New Synths in the Studio

After a very long time of buying completely nothing, suddenly I saw a synthesizer that has been on my wish list for the collection from day one. Never before I found one for sale in a condition like this one. It is an EMS 'Putney' VCS3. It is quite a rare synthesizer that was made in 1969. That is also the year that I was born, so that makes it extra special for me. It is a modular synthesizer that became famous famous because of its unique joystick, envelope fire button and the patch matrix. The matrix works with little pins and is actually quite convenient compared to plugging in patch cables to modules.

The machine is really in a great state, everything works and I'm so proud :) There is actually one in the London science museum you know :) That was the last time I saw one. The EMS's are actually perfect for creating sound effects and that is what Jean-Michel Jarre has used it for a lot. He made EMS famous together with Pink Floyd I guess who made there famous 'on the run' sequence on it. Well on the right is a nice pictures of the other machine I love for sound effects the ARP 2600.

And here is another syntesizer that I added to the collection. It is a Sequential Circuits Pro One. It is of the same make as the famous Prophet 5. This one is monophonic though. It is supposed to be great for bass sounds. To be honest I never played on one before, so this is new territory for me as well. A very nice feature is that it also has a sequencer on board. I can't wait to play around with it, but first I have to have a go at the VCS3 :)

Prophet VS in the Studio

I found another synth that I have been looking for a long time. It is a Sequential Circuits Prophet VS. It is a digital synthesizer and it uses a method called Vector Synthesis. It sounds really great, it has a lot of metallic sounds with a great filter and of course the joystick where you can go through the different parts of the sound. This makes it very useful for soundscapes that you can alter/modulate with this joystick. I have been playing on it for a while last night and I sort of understand now how it works. Now I need to find a nice spot for it, which is getting quite hard ;)

Sequential Circuits Prophet 5

I recently found a very nice Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 on E-bay. This is one of the great classics of course and I'm very happy with it. It used to be a REV 3.2 but it was upgraded to REV 3.3. This gives it more memory locations for presets and also it has Midi now. I moved it just above my DSI Prophet '08. Nice combo :) But when the Prophet arrived unfortunately it was not OK even though the add stated that it was recently serviced. The first thing I found is that the keys were sticky. When you pressed them some of them didn't get back up or came back very slowly. So I immediately mailed with the seller. He told me that all the bushings were replaced and it should be OK, but that maybe it needed a bit of lubricant.

I decided at that point not to install it in the studio but first go to my engineer. He opened it up, looked at the keys and found that a very thick grease was used on the keys. So he actually removed a lot of that grease and adjusted some stuff to make them work properly. After that we turned it on to test it and it didn't work at all :( We found out quite quickly that the -15 Volt from the power supply was not working due to a broken power regulator on the heat sink on the back. After about an hour we fixed this and then it worked like a charm. I contacted the seller about all this and he immediately agreed to pay the costs of my engineer. That was very nice of course. So a little trouble at the beginning but now it is a very nice addition to my studio :)