Nine Lives: Our Interview with Carmine Bonanno, inventor of Octave's The CAT

In 1975, the synthesizer market was ruled by the analog titans Moog and ARP, whose expensive instruments were heard all over FM radio. Unfortunately, Moog and ARP synths were simply out of reach for many up-and-coming musicians. Out in Long Island City, New York, a small group of engineers led by 22-year-old Carmine Bonanno set out to lower the entry barrier by creating affordable synthesizers with innovative features. Released in 1976, the Octave CAT broke new synthesis ground with its dual sub-oscillators, mixable waveforms, screaming filter resonance, and well-designed front panel layout. Originally introduced at only $599, the CAT cost half of what the competition charged. This was followed up by the smaller and even more affordable Octave Kitten, the unique CATstick control voltage joystick, and the deeply powerful eight-voice Voyetra 8, one of the first synthesizers to feature MIDI. Continuing their mission to revolutionize the way musicians created music, the now-renamed Voyetra exited the hardware synth business and created some of the very first MIDI sequencing computer software.

Today, Carmine’s instruments are among the most prized vintage synthesizers, and his software helped create the modern music software industry. We have been honored to work along-side him designing our loving tribute to his 1976 classic - the Cherry Audio Octave Cat. We sat down with Carmine to discuss what it was like diving head-first into the synthesizer market in the mid-1970s.

Q: In 1975, when the American synthesizer market was ruled by Moog and ARP, you started Octave Electronics and began development of the CAT synthesizer. What inspired you to become part of this emerging industry?

In the late 60’s the album “Switched on Bach” by Wendy Carlos inspired me to learn all I could about electronic music and synthesizer technology. At the time, there weren’t many electronic music publications, but I was fortunate enough to discover a monthly newsletter called Electronotes that explained synthesizer technology in great detail. It taught me how to design electronic music circuits and eventually I became proficient enough to build a modular synth that I used in my home studio.

In the early 70’s, I was working my way through college as an organ repairman at a musical instrument distributor called Syn-Cordion. By then I knew a lot about synthesizers and how to build them. I noticed the growing popularity of performance synths like the Minimoog, ARP Odyssey, etc. but they were extremely expensive and beyond the reach of average musicians. I suggested to the owners of Syn-Cordion that this presented an opportunity to manufacture an affordable synthesizer that they could sell to their network of music retailers.

As a proof of concept, I built a prototype CAT and it convinced them that we could profitably manufacture a synth that was feature-rich and significantly less expensive than the competition. We founded Octave Electronics in 1975, started taking orders at the 1976 NAMM convention and began shipping to music retailers later that year.

Q: The CAT, released in 1976, was a technical marvel of the time. It offered innovative features many competing instruments didn't have, including a duophonic keyboard mode, oscillator cross-mod, configurable sample and hold, dual sub-oscillators, combinable waveforms, two kinds of oscillator sync, and a massive filter with resonance that can rip your head off, all in an elegant and easy-to-program interface. How did you and your team go about designing this instrument? 

Octave was a small company with limited funding, so all aspects of the CAT series, including panel layout, chassis, circuit design, etc. were designed by me. The circuitry was based on my modular system. The panel routing was partially a result of my creating patches for several years on the modular synth and learning which connections worked best.

Q: The CAT's user interface feels like a fusion of Moog's knob-based designs and ARP's slider-based designs, with a control panel that is extremely easy to navigate. Who was responsible for designing the CAT's layout, and how much were they influenced by the other popular synthesizers of the 1970s?

Yes, exactly. The CAT layout was a combination of the Minimoog and an Odyssey, which is why it has both knobs and sliders. I played with a lot of performance synthesizers to understand how they worked and determine what features I liked best. Ultimately, I decided that the Mini and Odyssey were the most versatile, so I used them as a reference.

I regretted not incorporating the Minimoog mod and pitch wheels into the CAT because they made it so much easier to add expression to a performance. To address this, I designed the CATstick, which incorporated a joystick controller with pitch bend in the forward/reverse directions and modulation in the left and right directions. I couldn’t build this type of controller into the CAT because it would have been too expensive. So instead, the CATstick was made into an external device that could control not only a CAT, but a modular synth or any performance synth with adequate voltage control inputs.

I would also like to dispel a rumor that ARP sued us for copying the Odyssey. That’s not what happened. Actually, they sued us for using a duophonic keyboard in the CAT, which they claimed to have patented. They dropped the suit after I presented prior art showing that the technology used in duophonic analog keyboards predated their patent.

