The first one I'd like to tell you about is a real little gem of a keyboard, the Korg 707. Made in the late 80's it was very much aimed at the budget synth market with a 49 key keyboard and a rather cheapy looking plastic case. Its an FM synth with 4 operators and 8 voice polyphony and like all FM and digital synths of that era its a git to program (although lots easier than the DX7) although Korg, with an eye to live performance, put three sliders on the front so you can tweak the two envelope generators and the "Timbre" (basically the resonance Q) in real time. Play this little puppy and you start to use these controls a lot and very nice they are too. If you really want to go for that 80's synthpop band look you can run it on batteries and it comes with studs on the side so you can sling a guitar strap on it and wear it over you shoulder for that "I am an utter cockwallet" look.
This is my beast, its a bit tatty and the bottom C doesn't sound but as I picked it up for 35 quid on eBay I really can't complain.
Like any FM synth its very good at metallic and bell tones and I have to say although most of the presets suck donkey balls there are some real gems in there, especially the "Tine Piano" which you can hear in this little bit of music I composed.
November 707 - Dracunculus
All that is recorded directly from the 707 on the presets (no sequencing) and fiddling with the performance sliders (and a bit of reverb and compression in Reason) - yeah I know I'm about a good a musician as I am a blogger.
One of the nicest things about it is that the keyboard has full size velocity sensitive keys and, amazingly for something in this price range, full aftertouch, so it works surprisingly well as a MIDI controller and given that these go for 50 to 70 quid on eBay if you're in the market for a 4-octave controller you could do a lot worse than get one of these.
I like mine so much I'm thinking of getting a tidier one.
7 comments:
Good stuff, very Bo Hansson.
Good post, I like it when bloggers write with such passion about something they love. What is next, the Roland SH101?
Interesting. But I'd sooner have an analogue synth any day, since I can't play a note and just like the weird 'space' noises you get with something like a VCS-3 like wot Pink Floyd used so successfully in the 1970s.
Well much as I like the SH101 I doubt I'll be getting one any time soon as this is a very "budget" hobby and old analogue kit goes for serious money. A SH101 in even shabby condition will sell for 400 quid, pristine ones go for up to 700 or more! As for the VCS-3, they will sell for thousands.
Much as I like analogues they are tricky to keep going and the prices are just silly. If I need analogue wobblyness I tend to use software emulators which are pretty close to the real thing and don't go out of tune every 10 minutes! Mind you I'd like to get my claws on a real Yamaha CS5 or a Korg MS-20
Well I got the circuit diagrams for a VCS-3 from some website somewhere and have to admit they're horrendously complicated. However, this was all pretty much before LSI chips were available, and I reckon one could now build a creditable copy with all the capability of the original synth with just 50 quids' worth of ICs and a few dozen cheap discretes. And I reckon it would be a damn sight more stable, too. The trick is in identifying which ICs to use, and hooking them all up so all the various signal levels are in the right ranges. In the New Year I plan to do just that and if it's successful, I might even sell component kits and plans on Ebay. We'll see how it goes.
If you do get it working Old Git, drop me a line.
Give it MIDI in and you won't need a keyboard for it.
A couple of points, GD. Firstly, even if everything goes swimmingly (as if!) there won't be anything to show until around 14 months from now. These pieces of kit are HIGHLY complicated and I have nowt to go on but the original schematics.
Secondly, I've only the vaguest idea of what MIDI is. I know it's something digital, whereas I'm an analogue man, so we have a problem, Housten. :)
But I'll bear what you say in mind and let you know as and when and if the project comes to fruition. Just don't hold your breath!
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