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Pat Metheny: the Electronic Music Legacy
Robots, Rolands, and Synclaviers with a Jazz Legend
In 2009 jazz guitarist Pat Metheny had a robot problem. Specifically, that problem was latency. To help him get to the bottom of it, Metheny enlisted the help of Eric Singer, the founder of Brooklyn-based company League Of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR). Eric Singer’s idiosyncratic approach to designing robotic musical instruments turned out to be the perfect match for Metheny’s ambitious vision. Singer and his team at LEMUR specialized in creating autonomous instruments, which have been featured at venues such as Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum, and the National Gallery of Art. However, Metheny’s project—the Orchestrion—presented a unique challenge: could he overcome latency in a system where dozens of robotic instruments needed to play alongside and respond in near real-time to a live guitarist’s commands?
The problem stemmed from the inherent delay in converting Metheny’s live guitar performance and triggered MIDI commands into control voltages to control the solenoids and actuators that activated a motley ensemble of Yamaha Disklaviers, “GuitarBots,” percussion robots, and a robotic blown bottles. For an artist as precise and rhythmically focused as Metheny, even a few milliseconds of lag could disrupt the flow and feel of the music. Metheny wasn’t just looking for a mechanical novelty—he wanted a system that could match the nuance and immediacy of a human ensemble.
In the end, the solution came down to a combination of technological prowess and musical virtuosity. Singer set up an exceptionally fast processor to translate MIDI into control voltage, and Metheny learned to play a bit ahead of the beat.
"It's a question of physics. On input, I sort of have to rush. But the thing is, I've been around this stuff for 30 years, so I know how to rush. I play ahead. And the thing is I kind of rush anyway [laughs]. I'm used to playing way on top. So I just play even a little bit more on top than usual. But then coming back on output, it's right in there. Once I had that figured out, then it was possible to make the kind of music that I'm interested in making.” [Doyle]
The Orchestrion project—released by Pat Metheny on Nonesuch in 2013—was, by any estimation, an outré take on jazz and electronic music fusion. But for those who have followed the career of the down-to-earth Midwestern guitarist, it was just one particularly sensational project in a long tradition of innovation. Metheny has always pushed the boundaries of what a jazz musician could do, whether by adopting the guitar synthesizer in the early 1980s, collaborating with avant-garde artists like Ornette Coleman, or blending jazz with folk, classical, and Brazilian influences.
In another artist's hands, a project like Orchestrion might have been at risk of veering dangerously close to a gimmick or kitsch, but Metheny’s approach to experimentation has always been balanced by a sophisticated harmonic language, skillful compositions, and a finely-tuned sense for narrative structure, qualities that have balanced the more experimental aspects of their oeuvre and made Pat Metheny and his collaborators some of the most respected and enduring figures in contemporary jazz.
The Early Days: Establishing the Pat Metheny Group
The Pat Metheny Group was formed in 1977 with keyboardist Lyle Mays, drummer Danny Gottlieb, and bassist Mark Egan (later replaced by Steve Rodby) joining Pat Metheny to form the core ensemble. From their earliest album (Pat Metheny Group, 1978) the group established a distinctive sound that set them apart from both traditional jazz and the more rhythmically aggressive fusion styles of the time. Their music was characterized by lush, melodic compositions that blended acoustic and electronic elements; experimentalism often came in the form of new timbres and orchestrations as well as collaborations, particularly with Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos.
Lyle Mays’s contributions on keyboards and synthesizers were instrumental in defining the group’s aesthetic. Mays’s mastery of harmony and his ability to create rich, cinematic textures provided the perfect complement to Pat Metheny’s lyrical guitar playing, evident from the group’s debut album, with tracks like “Phase Dance” showcasing their ability to craft expansive, evocative pieces that felt both sophisticated and accessible.
Pat Metheny and the The Pat Metheny Group are often lumped in with “fusion” jazz artists, a term invented by the media in the late 1960s to describe music by artists like Miles Davis and Chick Corea who were inspired by rock and funk and started to incorporate electronic instruments and studio techniques into their albums. But, while Miles Davis was one of Metheny’s earliest and strongest influences, in the 1970s Metheny distanced himself from the beat-based and distortion-forward sound of Miles Davis albums like Bitches Brew and On the Corner. Instead, Metheny charted a path that emphasized melody, harmony, and compositional narrative, setting the Pat Metheny Group apart from many of the more aggressive or groove-driven fusion acts of the time. The music of the Pat Metheny Group often blended elements of jazz with folk, classical, and world music influences, creating a distinctive sound that was expansive yet accessible.
