Synthesizers

CatSynth Pic: Kitten and SH-101

Adorable photo of a kitten with a red Roland SH-101 from our friends at the Vintage Synthesizer Museum.

The Vintage Synthesizer Museum is a wonderful resource for synthesizers and education right here in our local area – indeed, this kitten was advertising an introduction-to-synthesis course. We hope to feature more of them in the coming weeks. And of course, the SH-101 is one of those classics that is prized as also reimagined and reissued. I particularly like the red and blue models.

CatSynth Pic: Gizmo, Little Phatty and Poly 800

Gizo poses with a Moog Little Phatty and a Korg Poly 800. Submitted by J Lugo Miller via our Facebook page.

Why does Gizmo love the Little Phatty and the Poly 800 so much?

Well, they are both fine synthesizers. The Little Phatty started the modern Moog “Phatty” series that includes the Sub Phatty we have here at CatSynth HQ and lives on with the Subsequent 37. And the Poly 800 has a place in the history of MIDI analog synths of the early 1980s.

At a time when Roland was doing well with their Juno-series, KORG countered with a poly-synth of their own in 1983 with the Poly-800. The Poly-800 was comparable to the Juno-106, at the time, with respect to the fact that musicians now had access to affordable programmable polyphonic analog synthesizers (it listed for under $1,000) with memory storage, stable DCOs (digitally controlled oscillators) and a new state-of-the-art technology called MIDI (although there was no SysEx implementation yet).

CatSynth Pic: Abstraction

Apropos of yesterday’s Wordless Wednesday post, we have a geometrically proportioned CatSynth Pic today. With the balance of colors (red for the Behringer and Focusrite on the left vs the gray on the right) and the stacked keyboard, this could be right out of our architectural series.

Submitted by Pete Dolan via our Facebook page.

CatSynth Pic: Betty and the Yamaha CS20m

Betty on top of Yamaha CS20m

Adorable Betty the black cat sits atop a vintage Yamaha CS20m synthesizer. From Edda Jayne Hill via Facebook.

Betty loves the CS20m

And she is certainly in good company! Long before Yamaha’s dominance in the mid-1980s with the DX series of FM synths, they created the CS series of analog subtractive synthesizers. Although similar in topology to other analog synthesizers of the era, they had their own unique sound and character and were prized by many artists.