Synth examples, post them here.

[HideawayStudio]

Here is a montage of sounds I've dialled up on my 1939 Novachord over the last few days. This 1/4 ton beast returned to the land of the living this week, after spending 200 hours completely rebuilding her PSU chassis and repotting the supply decoupling capacitors in the generator chassis. This is an amazing design for the era featuring two active smoothing, noise cancelling, HT rails and several other conventional ones.

Number 346 has travelled all the way across the Atlantic from Seattle to the UK after Marc Doty gave me the very generous opportunity to take on and restore this amazing beast.

For those who haven't been following my restoration thread, here are her essentials:

World's first commercial polyphonic subtractive analog synth, built in 1939
1069 manufactured between 1939 and 1941
163 electronic vacuum tubes (valves)
Weighs 1/4 ton
Features full 72 note polyphony
Configurable envelope per key giving control over Attack, Decay and Sustain!
Multi stage LC based Resonant low pass "formant" filters
6 channel electromechanical vibrato
12 oscillators
Swell and sustain pedals - with high and low octave split
Cost $1800 in 1939 or as much as 3 family cars or a house!!

Unlike Phil Cirocco's infamous rebuilt Novachord, apart from the PSU chassis, number 346 is currently running with an almost totally unrestored generator chassis containing 146 tubes and over 800 capacitors. At present all but the bottom two octaves are running albeit with some minor calibration and tuning issues - not bad for a 70 year old electronic beast!!

http://www.hollowsun.com/novachord/Nova ... ontage.mp3

Novachord 346:

The Huge Generator Chassis in the "Service Position"

[Composition86]

I have recorded two Roland Sh-2 demos.

Sh2 demo
This one is a 6:30 minutes demo: it's just a bass sequence with some random changes.

Sh2 Rio
This is one is a short excercise, I made it just for fun. I was trying to reproduce a fragment of the 3 famous arpeggios from Duran Duran's "Rio", with and without effects (ignore the notes ).

[guitarsandsynths]

[quote="HideawayStudio"]Here is a montage of sounds I've dialled up on my 1939 Novachord over the last few days. quote]
Beautiful sounds! Congratulations and thanks for posting!

[retrosounds]

Factory patches of the Yamaha DX-21

[haaplaj]

> not bad for a 70 year old electronic beast!!

> http://www.hollowsun.com/novachord/Nova ... ontage.mp3

Amazing!!
Sounds good too!

[solaristica]

Really incredible. Have to say, I didn't follow any of this, and am amazed that such a thing exists and you're able to take this sounds of it. How much of what we're listening is the Novachord though, and not effects, processing, etc.?

[HideawayStudio]

Really incredible. Have to say, I didn't follow any of this, and am amazed that such a thing exists and you're able to take this sounds of it. How much of what we're listening is the Novachord though, and not effects, processing, etc.?

http://www.last.fm/music/D.A.Wilson/_/N ... ?autostart

This recording was made directly from the balanced line output of Novachord 346 - ie. straight out of the preamp channel. This massively opens up the frequency range of the Novachord which is just amazing for a 70 year old piece of audio equipment - especially for one with 163 vacuum tubes in it!

Although the signal was washed through chorus/delay/reverb it has not been EQ'd in any way at all with the exception of a hum notch - ie. it's this bright straight out of the box. Again, during the sampling project we've not had to EQ the raw digital audio at all with the ironic exception of the fact that where we wanted the Novachord to sound like it does in all those old late 1930's recordings we've have to EQ the heck out of it!

Despite the use of FX the unmistakable sound of the Novachord always comes through - it is a truly unique and now extremely rare piece of vintage gear.

UPDATE: And now we have a Novachord & Theremin Duet!!

D.A.Wilson & Thomas Grillo: Alto Volo (High Flight):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVfhzLl5C9U

Novachord & Theremin Duet "Alto Volo" - MP3 Now Available:

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE

A number have asked me to host a decent quality copy of our sampled Novachord and Theremin duet "Alto Volo" featuring Thereminist Thomas Grillo.

It is now available for free download on LastFM:

http://www.last.fm/music/D.A.Wilson%2B% ... ?autostart

[vvd]

Doepfer Dark Energy - detected dark energy!!!

if i remember correctly it's only the square wave, no triangle or saw mixed in.
no post processing or editing.
enjoy

[HideawayStudio]

1939 Novachord... A 70 Year Old Synth Emulating a Piano!!...

OK... this evening has left me amazed. Playing with the resonator settings and setting the Bright/Mellow control to Mellow with the the vibrato off really does produce something piano like.

At this point I revisited the piano samples in our new sound set and came up with this little beauty. What has really impressed me here is that this is simply around 30Mb of raw piano multisamples direct from Novachord 346 through no more than touch of delay and reverb.

I called the program "NC346: Dark Tube Piano". Here is a quick demo:

http://www.last.fm/music/D.A.Wilson/_/H ... ?autostart

It really is impressive to think it's possible to traverse from sustained string sounds to piano on a 100% electronic instrument built in 1939!! So the question is what is lighter... a 1/4 ton 163 tube Novachord or a baby grand??

Novachord 346 In All Her Glory:

[madtheory]

The demo's for the Casio CZ range are deplorable at best and don't show off what the CZs can really do.

What's wrong with these:
Straight synth:
http://www.madtheory.com/CZ%20article/C ... 20demo.mp3

Lots of modulation:
http://www.madtheory.com/CZ%20article/C ... 20demo.mp3

It's a CZ-1, no chorus, no external effects.

[Carey M]

I was getting to know my recently acquired Acidlab Miami and in the process, farted out these two tracks. Miami does all drums and percs, everything else is played by hand (ie. poorly and out of sync) on a Moog Opus 3 (basses) and Korg Polysix. I'm not really well versed in making electronic music, so these tracks are just for demo purposes and not musical statements:

track#1
track#2

- CM

[balma]

1 minute, 40 seconds of the Ensoniq FIZMO

http://www.filefreak.com/files/136859_e6fyx/aluna.mp3

A user patch I made with 8 transwaves. The sound of the fizmo is simple unique. Such a great synth on such mediocre hands.....

[solaristica]

Very very good. The Fizmo is, literally, a dream machine...

[monolith]

All sounds are Korg Mono/Poly. There is a bit of delay and reverb (Boss RE-20) but no EQ, compression etc.


http://soundclick.com/share?songid=8710137

[Christopher Winkels]

On a roll at the moment... Part 2 of Emu Emulator II library sounds:

Watch on youtube.com

I just stumbled across this video today. It's easy to see hear why the Emulator II was such a popular machine back in the day. And my god, does the thing look like a bloody tank.