Lyle Mays: The Architect of Sonic Landscapes
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Lyle Mays, the longtime keyboardist and co-composer for the Pat Metheny Group, was an essential force in shaping the group’s sound, particularly through his innovative use of technology and wide-ranging musical sensibility. Growing up in rural Wisconsin, Mays showed an early talent in several different fields, including chess, mathematics, architecture, and both classical and jazz music.
At the University of North Texas, Mays composed for the Grammy Award-nominated One O'Clock Lab Band. But after meeting Metheny at the Wichita Jazz Festival in 1975, Mays joined The Pat Metheny Group and became an integral part of the band’s identity for the next thirty-three years, remaining Metheny’s sole consistent collaborator throughout the group’s entire existence. During this time, he not only composed some of the band’s most iconic tracks but also played a vast array of instruments, including piano, accordion, agogô bells, autoharp, electric guitar, organ, synthesizers, toy xylophone, and occasionally trumpet.
Mays’s skillful use of Oberheim synthesizers, particularly the OB-X, brought a distinctive analog warmth and depth to the group’s early recordings, enhancing their rich, atmospheric soundscapes. As technology evolved, Mays’s mastery of the Synclavier became pivotal in shaping the Pat Metheny Group’s signature jazz fusion style.
In contrast to the more rock- and funk-aligned synth sounds that were characteristic of other jazz fusion artists like Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul in the 1970s, Mays prioritized sonic blending, using synth pads, orchestral-like textures, and expressive timbres that naturally complemented the acoustic instruments in the Pat Metheny Group. Whether providing a lush harmonic foundation or adding subtle melodic flourishes, his synth work felt more like an extension of traditional jazz instrumentation than a departure from it. Mays was an innately talented orchestrator, and his contributions to the band's electronic sound design are some of the most defining features of the instantly recognizable Pat Metheny Group sound.
Early Adoption of the Roland GR-300 and Synclavier
One of the most distinctive sounds on the Pat Metheny Group’s albums in the early 1980s was Pat Metheny’s pioneering use of the Roland GR-300 guitar synthesizer. Introduced in 1980, the GR-300 was the latest incarnation of a project the young Roland corporation had embarked on in partnership with FujiGen in 1977 with their GS-500 and rack mountable SPV355 synths. These early systems used groundbreaking analog pitch-tracking technology that enabled specially equipped electric guitars to control synthesizers with the same expressive nuance and fluidity as traditional guitar playing.
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The Roland GR-300 operates by converting the vibrations of a guitar’s strings into control voltages, which are then used to generate synthesizer tones. It relies on specialized pickups installed under each string to detect the pitch and dynamics for each string independently. Instead of using digital technology, the GR-300 embraced an all-analog signal path, which gave it a unique tone and an amazingly low latency of 3.3 milliseconds.
A common issue with pitch tracking string instruments is octave-jumping, which occurred when the second harmonic of a vibrating string became louder than the fundamental frequency, confusing pitch detectors into interpreting the note as being an octave higher. To counteract this, the GR-300 employs a pair of analog bandpass filters for each string that dynamically adjust their cutoff frequencies based on the note being played. For lower notes, the filters focus near the string’s fundamental frequency, while higher notes cause the filters to shift accordingly up the frequency spectrum. Additionally, a circuit positioned later in the signal chain detects sudden irregularities in the pitch signal caused by louder harmonics overpowering the fundamental frequency and temporarily reduces the output from the envelope follower, preventing the system from amplifying erroneous tracking data. These subtle adjustments effectively mask the auditory impact of tracking errors, smoothing out the synthesizer’s response while maintaining the expressive integrity of the generated tones.
