CONN Electric Band Videos & Pics

YouTube Uploaded by matrixsynth on Jun 14, 2011

"The video is a bit overexposed in part one. Watch in HD and turn the volume up! Listen to it growl;
and that crazy synthetic laugh! Vids shot with a Canon Rebel T2i."


For Sale at Space Oddity Vintage Furniture Gallery Seattle
The CONN Electric Band. This is one interesting piece. I've been intrigued by it seeing it in previous posts that have gone up over the years. Is it an Organ or is it a Synth? At 50+ posts a day I try to keep the site's focus on synths, not organs, as adding them to the roster would make the site unmanageable. I will however feature organs that are capable of sounding like a synth. The CONN Electric Band definitely fits into this category. I finally got a chance to check one out in person.

This unit is currently for sale at the Space Oddity Vintage Furniture Gallery in the Ballard district of Seattle, WA. If you are in the area, I highly recommend taking the time out to check it out. There's also tons of other interesting items in the shop including a CONN Strobe Tuner. I'll post a video and pics of that later.

Above are a couple of videos I took of Todd, the owner of Space Oddity tinkering with the CONN Electric. We were both discovering the synth/organ, so some of the functional descriptions were guesses that we figured out were different later. Further below are more images. Click on each to see the super sized shots. You can clearly see all the controls.

The unit sits on top of a giant speaker cabinet with a pedal (that black in the image above is the speaker). In the back of the CONN Electric Band are two 1/4" outs that you plug into the cabinet. You can actually unplug it and move just the keyboard section to a desk or stand. See this previous post for pics of one without the cabinet. The speaker does sound great though. There is tons of low end. The videos don't do it justice (turn the volume up when you watch them). You really need to hear this thing in person. Massive thick low end on the black bass keys and a surprisingly rich and sometimes crazy mids and highs depending on the patch with the white keys.

As for the engine, this is a preset keyboard with three reverb settings and a full rhythm section. It's all analog and it sounds it. You can click on the images below to see the presets available. Everything sounds synthetic vs. organ-like. On the far right is the "Adjustables" section. Just to the left in the previous section you will see a button that read's "Adjustables On" with an arrow pointing to the section (see this image). At first we thought this was the "synth section" based on previous posts that stated so. I obviously made the connection that this might actually be the modulation section for each preset vs. a separate section. It turns out it is both. If you select it by itself you get two tones A and B and the modulation settings. To get the modulation going on a given preset it's a little tricky. You can't just select the preset followed by the Adjustables setting as that will just switch to the Adjustables. You have to select your patch and then slightly hold it down half-way while selecting Adjustables On. The controls look simple but you can get some really crazy sounds (listen to the synthetic laugh in the videos below (Space Junk preset)). The following videos will give you a little taste of that. This thing excels at drones and crazy slightly unpredictable synthetic sounds. This one does need work which makes me wonder if some of it's magic would be lost if fixed. Three of the presets unfortunately do not work so we were unable to check them out. Todd did say one was working the other day, so who knows. Definitely temperamental but man does it sound good. Again if you are in the area, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Details here: Space Oddity Vintage Furniture Gallery.