Quite rubbish sort of day at work, have to drive home with shopping, boooring, walk in through the door and...
...there's a parcel from Amazon Japan arrived. COME ON.
Western analogue synth types have been going mad for an edition of a Japanese science magazine called Otona No Kagaku, because its latest issue comes with an analogue synth, for about £15.
Yes, can you hear this Roland and Korg - an analogue synth. Didn't you say something about it not being economic to make these things anymore? What?
So bring on the traditional unboxing porn.
With postage it came to about £50 delivered for the two - ordered early on in August and finally posted late last week.
Mmmm, Buchla. The magazine is great, wish there had been a international edition. Didn't realise the GX-1 came with its own chair. Oh, where's that synth thing?
So comes as a kit, although there's not much work to do, just some screws and knobs to attach. You'd half expect Rolf Harris to be on the front of this - it looks inspired by the Stylophone. Here's the circuit board.
When I first put the thing together, I didn't screw the terminals for the carbon strip down enough, so I was only getting one high pitch out of it. Make sure they're tight, and it's all ok.
'Scuse the dusty mixer. The speaker is really tinny but bloody loud (just like the Stylophone...) on the hi setting - best go through an amp and some decent speakers to really hear the thing.
It's a single saw tooth oscillator only, with a square or triangle LFO which gets quite fast, possibly into audio ranges, but you can't alter the depth of the effect. The attack and decay knobs seem to be attached to the pitch and VCF. You can get quite blippy with the decay set short and the cutoff set low-ish.
By all accounts the filter is based on the Korg 35 in one of the versions of the MS20, and it sounds pretty good, but the resonance is either on or off, which is a bit of a shame. It's not easy to play a tune on the thing - the Stylophone had individual pads for you to scrape the stylus on, the SX-150 has a continuous ribbon which makes it easy to do lots of swoops and glides, but hitting definite notes is really tricky.
I had a quick fiddle with the "ext source" input, hoping that it would track one of my synths keyboards in a linear fashion, but unfortunately not - once I'd jacked up the level into it enough for it to trigger, it jumped multiples of tones between keys.
Here's some of my fiddling, bunged through an old analogue echo for extra hiss and nastiness.
(download)
There's been some thoughts about mods already for the thing, with most of the interest and resources being in Japanese so far.
Masa921 has some mods - I've got to have a go at the "VCF resonance atrocities" fix, it sounds great -
check the MP3 demo. Also
the SQ-150 sequencer project looks like a great add-on - maybe Otona No Kagaku could run that in their next issue? Don't make me get the soldering iron out, I'll only damage myself. Here's a mildly hypnotic demo of the SQ-150 on Youtube.