For Pat Metheny, who was looking for ways to extend the timbral possibilities of the ensemble, the GR-300 made perfect sense, allowing the electric guitar to become a completely new instrument with the push of a button. Metheny’s use of the GR-300 became an integral part of the group’s sound. The result was often expansive, otherworldly atmospheres that feel simultaneously futuristic and emotionally grounded. Metheny’s expressive phrasing, enhanced by the GR-300’s dynamic capabilities, allowed him to mimic the fluidity of wind instruments or the sustained resonance of strings, elevating the guitar’s role in the group’s overall texture. As Metheny told an interviewer at Forte Magazine in 1981:
“[It still] sounds like me playing—my personality is still there. It’s just that instead of sounding like a guitar, it sounds like a trumpet or a bass or an orchestra … My phrasing and everything just transfers over to this particular synthesizer totally intact. In other words, I can do all my sort of sliding kind of horn lines and they really come out intact. Plus, it allows me to play some real sort of angular stuff that I’ve been playing on the guitar all along, but on the synthesizer it has a certain rough edge to it that I’ve never felt comfortable getting on a regular guitar.”
The GR-300 wasn’t the only technical innovation debuted on Offramp though. The album also marked one of the first extensive uses of the Synclavier by the Pat Metheny Group and one of its first uses on a jazz album. Developed by New England Digital Corporation, the Synclavier was a groundbreaking digital instrument. Founded in Norwich, Vermont, the New England Digital Corporation was founded to bring to market research done at Dartmouth College, where composer and professor Jon Appleton collaborated with students Sydney Alonso and Cameron Jones to design one of the earliest iterations of the Synclavier in the mid-1970s.
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While the Synclavier, and its successor the Synclavier II, were handmade boutique instruments and were extremely expensive in the 1980s (easily surpassing the cost of a single family home at the time!), they offered unprecedented technical innovations—including 16-bit sampling, resynthesis, and the ability to record audio to disk—making them arguably the first digital audio workstations (DAWs). The Synclavier II also featured four digital oscillators per voice and up to four voices of polyphony in its initial configurations, expandable to 32, 64, or even 128 voices in later models. FM synthesis, licensed from Yamaha, allowed each digital oscillator to generate an infinite number of complex waveforms.
While expensive, the Synclavier was an immediate hit with commercial music producers, Hollywood studios, and artists like Michael Jackson, Frank Zappa, and Neil Young, who found it could replace many of the capabilities that would have previously required a whole recording studio to replicate. For Pat Metheny, the Synclavier was not just a performance instrument but also an aid to composition. Traditionally, jazz artists like Metheny relied heavily on the piano for sketching ideas and exploring harmonic structures. The Synclavier, with its integrated sampling, synthesis, and sequencing capabilities, offered Metheny a modern alternative that expanded his creative possibilities. It allowed him to craft intricate arrangements, experiment with complex textures, and seamlessly layer sounds in ways that the piano alone could not achieve.
Where to Start Listening
Offramp and First Circle
The album Offramp (1982) marked both the first appearance of the Roland GR-300 guitar synthesizer on a Pat Metheny Group album and the first use of the Synclavier. From the first notes of the album’s short introductory track “Barcarole”—an Ennio Morricone-tinged noir pastiche of sparse drum machine and Synclavier pads in which Naná Vasconcelos's acoustic percussion somehow feels intuitive and essential—we can feel how this album is an inflection point for the young ensemble. There is a new compositional confidence behind the use of new technology here.
Recorded in October 1981 at Power Station Studios in New York, the recording sessions for Offramp emphasized slinky chromatic melodies, usually outlined by Metheny’s synthesizer-enhanced guitar, set against chill synth and percussion grooves. Unlike Miles Davis fusion albums from the early 70s, and even mid 80s, there’s limited overdubbing here. Solos fill entire tracks, and most tracks were apparently recorded in just a few takes. The album’s standout track, “Are You Going With Me?,” was the first piece that Metheny wrote for the Synclavier. A Latin-tinged ballad that became one of the group’s signature pieces, it features a soaring synth solo played on harmonica-like synth preset which gives way to a more extended solo with Metheny’s signature “trumpet” synth timbre, a throwback to Metheny’s prior experience playing the instrument. Other stand-out tracks include “Au Lait”—a dream-inspired composition by Lyle Mays which has been compared to “surreal sad clown circus music”—and the title track “Offramp,” where the breakneck guitar solo verges on atonality, without ever losing its clear narrative arc. Although Metheny repudiated the idea, a contemporaneous comparison with Reich’s minimalist masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians (1976) was apparently responsible for the title of the track “Eighteen.”
