Pop My Cherry!

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

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

Mercury 6 🧻🧻🧻🧻🧻

Back in 1983 I was in Venue Music with a choice: buy the DX7 or the JP6 for about the same price. An entire period of sizzling music followed on my buying the DX7, which was ‘futuristic’ back in the day. Graeme from SPK went for the JP6 and lamented they’d removed the JP8’s ability to overdrive the amplifier stage (which came back on the Boutique). That made it less nasty and he was going to get it modded. The Roland seemed a little texturally limited to me, I’d need some guitar pedals. Had I bought the JP6 I’d be richer now – but I really think my music would not have been as distinctive.

Years later I got an MKS80 – not a JP8 or JP6, it’s a bit between. Cherry’s M6 does seem near to that – more robust than my memory of the JP6, certainly more interesting. As always it’s the changes in software they make that are significant. With 16 voices you will always want to stack two layers – 4 oscillators and ENVs, two filters etc. puts it way above the old beast. And it’s a pleasure to manage compared to the Roland Jupiter-X – no menu diving, everything on the front panel. The only Roland hardware that has this approach to sound is the JP8080, which is capable of a five voice stack attack but needs a lot of EQ boost to get the gruff on.

I liked the whiskey in their Mercury 4, but this is gin and tonic. At the prices they’re asking you can have both.

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.

PS20 🧻🧻🧻

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.

It is a Good Thing.

Mercury 4 🧻🧻🧻

Never did have one of these, but hell, I’ve had a lot of Roland. Immediately it announces itself as the Good Roland, the we-let-you-turn-it-up Roland. I’ll tell you what, I do own a MKS80 Super Jupiter, and I got the same vibe out of this straight away. It’s as grumpy as fuck and where’s my goddamn whisky? Really the MKS80 has only one spectacular facility and that’s unison mode with all the oscillators drifting all over the place. The Mercury 4 does that, but it does more and you will think of many helpful places you can use it in your music.

Why didn’t Roland do this first? The only thing they have left is their legacy, and they’re pipped by some small company that operates out of a cupboard in SoCal and does it better than all that AIRA babbledeboop. Again, I don’t really care if it’s authentic, I care that I can use it in some music.

It is an Excellent Thing.

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.

It is a Fine Thing.

Other things

I am now tempted to try other Cherry Things, even ones that I currently loathe. But I wonder how long they will be able to scamper around the grasslands before one of the other nostalgia empires like Arturia or Roland gives them a bit of the old ultra violence. So far they’ve done the machines that others have skipped, but some day there will be two, and some Highlander.

Surrealistic – hah I owned one of these. I let somebody borrow it. They obviously interpreted the word ‘borrow’ in a different way to the rest of humanity. So here it is for free. About right. 🧻🧻

Quadra – ERK! PUKE! GAG! No this is nasty. Should have checked first. 🧻

Elka-X – No I’m bored now, can’t be bothered. It’s just another analogue shrug. Make something weirder please.