Happy Ghost

Title link takes you to a video sent my way via LDT.

"LDT: Korg Sigma, Korg EA-1, Korg MicroKorg, Boss Giga Delay, Electro-Harmonix LPB2ube, Zoom MRS8, assembled and rendered with Acid Pro and Sound Forge."

Effector 13 Improbability Drive Demo + Registry

YouTube via plexuss. via a post on Zerosum Inertia that was actually in response to the Poll on synth demos. The post had the following to say:
"I was happy to see that 57% of 577 votes wanted to hear what the gear sounds like as apposed to hearing music made with the synth. I like both, however What someone else does with gear isnt what Im going to do with it most of the time, so why should I care what kind of music they make?"

Details on the video via plexuss:
"http://www.musicofplexus.com The ID is processing a drum and bass line from an electribe SX. only a bit of reverb and echo are added towards the middle. There is a guitar demo later on. Apparently only 15 of these were made, according to E13 directly so if you have one post a comment!"

AnaMaria - DJ Series

flickr by lowfreq.

KORG Microcontrol

Serge Modular

Click here for shots via this auction.

Details:
"SMOOTH FUNCTION GENERATOR, NOISE SOURCE, DUAL ANALOG SHIFT REGISTER, DUAL UNIVERSAL SLOPE GENERATOR, DUAL PHASER, UNIVERSAL EQUAL POWER AUDIO PROCESSOR, TIMBRAL OSCILLATOR, PRECISION VCO (TWO OF THESE), WAVE MULTIPLIER, VARIABLE Q VCF, DUAL TRANSIENT GENERATOR, DUAL AUDIO MIXER, TOUCH ACTIVATED KEYBOARD SEQUENCER.

Serge gets its name from Serge Tcherepnin (pronounced "Cher - epp - nin"), a multitalented composer and electronic designer born of Russian-Chinese parents and raised in France. Self-taught in electronic design and circuit building, Serge enjoyed doing 'junk electronic' projects early on, making tape compositions using various electronic noisemakers cobbled together out of transistor radios and the like.

After studying music and physics at Harvard and Princeton, he taught music composition at the California Institute of the Arts. This was the early 70's, the heyday of Moog, ARP, and Buchla synthesizers. Calarts had a few Buchla-equipped studios. These were expensive, highly sought-after instruments, kept under lock and key. Getting studio time on one at Calarts meant being either a recognized staff composer or someone who maneuvered themselves into favor. The Buchla, ARP, and Moog synthesizers were interesting in their way, but could be improved upon. They were both expensive and bulky, a system with a decent number of functions could take up a whole wall in a small room. Serge and students Rich Gold and Randy Cohen wondered what they could do about this. After kicking around some ideas, they decided they were going to do their own synthesizer.

The first modules were designed, soldered, and built at Serge's home in what was essentially a kitchen tabletop operation. Before long, the word got out to other professors, students, and musicians about this new synthesizer. They wanted a piece of the action. Serge set up a strange sort of guerrilla manufacturing operation at Calarts on a second-story courtyard balcony. People paid $700 upfront for parts, worked on the 'assembly line' soldering and building modules, and eventually got themselves a six-panel system. Somehow, the Calarts administration either didn't find out or wasn't too bothered by this.

Another interesting player in this drama was composer Morton Subotnik, a professor at Calarts. He had a long association with instrument designer Don Buchla in the early 60's, the two of them collaborating on fundamental aspects of synthesizer design. When Mort spoke, Don listened. Serge caught on to this, and sought to woo Morton away from the Buchlas, but that was difficult. Eventually, Serge did build Mort some custom equipment.

In the 70's Serge collaborated on the design and construction of TONTO, a large polyphonic modular system. TONTO had the ancestry of many early Serge designs, some packaged behind faux-Moog front panels, including the NTO.

Serge eventually quit teaching and began to build synthesizers more seriously, using the first designs as a springboard. The Serge company was started in 1975, in the West Hollywood area, then headed north to San Francisco's Haight Street a few years later. It was always a humble bohemian concern, running more on enthusiasm and the love of making music than money and hardheaded business sense. Business tapered to a trickle in the middle 80's, and Serge, to support his family, started doing various outside electronic consulting projects. In 1992 Serge decided to move back to France. It was at this point that he sold the closely-guarded circuit designs to longtime associate Rex Probe, who then founded Sound Transform Systems. Production record keeping was pretty informal; it's estimated that "hundreds" of Serge systems were produced in the early years.

