Sunday, January 9, 2011

Two portable cabinets and a 184

Today I have the two portable cabinets as well as the Roland 184 keyboard. The 184 has 4 CV and gate outputs making it possible to use the modular synthesizer as a 4 voice polyphonic. The 184 also has a pitch bender, arpeggiator (up, down, up/down and random), unison and polyphonic modes as well as a portamento. It was originally designed for the Roland System 100M but was built with all jacks as 3.5mm and 1/4" which was excellent foresight. Although in hindsight it makes sense as the Roland System 700 used 1/4" jacks so they were making it compatible with both systems. Still, A+ for Roland.

This is a portion of the system as it will be. Truth be told, it already looks different as since the photo I changed the layout and added some modules that were not present in this photo. A fourth oscillator, Steiner filter, STG sea devils filter (EMS Synthi clone) and STG Post-Lawsuit filter ('clone' of the 4072 in the ARP 2600). The left cabinet is now pretty much comprised of nothing but oscillators and filters.


Saturday, January 8, 2011

Start of the Modular


I'm assembling a modular synth finally. It's been a while in the planning and it is in 5U synthesizers.com format, but Im also adapting it to accept MOTM and Modcan modules in the future. I will track the creation of the synth as well as update this with music and such as it happens. The first module to arrive came before I even have the cabinet to put it in. It's the Synthetic Sound Labs Steiner Filter. It is modeled after the filter in the rare Steiner Parker Synthacon. The filter has separate inputs for low-pass, high-pass and bandpass modes and one output.

Tomorrow I will be getting another 1/3 of the system together including two portable cabinets with modules, but the steiner is the first to arrive.