While comparisons to Music for 18 Musicians may have been overburdened, The Pat Metheny Group was increasingly incorporating syncopated ostinatos and pandiatonic harmony, which are evocative of a certain 1980s approach to post-minimalism. Mervyn Cooke, author of Pat Metheny: The ECM Years, 1975-1984, notes that “First Circle,” the title track of the eponymous 1984 album—built around a conspicuously complex 22-beat metrical pattern of alternating two- and three-beat pulses articulated by hand claps—sounds remarkably reminiscent of Steve Reich’s Tehillim (1981) as well as his earlier Clapping Music (1972), the former of which Metheny was certainly aware of in the early 1980s, having even proposed performing with his band.
Recorded again at Power Station in New York City, First Circle represents a striking evolution in the Pat Metheny Group’s sound, marked by a growing influence of film music. This shift reflected Pat Metheny’s recent work on the PBS drama The Little Sister and his contributions to Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Under Fire (1983). The album showcases a heightened interest in complex time signatures and global rhythms, a testament to Metheny’s deepening engagement with world music traditions. For the first time, (mostly) wordless vocals play a central role, adding a rich, human texture to the group’s already distinctive sound. There are also bizarre new textures and more experimentation with orchestration; the tongue in cheek opening track, “Forward March,” for example—featuring Mays on trumpet accompanied by out-of-tune synth chords and parodied marching-band percussion—sounds more like an experiment by Charles Ives than a jazz album. Steve Rodby, who had recently joined the group as bassist, brings a fresh dynamic to the rhythm section, complementing Paul Wertico’s inventive drumming.
Together, Offramp and First Circle capture the essence of the Pat Metheny Group at a particular creative peak. Both albums won Grammy Awards, in 1983 and 1985. Although groundbreaking, the use of new technologies and other experimental elements of these albums are always in service of a cohesive narrative structure and never overshadow the expressive goal, which is perhaps why these albums still manage to sound fresh decades later.
Song X
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Song X, a collaboration between Pat Metheny and free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, stands out as one of the most daring and experimental projects in Metheny’s career. Released in 1986, the album is a striking contrast both to Metheny’s earlier work with the Pat Metheny Group and to the more cinematic and intricately produced albums like Secret Story that followed.
The Pat Metheny Group’s music in the late 1970s and 80s had been characterized by lush, melodic compositions that blended jazz, minimalism, and Brazilian influences with a pioneering use of technology. There was also an underlying current of experimentalism. On albums like Offramp (1982) and First Circle (1984) certain improvisations showcased a highly chromatic extended tonality which has been compared to the harmonic language of 20th century French composer Olivier Messiaen. But these works, while innovative, adhered to a polished and intricately pre-composed sound.
Song X diverged sharply from this approach, embracing a raw, avant-garde ethos that placed free-form improvisation at its center. While the album’s energy and spontaneity might suggest a departure from Metheny’s technological sophistication, Song X actually demonstrates his ability to use technology as an expressive tool in an entirely different musical context. Metheny’s use of the Roland GR-300 guitar synthesizer here was less about creating lush textures or cinematic backdrops and more about augmenting the jagged, unstructured interplay with Coleman’s alto saxophone. The GR-300’s horn-like timbres provided Metheny with a voice in the ensemble that’s able to cut through the hail of percussion and hold its own against the intense and unremitting buzz of Coleman’s saxophone. A synthesizer has rarely sounded so organic as the GR-300 does on this album.
Secret Story
While not officially a Pat Metheny Group album, Secret Story, released in 1992, included many perennial Pat Metheny Group members and collaborators, including Lyle Mays, Danny Gottlieb, Paul Wertico, Steve Rodby, and Naná Vasconcelos. Likewise, it showcased Metheny’s ability to weave together a vast array of influences, collaborators, and technologies to create an impressively cinematic work. The album is one of Metheny’s most ambitious projects, blending jazz, classical, world music, and electronic textures.