Today, Serge is again doing musical composition and is involved in helping Russian Jews move to Israel.

As Moog was a powerful East Coast influence that inspired ARP and Polyfusion, Buchla was the West Coast influence on Serge. Several Buchla designs, including the use of touch sensitive nontraditional keyboards, sequencers, random voltage generators, function generators, and matrix mixers found their way into Serge's repertoire. But that's not to say that Serge is merely a Buchla clone. Serge made many unique contributions, including the wave multiplier module, and some ideas were taken to new heights. Serge's oscillator designs have extraordinary accuracy and stability, especially considering their discrete nature. His philosophy of allowing the easy interplay of audio, control, and trigger signals, combined with the use of banana plugs, makes these systems wonderfully flexible.

There's no denying the amazing staying power of the Serge designs. Largely because of the development of convenient microprocessor-based keyboard synths, the 80's were a nasty time for analog synthesizer makers, practically all of them throwing in the towel. Serge's business slowed way down but never completely went out of production. With the recent clamoring for analog gear fueling successful production, Rex Probe and Sound Transform Systems look poised to carry the cream of analog modular music synthesis over the threshold of the 21st century, into their fourth decade of realization.

Sound Transform Systems has done a great job of continuing the analog modular lineage. Most of the traditional Serge modules are there, a few old ones were dropped, a few new ones added. The details are constantly being improved in many visible and invisible ways. They are still laboriously handmade, though the entire build process has been improved. Turnaround time has been improved from several months to 'just a couple'. All the components are top notch. The panel graphics and layout of many of the modules have been redesigned to make them more compact while keeping or improving the functionality. The circuit designs on many modules have been updated."

Doepfer Modular

Title link takes you to shots via this auction.

Details:
"A-190 MIDI TO CV CONVERTER, MC01 MASTER CLOCK, BD88 BASS DRUM, A-112 SAMPLER, A110 VOLTAGE CONTROLLED OSCILLATOR (TWO OF THESE), A-118 NOICE SOURCE, A-117 DIG SOURCE/808 SOURCE, A-121 VCF2, A-123 VCF4, A-120 VCF1, A-180, A-181, A-138 MIXER, A-114, A-115, A-116 WAVEFORM PROCESSOR, A-140 ADSR, ENVELOPE GENERATOR (TWO OF THESE)."

Be careful with the rest of the description on this one. It's pulled from VSE and features more modules than what's actually up for auction.

Yamaha EX1 SN 5012

Note: Auction links are affiliate links for which the site may be compensated.

via this auction

Anyone know more about these? Where they purely organs or did they have any synth capabilities? Do not confuse the EX1 with the mighty GX-1 analog monster or the FX1 FM monster. The auction details claims, "Successor to the famed, GX-1, this organ was very similar in many regards and originally cost $35,000 when new in 1977!" In look yes, in anything else? If you know feel free to comment.

CLICK FOR MORE »

100 Patches for the Casio CZ-101

via this auction.

MoogulatoR

MoogulatoR of sequencer.de just put up a ton of music on his MoogulatoR site. To keep this on topic and about a specific synth or synths, many of the tracks feature only one synth including the Waldorf XT and Roland SH-5.

Virus TI Polar Flickr Set

Click here for the full set sent my way via Jyoti Mishra.

Making the Andromeda A6

A great thread is up on the VSE Forums on the Alesis Andromeda. I know the threads expire there, so I'll grab some of the most interesting bits here. DB below is David Bryce who worked on the Andromeda. I remember when all of this was happening. Mike Peake was on sonic states the-gas-station and AH. The guys behind the Andromeda really loved synths and they respected the rest of us enough to frequently pulled us in for feedback on the design of the synth. It was as if they were one of us, and in reality they were and still are. Mike Peake stayed active in the synth community and as you can see from this thread, David Bryce is still very active. You have to love a company that does this. Great people make a great company. I personally think Alesis has been one of the better synth manufactures to date. The Andromeda, ION and Micron, and the Fusion have all been pretty amazing synths. The price points for what you get compared to what else is out there is astounding when you think about it. Do take the time to check them out. The Andromeda is a 16 voice analog with a huge modulation matrix, dual filters, built in step sequencer and much, much more. And it sounds pretty amazing imo. Whenever I think I've heard it all, someone makes a demo that showcases a completely new character of the synth. BTW, are there any other poly analogs with 16 or more voices other than of course the fully polyphonic boards using divide down technology?

