Vintage Synth Explorer

JEN • SX-1000 SYNTHETONE

The Synthetone SX-1000 is an old Italian basic mono-synth. It has a single analog DCO with three waveforms: sawtooth, square, and PWM (Pulse Width Modulation). There is an analog filter (12dB/octave) with cutoff, resonance, and LFO modulation. There is also a simple ADSR envelope for shaping your sounds. In addition there are also white/pink noise generators a glide effect and a vibrato effect. It's known for fairly stable tuning too. Probably its best sounds are the lead ones, the basses aren't that deep but it sure can scream!

What it doesn't have is MIDI, CV/Gate or any other form of control. MIDI retrofits can take care of this however. Unfortunately there is no patch memory, and there is no way around this limitation. Its knobs are boldly colored and well layed-out for easy hands-on access; but you'll need a Polaroid camera if you want to store your patch settings! Also lacking are an arpeggiator, sequencer, pitch/mod wheels, and effects. Nevertheless, this Italian vintage synth is a very cheap entry-level analog synth that has some unique sounds and characteristics worth checking out if you find one. It's been used by Future Sound of London, LFO, Nexus 21, Altern 8, Eskimos & Egypt, Fillmore, Man Machine, Tim Simenon, Broadcast, Plone, Luke Vibert, Ladytron, Prodigy and Herb Legowicz of Gusgus.

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Posting Rules: Please keep your comments relevant! Do not post requests for help, do not use for sales, do not post unless you have something interesting to say about this instrument, or we may delete your post.

 

Sanhedralite

Posted 79 days ago

Mine and most of the planets first 'real' mono synth.. limited, but a good intro into synthesis. you WILL lose most of the endcaps, but rest of construction very solid. weak sound, probably not much use these days as it has no memory or control

Boo

Posted 91 days ago

Very tough machines... mine fell out of a land Rover on the way to a gig.. broke off top & bottom C keys, and a couple of the knobs, but everything still worked fine!!

Mike

Posted 347 days ago

The Jen SX1000 has got to be the most under-appreciated monosynth of the lot! Although it's very simple, it's capable of some really screaming lead sounds and some trully insane bass tones (particularly when PWM is used carefully). It's as solid as a rock and always works a charm, it also never goes out of tune (unlike a lot of it's bargain bin VCO-equipped rivals). And trust me, it sounds about as undigital as you could ever imagine!

Thomas kenny

Posted 347 days ago

I First seen one of those synth's called The Jen SX-1000 Synthetone way back since 1981 in the catologue shop in northfield,Birmingham it was a very cheap model the same time casio keyboard's first came out that time & when I saw the controls on the SX-10000 machine I didn't understand what those controls were used for it was too misunderstandable to me.

Neil

Posted 377 days ago

Actually, it is an analogue oscillator, that then drives a digital chip that scans the keyboard and generates the note. So, yes, it can go out of tune just like any other analogue oscillator synth.

Cheers,
Neil

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