As threatened here is the Synth thread I'll start by asking the question what is your favourite synth in your collection. Mine is probably the Korg Radias. After watching this demo on Youtube I just had to buy one, and luckily one came up fairly quickly with a good Buy It Now Price.
I have something like this got it few years ago. It is a Corg and packed in the box in my basement. Am not sure which model is, it looks so beautiful and I got it from guitar center, I will check it someday and post some pictures.
At the gentle age of 9 I realized that playing is Not my thing: I love music but within the weeks between "which polonaise you choose to play" and me playing it... a Lot of hatred to the tune imbued!! Lucky me, I saw the guys at my local Club of Youth Developments (Yes, it was USSR, where else such names existed!?!) flying their gliders and I said No to playing and Yes to being an Engineer! Lucky me, all of my friends who graduated from Music School came to hate any music! Back to Synth: I buy and download everything new, my favs are KS, especially with his buddy Manuel Gottching (Ash Ra), TD in their 70-ies and 80-ies (not later, God forbid! When Froese went solo and then with his son. ) But Ages is his masterpiece undefeated, available whole as LPs only! Boy, so many good tunes since Vangelis and TD emerged.. Please post your own efforts or your findings!!
Forgot to mention: daddy's leather belt was always next to my piano, mommy complained that beating my skinny ass into practice hurt her hand, she used the belt... To make me feel better she would add that my uncle always complained that his mom (my grandmother) should have put more beating into his piano playing. Watching the clip I can almost relate to the sentiment ;-)
I was picking up the random Casio's and Yamaha's over the years when they were a couple bucks each. I've got most of the Casio Classics like the CZ-101, the SK-1, the big MIDI Keyboard and the little tiny white one that several bands used back in the early 80's. They're a ton of fun to run through an amp and play with and that sound is so iconic to the 80's. Time has not been good to them and even Deoxit doesn't work on the older switches so a few are just sitting until I get time to dig into fixing them.
I found this random photo, It must be about 10 years old but I'm just messing around with a Casio SK-1 that I had picked up, running it through a little Technics Amp in to a Realistic Minimus 7 Speaker. I love playing with all the cool 80's gadgets.
I was just reading about the SK-1 a few days ago, I forgot I posted that photo, the article was talking about how cool it was. Although it was entry-level when it came out, they seem to be going up in value these days, I'll have to pull it out again. I was looking for some information on another keyboard I just pulled out of storage and was messing around with, the Casio VL-TONE, VL-1. Another super-fun keyboard just to mess around with, it's so basic that just punching the buttons sounds good. One of the nice features with these old units is they have audio out and a jack for a wall-wart. Battery life was as bad as a boombox. Here's another cool article I just dug up, check out all the issues on www.americanradiohistory.com
No discussion on the VL-1 is complete without At around the same time the VL-1's distinctive sound appeared on quite a few more serious tracks. I wasn't looking for a live version but Phil Oakey is still a fan On the Human Leagues album Dare this goes straight into the great track Seconds I'm sure the VL-1 is the lead on this track as well along with the break at 3:34 In the 1980s they thought this was what the future would be like. Instead we got Ed Sheeran
It's pretty close, I think if I knew how to effectively use the ADSR (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release) function I could get it to sound the same. To get those features you have to program in each note, which modifies the stock sound. For the younger guys, we had mom's piano and that was it, real synths were huge money, these little portable keyboards were so much fun just to create sounds on, even though today they may sound dated. Here's a cool website with a lot of of Casio Manuals on it, you will not know how to program this little wonder without the manual, now if I could find the song book with the key/cords in it... https://generror.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/casio-keyboard-manuals/#more-3
I'm not sure if you would call it a 'synth', but my favorite 'board in my collection is a Korg Krome 88. Its a workstation with mostly PCM samples... but you can adjust ADSR, envelope, and others. I also have a Casio synth that supports those 'drum pads', but it's more of a toy I believe.
Years ago I promised myself that when I paid off the mortgage (which happened about a year ago) I would get myself a Korg M3. I already have a Korg Radias to add to it. At the moment the only keyboard I could immediately start playing is my Yamaha DGX500 which is a similar (but older) unit to the Krome. However, I do like my synths to sound synthetic. For years the aim of synthesizer designers / buyers was to produce sounds no one had heard before. In the 1970s people would have paid £1000s to get the sounds a Casio is capable of. In fact I paid £150 in 1983 money for a Casio MT65.