Alesis A6 Andromeda, Now where did that come from? (title of VSE thread)
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CTB wrote:
Our very own Dave Bryce, who sometimes posts here and works for DSI, was involved in the A6 project. Perhaps he would be the one to ask. Smile

DB:
Actually, we just got tired of people complaining that the QS synths had no resonant filters, so we decided to make something that did. Very Happy Cool

Making Andromeda was really the culmination of a dream for a bunch of us who had grown up with the older analog synths. We had spent years working on sample based stuff, and Erik and Rob Rampley got Alesis founder (and major engineer geek) Keith Barr drunk one night and talked him into letting us make an old school American power synth. Keith actually designed Andromeda's ASICs himself, if memory serves.

One of the back stories was that we were fought tooth and nail by Alesis' sales and marketing VP at the time, who thought we were out of our minds. He once told me we'd be lucky to sell 50 total units. Guess he may have been wrong. Shocked Idea

If anyone has any specific questions, I'll do my best to answer if I can remember. That was a while ago...

StepLogik wrote:
I'm shocked that the marketing group fought you

DB:
It wasn't the marketing group. I was the marketing manager of the synth division, and I was certainly behind it. It was the VP.

,
Quote:
seems like they would want to distinguish Alesis from the "workstation hell" of that era.

DB:
Not just workstations - it was VA synths, too. We figured making a Real Actual Analog synth would catch some people's attention (as Bitexion correctly surmised).

Plus, we were tired of hearing that we weren't a real synth company despite the fact that our ROMplers (especially the QS8) were outselling just about everything else at the time...but there were folks who kept telling us that ROMplers aren't real synths...so we made a real synth. Idea

That seemed to do the trick... Laughing

cbjlietuva wrote:
so maybe i can get my question amswered here:

does the Andromeda have Polyphonic Aftertouch?

DB:
The short answer would be no.

theglyph wrote:
Dave, the one major question I have had and the one thing which has kept me from pulling the trigger on an A6 purchase is what will the status of the A6's ASICs be in the future? CEMs and SSMs were used in several synths from many manufacturers so those chips were manufactured to some degree in surplus as we see today (although they ain't cheap Crying or Very sad). Did Alesis make sure that the IC manufacturer made enough chips to fulfill any future failures or is the well not so deep?

DB:
Alesis is the chip manufacturer...I mean, they don't own the foundry where the chips are physically made, but they do everything else. Consequently, there's no way we can know how many of them Alesis has made/wants to make...

...unless they want to tell us, of course... Wink

Soundwave wrote:
Few questions;

Is the A6 still in production and will it remain so for the foreseeable future?

Will the support continue for the machine i.e. OS updates/fixes?

Are the first, more expensive Alesis A6’s different in any way than the later Numark ones that are apparently now made in the far east as some claim the earlier Alesis ones sound better?

There are rumours that some of the people behind the A6 were also involved in the Xpander/Matrix12 is this true?

Will there ever be an analogue successor or derivative or the A6 as the VA market has kinda reached a standstill now?

DB:
I can only answer two of those questions becuase I haven't worked for Alesis for about seven years, so I have no idea what their current plans are.

Marcus Ryle, who founded Line 6, was one of the guys responsible for the XpanderMatrix 12. He and his team had a lot to do with a bunch of Alesis products including the ADAT and the QS synths...but they had nothing to do with Andromeda.

There are a few "rev 2" Andromedas that were only used during beta. They are slightly different from the production models, but the OS in them is different enough that you can't transfer programs between, them, so they can't really be directly compared....nor, if you could, is there actually any point in doing so. Howver, all the production models are (AFAIK) exactly the same...."
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And that's it as of the time of this post. Check out the VSE thread for updates. I'll try to update this post with the historical bits so we don't lose them. Image via this post.