Pop My Cherry!

This is the mission of the Starship ManCave.
The obvious title that boldly Goes Too Far.

This page has their general reproductions only. For their original titles please go here. For Roland reproductions go there.

Eight Voice (Oberheim Eight-Voice) 🧻

No. Fuck no. There was a time where eight voices required eight separate pieces of hardware. There was also a time when you shat in a foricae. Authentic – absolutely, but there are plenty of ways to make something polyphonic (hell – see Cherry’s YellowJacket below) without it being a seething horror of knobs.

Octave CAT 🧻🧻

This is quality museumology in that the CAT has a specific and important role in the history of synthesis, as an alternative to the MOOG and allowed some smaller bands to grow – and so on. It’s just not that exciting as a musical instrument. Kept authentic for some reason when other Cherry reproductions have been granted many advances. For me there’s no reason to reach for this one in preference to others.

Atomika (Polivox) 🧻🧻🧻🧻

Here’s some hardware I’d often hear about but was very unlikely to hear. I finally understand the joy. From odd bits and pieces of radio innards, Vladimir and Olympiada Kuzmin assembled something truly distinctive with its own rules and foils and storyline. Twiddling leads to a direct sense of electricity in flow. It is not real or analogue but can be whispered to as if that were so. It may disagree. In this case giving it 16 voice polyphony just amplifies the joy.

YellowJacket (Wasp) 🧻🧻🧻🧻

I’m quite familiar with the Wasp, being of about the same vintage. I bought a hardware reproduction to check my recollection and yep it is that thing. But this – this is not that thing. This is as if you have bought 4x 16 voice polyphonic Wasps. The original makers had a scheme to stack the hardware and Cherry have followed through on this mad plan, offering 16 voices stackable in multiple detuned and deformed piles of sound. Given the Wasp was a crazy piece of engineering to start with you are well sorted. (Note that I tried to not to call it a ‘hive’ – but failed in this last sentence).

P-10 (Prophet 10) 🧻🧻🧻

Prophets are Prophets are Prophets: they come in different sizes but essentially the same thing. So if you have used a Prophet One you know how this sounds – but with a lot more voices. You might point at the Wasp review just above this one and say ‘well that’s just more voices too’ – but those are crazy deformed voices. Adding more voices to a Prophet just discourages you from the kinds of farty noises you make on the Pro One. While one piggy squeal is great – 32 piggy squeals are bacon.

The Pro-10 has two layers each with 16 voices and their own keyboard a la church organ. The two layers are useful in setting up opposing sounds (e.g. bass and tingle) with more energy that the Roland Jupiter 6. It sounds big fat and important, and was used by many rich musicians. Somehow I am more impressed (it’s quite the thing) than inspired.

Elka-X (Synthex) 🧻🧻🧻🧻

Kind of like the Prophet just above: it’s a big hunk of love with the ability to stack two sounds to occupy a much wider frequency range than the average synthesiser. The filters are distinctive… but not that wild or woolly. While in the heat of composition I’d probably prefer the Prophet-10, simply due to the familiarity. Actually I’d more likely go for the PolyKBIII. Arturia have produced their version around about the same time, and it’s becoming clear that Cherry is in for the kill.

Rhodes Chroma 🧻

I have never felt the inclination to use this in a piece of music. Even though Cherry make a good sales pitch.

Crumar Spirit 🧻🧻🧻🧻

There’s a whole lot of talk about which famous designer and which famous circuit board and so on and so on – I don’t give a damn. What really matters is that Cherry have fucked with it, the same way that they fucked with the Wasp and it is a glorious thing. 16 voices with the same kind of tweaking as YellowJacket, an extra control matrix, an odd bit here and a bit there – it seems that when they are allowed to tweak it is surely for the better – and I’d strongly encourage that other releases are given that gift. Hell – add an ‘authentic’ setting and allow us to turn it off.

