via
this auction"demo cassette of the old APPLE II synthesizer! The SOUNDCHASER synth. Rather unusual - I remember seeing Chick Corea demo this thing, and likely it's where I got this from. 1982 as I recall!"
Anyone know more about this one?
Update via Eccentric Genius in the comments:
"Zoiks...what a flashback.
I had one... real similar to an Alpha Syntauri. The Syntauri had a velocity sensing keyboard, the Soundchaser was stuck with an organ style one. The 'chaser had better sequencing software though... 16 tracks as opposed to 4.
Both were based around the Mountain Digital Oscillator boards, which plugged into your Apple II along with a keyboard controller card and gave you up to 16 voice polyphony. The hardware was unbelievably noisy; a noise gate was mandatory to avoid the crazy-makin' drone of 16 leaky oscillators coming at you every single second the thing was powered up.
It had user defined waveforms, which was the earliest proof available that complex single cycle waves for the most part sound like shit... Despite the fact that the oscillator boards came with an attached light pen (for use with the Mountain score editing software), the Soundchaser made you draw your waveforms using the Apples game paddles or joystick. The only place draw-yer-own waveforms was useful was when you got all finicky and drew elaborate and precisely stepped 'staircase' shapes and assigned them to the LFO, which let you harness the zipper effect and gave you a one-key arppegio that would almost be in tune if you drew the shape just right. Of course, the LFO rate tracked the keyboard, which severely limited the usefulness...
Each oscillator was treated as a separate voice; you made your patch by assigning oscillators from the pool, then tweezing each oscillator to death.
There were no filters...just a 4 stage envelope and the lfo. If you wanted anything approaching timbre dynamics you had to get artsy fartsy and assign, say, 4 oscillators to the patch, then meticulously tweeze the envelope parameters for each oscillator to fade from one to the other during the course of the note on event. This could really eat into your available polyphony in a hurry.
It is worth noting that assigning 16 oscillators to one patch gave you one note polyphony, but it was a very large note when you played it.
It supported one keyboard split, and the gamepaddle was used as a pitchbend during performance. I don't recall a mod wheel being implimented.
The sequencer started out as 4 track, then updated to 16. Keyboard input with limited quantization, then you could open up the sequence as a hexadecimal event list and edit pitch and duration on screen after the fact. It was less than intuitive. I paid $1800 cdn in 1981, and used it regularly through the '80s, despite the perils of dealing with outraged soundmen distressed at the presence of the *very* loud radio frequency presence of the Apple onstage. I think my son still uses it back in Toronto...I'm gonna have to ask him."
