synthesizer repair in Philadelphia
Should I be embarassed to admit I had never heard of the Multimoog until this one showed up on our doorstep? The Multimoog was a Moog monosynth made between 1978 and 1981 and I’m not sure I understand how it was intended to fit into the Moog product line, or what is “multi” about it. Continue reading “Moog Multimoog”
The Taurus is a funny little (actually quite awkward and heavy) bass synth produced by Moog between ’75 and ’81 that is designed with a one octave, organ style pedal board meant to be played with your feet. It has a limited number of actual features… just one sawtooth waveform for both of its oscillators, the obvious 24db Moog ladder filter, portamento (glide), and a simple attack and decay envelope for the VCA and filter. It’s basically meant to do one thing well, which is make bass sounds, and it does it as well as any other Moog synth I’ve played. Though, I will admit it is a fun and unique experience to sweep the filter with my foot using a giant foot-sized slider.
We had a Prodigy in the workshop at the same time, which is the Moog Taurus’s immediate Moog monosynth contemporary. Comparing their sounds when set to equivalent settings, even before comparing the schematics it was clear that even at its highest cutoff setting, the Taurus’s filter, compared to that of the Prodigy, was still cutting a good deal of high frequencies. It was really designed to be used as a bass synth only. Continue reading “Moog Taurus (and a Prodigy)”
A cleanup and calibration of another Sequential Pro One. Happy New Year my friends, and may St. Dave Smith protect you!
It’s been almost a year since I began working on the first ARP Axxe I restored, and I was amazed by how much more smoothly this second one went, though it’s not really surprising as I have worked on over 70 synths including a half dozen other ARPs in the year since then. Continue reading “ARP Axxe (#2) – repair tips for all ARPs”
When we got this Pro One it was acting insane: keyboard playing only one note and/or pitch sliding upwards, loud bursts of noise, weird envelope/triggering behaviors. This synth is unusual for its vintage (early 1980s) in that much of the control voltage for the analog circuitry is generated by a digital CPU, which was hot enough that it burned Darian’s finger when he happened to touch it, badly enough that he still has a blister a week later! So clearly the CPU was bad– and further testing confirmed it. Continue reading “Sequential Circuits Pro One – CPU upgrade and MIDI retrofit”
The Moog Prodigy is the slightly bigger brother of the Moog Rogue. Features-wise, it is the next “step up,” with the important addition of two ADSR generators (in which D must equal R, however) but some of the same limitations. Continue reading “Moog Prodigy”
I just finished up some intense custom mods on this Moog Werkstatt. I packed in a bunch of cool goodies and the case of this little synth is now totally at capacity. It even bulges a little bit, and it feels noticeably heavier. It sounds amazing if I do say so myself. Continue reading “Moog Werkstatt – custom mod project”
I’ve been doing a lot of repairs the past couple of weeks that I haven’t posted about because there’s not much to say about the jobs or the instruments (digital workstations, modern hammer-action keyboards, etc), and I don’t have much to say about the work I did on this Yamaha CS-01 either, but wanted to share this picture of it just because it is ADORABLE. Continue reading “Yamaha CS-01”
The Moog Satellite is the Moog not even its own mother could love, Bob Moog’s least favorite Moog and mine as well. It is a preset monosynth (!?) created in the early 1970s as an accessory for Thomas Organ Company home organs, at a time when boring middle class people all over the US were listening to Switched on Bach and were excited to get their own Moog and pronounce it “MOOOOg.” Continue reading “Moog Satellite”
I worked on two ARPs most of the day for the last few days, this one and an Omni 2. The filter, ADSR and VCA on the Axxe are very close to identical to those in the Omni’s “synth section.” While I was initially skeptical of the Axxe (as I am of any synth with only one oscillator), I really appreciate the fact that it lets you route the envelope generator to control PWM, which you don’t often see. Continue reading “ARP Axxe”