M-Z3R0 - circuit bent 3LC - DRONE

YouTube via manufacturedZ3R0
"A small ELC keyboard with pitch control, opto theremin and a delay circuit.
Excuse those filthy hands. I did some work on the car earlier in the day :)"

Gentle Electric

Remember the Gentle Electric 101 Pitch Follower? Carl Fravel dropped by in the comments and left a link to the Gentle Electric website.

"While working at Aries Music in the Fall of 1976, Carl Fravel had some conversations with Dennis Colin, the designer of the Arp2600 and of the Aries, about pitch following for analog synthesizer control. Dennis had prototyped a pitch follower using cascading octave lowpass filters, but didn't create a product from it. After leaving Aries, Carl founded Gentle Electric, for which he designed a pitch follower a using a different approach (a time-domain pattern recognition algorithm), and included envelope following and envelope triggering features. Gentle Electric's early business included custom synthesizer work and prototype quantity circuit board manufacturing, until the pitch follower was ready for manufacturing. Approximately 200 of these pitch followers were sold over the next 10 years. The pitch follower existed in 5 configurations..."

Gentle Electric 101 Pitch Follower

via this auction.

"Very rare and early model gentle electric pitch and envelope follower model 101 with very early serial number."

Anyone know more about this?

via Johan


Update : here's another one in black via this flickr set, via .alex. in the comments:


"These are great! Don't know much about it but got a chance to mess around with one while i was a student at the Chicgao Art Institute. Here's a photo of it in the studio."

Update via Carl in the comments:
"Hi, this is Carl Fravel. Thanks for the nice comments. Gentle Electric has a website for history buffs at www.gentleelectric.com"