Vintage Synth Explorer

Brutal basses!! Limited but brilliant......
www.myspace.com/seccosupertstars

I've owned or played practically every synth manufactured and have played synths for over 30 years --this synth gets a bad rap because of its appearance and preset tabs. It is quite literally one one the most expressive lead synths I've heard but you need to put it through a line 6 echo or space echo to get what i'm talking about. yes you can do that to any toy to make it sound better but other synths just don't have the edge or sonic variance. Some wonderful sounds can be had when the filter hovers on oscillation, and having tabs to instantly engage a warbling, gurgling or buzzing LFO makes this an extremely expressive lead synth. I simply cannot get these sounds out of other machines. Add a foot pedal to control cutoff and you'll find out what I'm talking about.

It has was used by Jimmy Destri,of Blondie!

It takes a bit to figure out the labels, but I am surprised at what this thing can do. Having two LFOs makes a huge difference, especially when you get them beating together. You can make nice evolving soundscapes with this, although the LFO rates are rather limited.
The ability to mix together saw, square, and pulse waveforms from 2' to 32' (not all waveforms available for all footages) makes for a really wide range in tonality. Add the octave switch, and you can go almost from subsonic to supersonic.
You can't manually overdrive the filter, although it will start to overdrive if you turn on lots of the waveforms switches. The Bass and Tuba presets take advantage of overdriving the filter to get a nice distortion.
This does not have CV/Gate in, although it's easy to add. The VCF control input is for an expression pedal. A volume pedal will work, but because of the log response, it won't behave as expected.
All in all, a very capable and great-sounding synth.

I have one of these that all of a sudden stopped working. Now only the random note generator works. I know it must be something simple because one second it worked, the next it didn't (no dropping involved in this incident). Maybe needs some soldering? If anyone can take a look at it in the Western MA area, I'd pay for parts and labor.