Metheny had planned for Secret Story to be a solo album and apparently composed the entirety of Secret Story with the Synclavier before later bringing in various performers to play many of the parts. For an album that started as an entirely synthesizer-based project, Secret Story eventually featured contributions from an extraordinary global ensemble, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Pinpeat Orchestra of the Royal Ballet of Cambodia, the Choir of the Cambodian Royal Palace, and harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans, and vocalists and percussionists from diverse traditions. This eclectic instrumentation allowed Metheny to explore a wide range of textures and moods, from the orchestral grandeur of “The Truth Will Always Be” to the meditative simplicity of “Above the Treetops.”
The album’s legacy has also been complicated by its imitators. Many later projects in contemporary jazz and new age music attempted to emulate the grandeur and polish of Secret Story but often lacked Metheny’s compositional depth, narrative cohesion, and sensitivity to cultural influences. As a result, Secret Story can sometimes be overshadowed by the less nuanced works it inspired. Although lauded by audiences and some critics (the album holds a near perfect five stars on AllMusic), Secret Story didn’t meet with universal acclaim. BBC music critic Nick Reynolds wrote that the album “removes any of the grit of world music and reduces it to tasteful textures around which those keyboards twitter interminably.” Nevertheless, the album remains an excellent example of Metheny’s orchestrational sensibilities and his ability to balance sweeping ambition with intimate, emotive storytelling.
In a 2007 interview with composer Richard Niles, Metheny discussed how electronics help achieve these orchestrational and expressive goals:
“Somehow as we entered into the world of polyphonic synthesizers it was possible to invoke this broader sense of orchestration in a small group setting. That was and is a fascinating area for me. [...] Some of that has to do with things we can do in the studio, where we're using the studio itself as an instrument. [...] Some of it is Lyle's incredible skill in this area, his unbelievable, innate sense of orchestration that involves everything he does as a player. [...] Those qualities of being open to orchestration are a central part of what the group thing and other things that I've done have represented and what we've offered in terms of change.”
Finding the Pat Metheny Sound Today
Modern virtual guitar technology from Boss
If you aim to imitate the fully autonomous orchestra of the Orchestrion, you may have to find your own way; MIDI controlled solenoids and air pumps are still a novelty in concert halls and recording studios, and physical actuation of instruments by digital means is beyond the scope of this article. But many of the technologies that defined the sound of Pat Metheny and The Pat Metheny Group are now easier than ever to explore. While the Roland GR-300 guitar synthesizer was discontinued in 1985, there are several modern guitar synthesizers and pitch tracking devices that allow guitars and other physical instruments to control synthesizers.
The Boss GM-800 is the modern successor to the Roland GR-300, and while it now uses analog to digital conversion for pitch tracking, this has the advantage of providing new options such as built in samples, effects, and MIDI output. (As with the robotic instruments in Metheny’s Orchestrion project, greater latency from analog-to-digital conversion here is a consideration, but one that can be overcome through fine tuning and performance technique.) Another Roland guitar synthesizer, the VG-99, actually includes a realistic emulation of the GR-300 sound. Using the VG-99’s dual modeling engines, it’s possible to layer two virtual GR-300s simultaneously.
In addition, many other manufacturers now offer guitar synthesizers or pitch trackers that are more affordable and open up new possibilities for pitch tracking and synthesis. While the GR-300 originally required the guitar itself to undergo special modifications, the Electro-Harmonix Microsynth Analog Guitar Synthesizer offers a similarly all-analog design which is ready to play out of the box, with simple and intuitive controls.
The outlook for the Synclavier unexpectedly became much more promising recently. New England Digital stopped producing the original instrument in 1993. However, in a remarkable development, Cameron Jones, one of the original designers of the Synclavier at Dartmouth College, recently reacquired the rights to the Synclavier’s intellectual property. In 2022 a new company with the same trademark—Synclavier Digital—started manufacturing the Regen, a desktop synthesizer which is a modern incarnation of the original Synclavier software. An iOS emulation of the Synthclaver is also available under the name Synclavier Go!
The original Synclavier, produced in the 1980s, was a luxury piece of hardware, often costing upwards of $200,000, a price point that restricted ownership to elite studios, institutions, and high-profile artists. In contrast, the new Regen desktop synthesizer and Synclavier Go! iOS app preserves the instrument's innovative sound and makes it available to anyone—a sound that remains as captivating today as it was on Offramp in 1982.
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