Q: The CAT has been used by major artists including Devo, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and the Chemical Brothers. How did musicians react to the CAT when it was first released?

Because of its low price, the CAT was very popular with musicians who could not afford the expensive alternatives. Although many famous musicians who were making a lot of money didn’t mind spending a lot more for a Moog or ARP, most musicians who tried a CAT ended up buying one. It was difficult for us to get famous musicians to try it because we were a small company with a limited marketing budget and couldn’t reach out to the star players like Moog and ARP did.

Q: In 1984, Octave-Plateau™ developed Sequencer Plus, one of the earliest PC MIDI sequencing application. This marked a change in direction for your company, from synthesizers to sequencer and recording software. This decision ensured that your company remained on the cutting edge of music technology as other pioneering American synthesizer companies went bankrupt. Did you foresee at the time that computers and MIDI were going to permanently change the way music was made?

When I was designing the Voyetra Eight in the early 80’s, I planned to make an auxiliary mono synth called the Voyetra One which could be used to program the V8. After the IBM PC was released, I realized that it would be better to program the V8 with a computer rather than an expensive piece of hardware. So, we scrapped the V1 project and we made a voice editor for creating presets that could be saved to floppy disk. This was our first experience in controlling a synthesizer with a computer.

When MIDI came along, it became possible to record, edit and play music with a V8 keyboard, so we created Sequencer Plus. It offered a new and powerful way to make music and soon became popular with musicians who made movie scores, commercials, and pop songs. Based on the success of Sequencer Plus, we went on to establish a music software division which kept us alive after the synthesizer business collapsed in the late 1980’s.

Q: Nearly 50 years after the release of the CAT, interest in classic analog synthesizers is at an all-time high. Did you ever imagine that the instruments you created in the 1970s and 1980s would remain so desirable today? 

I’m not surprised. Although digital synthesizers are extremely versatile, most are very complicated to program, so it’s often difficult to get the sound you’re looking for. Rather than imagining a sound and creating it from scratch, like you would on analog synthesizer, most people bypass the patch creation process and just scroll through presets until they hear something they like. In that regard, an analog synthesizer is more intuitive for creating sounds than a digital synthesizer. If you want a particular sound and know your way around analog synthesis, you turn some knobs, flip some switches and eventually get what you’re looking for. It’s this organic feel of analog synthesis that makes it attractive and that’s why I think it has started to come back into the mainstream.

Q: You worked closely with us at Cherry Audio on the design and layout of the new Octave Cat synthesizer, and it was important to you that the design of the CAT remain as close as possible to that of the original instrument. We've worked extremely hard to ensure that our Octave Cat looks, sounds, and feels exactly like the original CAT. What is it like for you to experience the return of the CAT after 5 decades?

Frankly, I am amazed at what you’ve accomplished. When I look at the Cherry Cat on my PC screen, it feels like I’m looking at the real instrument! Better yet, it goes way beyond what a hardware CAT is capable of. For instance, on a hardware CAT you can’t save a patch, you can’t control modulation with an external MIDI controller, you don’t have full polyphony, etc. Also, you get enhancements like S+H glide, sequencing, MIDI clock sync, effects processing, etc.. All of this makes the Cherry Cat incredibly more versatile than a hardware CAT.

Q: What do you envision as the future of synthesis?

As computers become more powerful, I believe that hardware synthesizers will eventually become less relevant because software synthesizers, like the Cherry Cat, are significantly less expensive, more versatile and integrate seamlessly into the computer music ecosystem. Software also makes it possible to easily implement different types of synthesis, such as granular, sampling, FM, analog, or whatever type is best for creating the sound you’re looking for.

Assuming I’m correct, I think the next logical step is to combine Artificial Intelligence (AI) with software synthesis to create sound simply by describing it. AI is already being used to compose songs, mimic voices, etc. so it’s inevitable that it will also be used for synthesizing sounds.

With this type of system, you won’t have to think about which form of synthesis is best for creating the sound you’re looking for. Instead, you can describe the sound and it will produce it using whatever type of synthesis it deems is best to create it—much like how AI can now create realistic photos from a description. Musicians could then focus on making music rather than toil over the sound creation process. After all, a synthesizer is just a tool for creating sound textures. If you’re composing a song, movie soundtrack, commercial, or other musical expression, why spend your time tweaking knobs and switches when you could instead describe what you want and get it instantly?

Our sincere thanks to Carmine Bonanno for his unique insights into synthesizers past and future! To learn more about Cherry Audio's Octave Cat, visit the Octave Cat product page.

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