New baby in the studio

Picked up a Kawai R-50 from E-Bay recently. Lovely over-compressed crunchy drum sounds from thirty years ago. A bit limited in what it can do - bit like the Roland Tr-505, but still a fun unit.

Now to keep my eye open for the R-100, give it the full Jan Hammer sound!

Vintage Ads

Vintage Stuff

Spent the day reading an old issue of 'Electronics and Music Maker', a good one too, with a great interview with Keith Emerson and a transcript of some of his music - way out of my league :-) 

But what made me smile was the prices of some of the gear back then and the great ads - some of them are cheaper then they are on E-Bay today! Take a Prophet One for instance, back then, just over £300 - today, I saw one on E-Bay for £1500!!
That's some inflation. 

Here are some ads for you my fellow synth fans.

I'll post some more shortly. 

New addition to the studio

Just bought a Roland D-110 Synth - well, won a D-110 from E-Bay the other day. Got it in the rack and all hooked up - now trying to figure it out ( I thought programming a DX7 was hard!). Both Opcode Galaxy and MidiQuest aren't to happy with it and promply spit out any patch loading/collecting requests, so I might have to do a bit of web detecting for clues, hopefully it ( the D-110) having an older ROM system won't affect anything (v.1.06) looks like 1.10 is the ROM to have.

Roland D-110

D-110 hooked up to the PG-10 programmer

Luckily Roland do have all the old manuals online via their website, as well as the factory presets as SysEx files which is a total result - find them HERE

UPDATE.. D'oh! After originally making sure all my midi channels on the patches were going 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,10 it seems that they need to be 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 as the unit was originally supplied - well, at least the first patch has to be and now Galaxy and MidiQuest are happily moving patches back and forth to the D110.