Just got thinking about some of the stuff I bought when I first started getting into synths. What are your oddball instruments that you’ve had over the years? I’m not thinking boutique equipment or modified gear, more the weird and sometimes wonderful stuff that’s been on the high street. I’ll start off with a couple from the same manufacturer, Crumar.
They started the multi-keyboard trend off in the 70’s with the Multiman which had sections for brass, strings, piano, harpsichord and maybe contrabass (I forget exactly). The re-hashed the concept a few times but they were all essentially the same; a TOS chip feeding dividers and fed through filter and envelope circuits per part.
A few years later around 1981/2 they brought out the Stratus and Trilogy ‘polysynths’. They were interesting because rather than use VCO or DCO’s in the traditional sense they used dual TOS chips but that fed 6 individual voice cards with two notes sharing a card (eg all the C and F# notes on one card, D and G# on the next etc) So it’s sort of paraphonic. The voice cards have a CEM3310 VCA, 3320 VCF and a 3330 EG on each which goes some way toward making up for the lack of ‘proper’ oscillators. They clearly hadn’t invested in software development at this point as there’s no processor to be found in the synth. The memories are set by tweaking trimmers on cards under the lid. The trilogy, as it’s name suggests got the bonus of a 4 register organ part as well as a simple string machine part.
Second comes from the same era and company, the DP50 Dynamic Piano. Again, there is TOS based waveform generation but this time the filtering is done on a dedicated board with no less than 3 CEM 3320 VCF chips controlled by 5 knobs on the front panel. There are two modes of operation and depending which is selected dictates the filter topology. I’d have to dig out the schematics but I think one mode is a HPF and the other is a BPF, both with resonance controls. There is also a sensitivity control where a primitive velocity circuit acts like a EG filter depth so harder key presses will sweep the filter. There were other DP’s in the range and their Baby Grand was basically a DP50 in a baby grand body.
I’d love to hear about some of your mainstream oddities!