Switched-On Bach is the debut album by the American composer Wendy Carlos, released in October 1968 by Columbia Records.

After Carlos came out as a transgender woman in 1979, reissues of Switched-On Bach amended the artist credit to reflect her change of name, as was the case with the rest of her discography up to that point.

They included compositions written ten years earlier as well as some from 1964 co-written with her friend Benjamin Folkman at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City.

[1] Soon after, Carlos began plans to produce an album of Bach pieces performed on the recently invented Moog synthesizer.

Elkind contacted her friend, producer and conductor Ettore Stratta at Columbia Records, who "generously spread his enthusiasm throughout the rest of the company" and assisted in the album production.

Paul Myers of Columbia Masterworks granted Carlos, Folkman, and Elkind artistic freedom to record and release it.

"[5] The synthesizer was unreliable and often went out of tune; Carlos recalled hitting it with a hammer prior to recording to obtain correct levels.

Carlos and Elkind objected to this original cover and had it replaced, finding it "was a clownish, trivializing image of a mugging Bach, supposedly hearing some absurd sound from his earphones".

They also objected to the fact that the synthesizer was incorrectly set up: "[The earphones] were plugged into the input, not output, of a 914 filter module, which in turn was connected to nothing, [assuring] that silence is all that would have greeted Johann Sebastian's ears.

"[7] In 1968, shortly before the release of Switched-On Bach, Robert Moog spoke at the annual Audio Engineering Society conference and played one of Carlos' recordings from the album.

These technical people were involved in so much flim-flam, so much shoddy, opportunistic stuff, and here was something that was just impeccably done and had obvious musical content and was totally innovative.

[3] In June that year, Billboard reported the album's sales surpassed one million, the second classical music record in history to achieve the feat.

[14] In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Bruce Eder noted that Carlos' approach "was highly musical in ways that ordinary listeners could appreciate ... characterized by ... amazing sensitivity and finely wrought nuances, in timbre, tone, and expressiveness.

I remember there was a nice big bowl of joints on top of the mixing console, and Terry Riley was there in his white Jesus suit, up on a pedestal, playing live on a Farfisa electronic organ against a backup of tape delays.