Synthesizers

Any sound engineer or producer worth his or her salt loves to mess about with synths. Some like me and others i know are almost geeky about it. We will happily explain to you about Oscillators, Waveforms, Phase Offset Modulation, Pulse Width Modulation (especially!), Frequency Mod, Ring Mod, LFO, Envelopes, Filters, the list goes on.....! Anyway, heres a synth you wont find many places : This is a home made drum synth i built in 1989, out of a kit. It won me a 'Distinction' for my GCSE Electronics project. Years after i sampled the hell out of it. Its got a few dry joints which i fixed recently, but otherwise, still works. Its got a piezo-electric pick-up, blue tacked to the side to trigger it and also a audio input. I used to feed it closed Hi-hats and synchronize it with a Yamaha RY30 drum machine.

I also had a good condition Roland Juno 106 to play with at work. What a sweet machine! As a kid, i always knew i wanted to mess with synths as soon as i was old enough to recognise my own name splattered across all kinds of sound boxes. My favourite trick with the juno back then was to stick it through a Drawmer DS201 in stereo, one side on Gate, the other on Duck. