Posted on 12/03/1986
Acquired: Autumn 1985. Sold: 1987 After the inital novelty effect of the Fairlight CMI had settled, a range of more affordable samplers were expectably popping up. The first of these – the Ensoniq “Mirage” sampler had a basic sampling and synth engine, and was able to record short samples in only 8-bit resolution. It was […]
Posted on 31/01/1986
Stack in a box While not exactly a Marshall stack, the diminutive Rockman Sustainor Distortion unit was actually quite a game changer when launched in the mid 1980’s. It allowed you to produce decent guitar tones, without the hassle of setting up a stack and miking it up. This gave smaller project studios a way […]
Posted on 09/11/1985
The Emu Emulator II is a nice machine, but originally came with a semi-hefty price tag that limited owners to recording studios and wealthy musicians. The sound library was available both on Floppy Disks and CD-ROM. The CD-ROM version is much more practical, since it contains a large library on each disc, with only little swapping of […]
Posted on 06/08/1985
The Roland MKS-70 is a rack mount version of the quite well-specified Roland JX-10 Keyboard. The JX series has a somewhat different architecture from the Juno and Jupiter series. It started with the JX-3P keyboard which had a different sound and approach. The JX-3P was followed by the JX-8P which expanded the feature set, and features a […]
Posted on 01/06/1985
This unit was one of the first commercially available MIDI-to-CV Interfaces to be produced. It has several operating modes, including Mono (4 Mono voices on 4 MIDI Channels) Poly (Up to 4 voices on 1 MIDI Channel) Used to control the Fluxic Modular System from Logic Pro X on the main DAW. Manufacturer: Roland […]
Posted on 05/03/1985
The Roland MKS-80 was launched as a rack successor to the big and beautiful Jupiter-8 synth – the unofficial king of the 80s polysynths. The MKS-80 had several additions to the JP-8, with MIDI and Velocity response as the most important. This made the instrument a lot more expressive, than the sweet sounding but more static […]
Posted on 18/10/1984
It may seem odd today, but the Roland SBX-80 sync box was a real relief for syncing up MIDI sequencers to analog tape recorders. Released in the mid 80s, it was the perfect companion for e.g Rolands own MSQ-700 and MSQ-100 MIDI sequencers, but could be used with anything that slaves to MIDI sync. After […]
Posted on 30/09/1984
Since the early days of electronic music, the Vocoder has always had it’s place. Originally invented to reinforce intelligibility of telephone calls, the vocoder was soon abused by electronic musicians to make synthetic voices and other spectral processing. Early albums such as Wendy Carlos’ “A clockwork orange”, “Tales of Mysery and Imagination” by Alan Parsons […]
Posted on 13/08/1984
[gdlr_divider type=”solid” size=”100%” ] A Danish classic A real studio classic, and a classy piece of engineering. The “TC-2290 Programmable Digital Delay and Effects Control Processor”- or just TC-2290 – by Danish company TC Group (formerly TC Electronics) has found a place in most high end studios across the world. Writing the manual Being deeply […]
Posted on 20/07/1980