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.

GX-80 🧻🧻🧻

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 🧻🧻🧻

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 $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 🧻🧻🧻

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 🧻🧻🧻

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.