Like Atomica you can feel the electricity moving around, hitting the edges of things – these are instruments that compete with hardware

GX-80 (Yamaha GX-1) 🧻🧻🧻

I’ve played a real CS-80 – if by ‘play’ you accept pushing a few notes, hearing cat howling and realising it probably hadn’t had a service since Blade Runner was released. So I’m not able to tell if this software is accurate – but what really matters is that it at very least offers something unique. Because this horrible, yes don’t deny it – HORRIBLE – control system, all upside down and back to front demands some serious justification. After much fiddling you’ll admit it’s a relic from the era of organs, stops, rockers and so forth and there’s been decades of improvement since. A ‘modern’ interface really wouldn’t hurt.

Oh – you need it to be authentic? Fine, have only four modifications you have to dial in on tiny knobs. Come back to me when you’ve got bored with that authentic.

Cherry’s GX-80 feels more open than the tightly packed Arturia CS-80. And it stacks twice as much stuff which, for all the panting prose, is near all that the GX-1 part will give you. The manual is well done, Cherry are good at that.

The sound is not unique but specific – it’ll work here, and not there. The performance aspects are nice. But it’ll never be ‘a visionary flagship’, ‘transformative’, ‘powerhouse hybrid’ or all that advertising babble. Cherry’s price is (as usual) right.

PS-3300 (Korg PS-3300) 🧻🧻🧻

I’m not convinced that rarity is a musical quality. That is, the small number of Korg PS-3300 modular synthesisers ever sold (50? 30? Let’s make up a number!) doesn’t make them sound better. It’s great that Cherry are making this audible to the average enthusiast, while donating to a museum that preserves the real thing. But maybe their new synthesisers with modern interfaces are of more importance in creating new music.

It was made at a time when you had to have 300 oscillators through 300 filters or something like that. Cool story. Does it sound good? In many ways it does – the resonators are particularly nice, and the filters are a bit MS-20 grouch. At USD$40 you are getting a great deal. It might do some things that will inspire your music. It also is like one of those interactive museum displays: The Music Steam Engine of Yore.

But no magic will take place: you will not become big, fat and rich like the people that bought this thing long ago. I’m a bit amused by Korg re-issuing the PS-3300 in hardware format, again for a horrible fat/rich price to be placed in a collector’s trophy room, next to the JP-8.

PS-20 (KORG MS-20) 🧻🧻🧻🧻

Now let’s be clear – I don’t give a rat’s arse whether the software sounds exactly like the hardware. However I do like to see if the makers have a clue. So I started with hardware I’ve used for nearly 40 years – the MS20 and MS50. Right away the manual describes the differences between their polyphonic re-imagining and the original. They point out the flaws, the work-arounds, the places they have made significant changes. I like this attitude, I like the changes they’ve made because they sound like things I would have wanted in 1980 something. There’s many little touches like the MS50 styled VU meter that are sweet. The sequencer is a lot like my old SQ10. I try some of the tactics I know on the MS20 – they don’t quite work. I try some of the new features and they are good fun, raucous, organic to a large extent.

You wouldn’t drop this in where you had the MS20 hardware. I feel that even KORG’s own software would be a better bet for that. It doesn’t quite respond as hoped to my filter-knob finger memory. But if you were creating a new thing which needed that kind of KORGasmic explosion this is going to make you happy and thinking back to my old MS20 versus MiniNova prank, puts the KORG back in contention.

Memorymode (Memory Moog) 🧻🧻🧻

If you have previously suffered this blog you know I really don’t get along with MOOGs. I did have a Voyager for a while and spent most of the time I had it trying to fix it. The moment I did fix it, I noticed that it always made my music sound more flabby. So off it went. Now here is a MOOG with 16 voices and if one is flabby then 16 should be like one of those grotesque internet cats.

But it’s not. It’s really quite pleasant. ‘Pleasant’ could seem a little insipid, but it’s the best word for it; warm without smothering, creamy without the triple bypass. There are a lot of MOOGs out there in software land, every vendor has to have at least one – the Big Mac of their family restaurant. Cherry perhaps picked the right model, and perhaps the nicest fabrication of that model. I don’t know, but I am forced to temper my dislike of MOOGs to allow this one into my noise farm.