My name is Tom Ellard and my first synthesiser the Kawai 100F, for which I swapped a tape recorder and $250 in 1979. I thought it was a normal instrument – little realising it’s the sonic spawn of Satan. Such that when I got a cheap Roland SH-1 in 1981 I was surprised to find you could make recognisable music on these things. For sequencing there was a TRS-80 computer! And a Mini Pops!
I’ve worked in music since then, sometimes wealthy, sometimes poor and have churned through an awful lot of synthesisers over 40 years. I’m reasonably old and not fooled by any of this ‘legendary vintage’ bullshit. If it was complete rubbish back when it came out (and a lot are), it hasn’t somehow improved like a bottle of wine. It’s familiar complete rubbish.
It comes down to this – which would you sell to eat, and which would you keep by not eating?
After the SH-1 came a whole heap of hock shop Korg – MS20‘s, MS50 and SQ10. These have a wonderful but limited sound – got sick to death of that sound. My brother had a PolySix and a Juno60 that I could borrow when I needed more than one note. The mere fact that these were polyphonic was luxurious back at the time.
Sold some records and went for a *new* *poly* keyboard in ’85. It was either the Jupiter 6 or the Yamaha DX-7. Now these days everyone is all yoohoo about the Jupiters but I’m really glad I got the DX. It was new, it was wild, it was an utter pain in the arse to program. Jupiters/Junos, they’re OK but not the future of anything.
In 1986 we went on tour – I took a Mirage rack and the other guy an Akai S612. That was most excellent at the time – sampling was new and adventurous – all the unusual sounds you could concoct in 2 seconds of 8-bit audio. But the Mirage got stolen early in the tour and I lugged the stupidly heavy keyboard version – never again bought an Ensoniq keyboard. Got rid of it and the DX7 and went for a Ensoniq ESQ-m, a TX81z. and a nasty Roland sampler. That simple combo made a lot of sound and a fair bit of income.
Which I blew on a Yamaha SY-77. That wasn’t entirely stupid – I have a TG77 now and it’s a distinctly gorgeous sounding machine. But I had put too much sound in one basket. Lesson is that a small orchestra is better than one big anything.
Lucky for me a few years later the price of old analogue equipment was the square root of fuck all. You could get Jupiters for Behringer prices and I did. And I was very kindly allowed an Oberheim Xpander on extended loan. There was eventually enough money to buy an Ensoniq ASR-10 rack. The big cost up to this point had been the 16 track tape recorder. In the mid 1990’s you could MIDI up all the gadgets, push play and they’d pump out music straight to a DAT. It was a very distinct jump.
Poverty is always around the corner. Selling off equipment is part of life. I gained a very healthy respect for software synthesis over the following years. Early VSTs were clumsy, but they got better. I lost interest in hardware because the sound could be found more cheaply – and the sound is what matters.
Jump to 2013, fate had changed and I was bankable again. I’d been using little KORG keys with a laptop, but decided it would be nice to get something that could also be a stand alone synthesiser. Hadn’t looked at hardware in years, saw the Novation Mini-Nova – oh that looks like it’ll do. It did! It was fun! I like this! Oh look there’s been a thing called a Radias – wow look at that thing that looks like a cyber MS20 – hey there’s one on eBay – etc. etc. I got the silly collector bug much later in life, with enough experience and financial security to test things knowing some to be complete shit.
Somebody needs to save young people from wasting their creativity emulating old farts and ‘authentic’ things like this.