I was lucky enough to be in Paris over the past few days and I was even luckier enough to get to go to an awesome studio and I was even luckierer still because said studio had my favourite synth ever made sitting like it weren’t a thing – the Yamaha CS-80.
Famous for being the trademark sound of the Blade Runner soundtrack – and less so for providing the riff for Toto’s Africa – it has an earth-shattering, ear-piercing, eyeball loosening, pant-dampening, beast of a sound and it’s something I won’t forget for a long time. It rattled my soul with it’s bass and sent me to heaven with it’s treble. Mama mia.
There are so many sub-£20 FB-01s on eBay. That’s a credit-crunch busting synth, if ever there was one.
It’s basically the DX100 (the classic talkbox synth) engine in a hard-to-program box – however, with MIDI Quest, everything is easy to program. If you want a bit of hardware FM synthesis, try it out, it’s less than the cost of a night out and some of the bass sounds are realllllll nice.
Although MatrixsynthB is awesome, it’s kind of counter-intuitive.
It’s a blog that scowers eBay for the best analogue and digital studio gear and posts it up.
Great, except that so many people read the blog that the prices just soar and you’ll never find a bargain (unless nobody wants it, which was the case with my FB01).
Regardless, it’s a wonderful place to visit to both keep track of prices so you know what’s a bargain or just to lust over lovely, lovely gear. Just this morning a Machinedrum and Juno106S got added (the Juno isn’t actually that expensive).
That GR700 is catching my eye though, oh baby.