these marathon all-nighters doing circuit board layout, initial design work, etc. It's that same creative process of, 'OK, I've got an idea I'm going to try to bring to execution and make available to a lot of people, and I hope they enjoy it.'"

Five years ago Fast put Peak to good use in releasing his retrospective Reconstructed Artifacts, a newly recorded collection of Synergy's most classic pieces.

"I can't think of anything I've done in this century where everything hasn't, at least, ended up in Peak at a project's final stages—from final trimming and editing to preparing for mastering. I've used a nice collection of plug-ins which serve as adjunct to Peak in the mastering mode."

In late 2006, Fast compiled former Renaissance member Annie Haslam's solo album Woman Transcending. He's produced her works and co-written many songs with Haslam over the years, but this album was different. It's a collection of songs which never made it to her other records that required the two, with Peak at the ready, to wade through dozens of old DAT tapes and cassettes. When her original engineer didn't get the results she was seeking, Annie brought in her old friend to restart the project from scratch, literally pouring together through her shoeboxes of old recordings she was bringing to the new album.

"A few of those pieces were just in complete shambles," recalls Larry. "Peak really got a workout on that. Peak was where all that was cleaned up. The main tasks were to match EQs, levels, and so on from a variety of sources ranging from her casual cassette demos to studio digital masters. I took full advantage of Peak's features to do everything from trimming and editing to converting sample rates. Peak really helped us out with old recordings of live things like that. I've been through most of the reissue work for the Synergy back catalog, as well, which was all passed through Peak in order to get it ready to go out."

Resonating On The Road With Tony Levin

Larry has recorded and toured with the Tony Levin Band—the core of the original Peter Gabriel band—since 1999, including a recent March, 2007 tour in prog-rock/electronic music-hungry Mexico at the Baja Prog Festival in Mexicali. For both the recording of the Levin band's 2006 release Resonator and in concert, Fast puts Peak to the task every day. On that album's track "Break It Down" Levin recorded a complicated hammered and repeat-delayed bass line that forms the core of the song but isn't feasible for him to perform live. Fast used Peak to make that intricate bass part a reality in the band's live performances.

"I took a segment of the stereo master track of that part, trimmed it, looped it, and otherwise got it ready in Peak for export as a sampled part to my Kurzweil. The finished sample, exported from Peak, is something I trigger from the Kurzweil in our live set as the main part of that song. That's one of the most important tasks I use Peak for in Tony's band: preparing samples for onstage use. I have entire parts, played or sung by the other guys in the band, too, that I've trimmed, looped, compressed and otherwise prepared within Peak so that I can play those parts onstage from my Kurzweil."

Another track from Levin's Resonator that benefited a great deal from Peak is called "Crisis of Faith." Comprised of heavily processed bowed electric double bass, drums, and 12-tone atonal harmony vocal parts—again, a studio recording impossible to pull off in concert—Fast leaned heavily upon Peak to make the song shine live.

"I extracted the vocal sub-mix in stereo and used Peak to reduce the sample rate down to an acceptable point," he recalls. "There's also a couple of minutes of continuous vocals in the song I've broken down into sample chunks I've exported from Peak and assigned to the Kurzweil. This is now something I can perform live as part of the Levin-Marotta-Fast power trio."

Future Plans For Peak

There are a host of new features in Peak and Master Perfection Suite that Fast looks forward to using on his future projects. He's interested in a number of new mastering tools when he upgrades.

"I like the new graphical views of the audio now available with visuals of the crossfades between songs," he notes after a recent trade show visit to the BIAS booth. "And though I haven't needed it just yet, the new DDP capabilities are very welcome. I also saw and heard some enhanced DSP functions that were quite impressive, and the new actions of the scrubbing were more to my liking than on previous versions. I'd use these additional features to make my workflow more efficient. Regarding my work with virtual instrument plug-ins, the MIDI keyboard input recognition feature in Peak will be helpful to me, as well, in simplifying my work when there is just a small musical task to be done. And the demo I saw of the Master Perfection Suite was also very impressive."

Larry also likes what he sees in the various BIAS Peak plug-ins.

"The new Peak plug-ins are looking really good," says Fast. "I suspect there's going to be a point where I'm going to just say, 'well, let me try this EQ this time rather than the one I usually use in conjunction with Peak,' and I'm going to be very pleased with the results. The more I talk with BIAS about the plug-ins they're making, the more I'm amazed by what they've accomplished over the years. There's an amazing potential for what I might do in the future with Peak's bundled plug-ins."

What Goes Around Comes Back Around

As if by some embedded meaning set in stone long ago, each of Larry Fast's past pursuits—synth pioneer, radio station manager, new technology developer, architect, and a degree in history—have all come full circle. Today he's faithfully restoring a 100-year-old house, chairing New Jersey's Morris County Heritage Commission, recording sound logos for XM Satellite radio, playing in a busy global touring rock band, and enriching the public lives of hearing disabled persons, all his past expertise folding back to mold a complete picture of his current daily endeavors.

"I never lost my interest in historical background," says Larry. "My focus in history has always been about the history of technology, as well, so I've gotten quite involved in that. In fact, one of our professional staff at the Morris County Heritage Commission is an archivist who just happens to be an amateur electronic musician. His life's work is preserving documents and artifacts, making sure it's all preserved in accordance with all the best practices for documentation. I was recently talking with Mimi Moog, Bob's daughter, and she said they're worried because her father's papers are deteriorating and they don't know what to do. So, I hooked the two of them up and now my history background has returned full circle in making the connection so that the proper archival techniques, normally used to preserve slave records or Revolutionary War papers and such, can be applied to preserving Bob's work."

What goes around comes around to always help out down the road?

"Well, sometimes it hurts, too," laughs the affable Larry Fast. "But I'm fortunate that all my past pursuits have come back to be very positive."

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