Kimball string synth?

Hossinfeffa · Post by **Hossinfeffa** » Mon Jun 23, 2008 8:23 am

My question is.. what exactly is it? I've never seen it before. To me it looks almost like a string synthesizer from the 70s. I had always thought Kimball produced only pianos and organs. Ideas?

tim gueguen · Post by **tim gueguen** » Mon Jun 23, 2008 4:03 pm

Betcha its a rebadged something or other, probably Italian given how many of them came out of Italy in the '70s.

Hossinfeffa · Post by **Hossinfeffa** » Mon Jun 23, 2008 11:50 pm

Whatever it is, I just bought it for cheap. I'm going to pick it up tomorrow and try it out.

I can't even find anything about these online. I did see a revision 3 on ebay.. but it looks completely different than this.

OriginalJambo · Post by **OriginalJambo** » Tue Jun 24, 2008 2:30 am

There seems to be no mention of a Kimball synth/string machine/organ/whatever is it in the fabled "A-Z of Analogue Synthesisers" so it must be either really, really rare or really, really worthless and therefore almost completely forgotten. Maybe a bit of both, who knows.

If you do manage to grab it - it is your duty after all (synth service rule #3240 states that when a member finds something rare or unknown they must get a hold of it at all costs!

) - do let us all know what it is and what it's like.

Let's just hope it's a working example for your sake, as if nobody knows what it is or can locate some schematics it'll bound to be a nightmare to repair.

Hossinfeffa · Post by **Hossinfeffa** » Tue Jun 24, 2008 2:43 am

I found it on Craigslist yesterday, here's the description:

"its a "voyager" old skool ~ has earphone plug and couple other audio plugs on the back~
works great ,,,,bought it from hippy who played bongos too.
has beats and all kind of different keyboard sounds.
its very large and heavy and can be used in a band or practice learning to play!!"

Made me laugh a bit.

But hey, it's only $20 so I'm not losing much if it's not any good.

I'll be sure once I get it to let you all know what it actually is. Maybe even do a little video of it.

Hossinfeffa · Post by **Hossinfeffa** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 10:41 am

Well, I bought it and brought it home to try it out better. A few keys don't work, but that probably just needs a good contact cleaning. This is actually not a string synth, it just looks like one. It's actually a scaled down Kimball organ. Scaled down in terms of size, really. It sounds similar to the big ones. It has the typical "entertainer" section, rhythm machine, and solo section. Not that bad if you want the Kimball sound without the big organ. A lot of the preset sounds seem almost unusable for not sounding that good. They sound very weak. But, two sounds that are really good are the "full organ" and "marimba." It's a nifty little thing, but I think I'll clean it up and re-sell it since I have the full organ that is big brother to it. (I think this came out in 1977.. same year as my organ. Judging mainly by how it looks.)

OriginalJambo · Post by **OriginalJambo** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 1:33 pm

So it's a old combo organ then? Still not bad for $20.

Bit of a shame it's not some rare string machine that nobody knows about though.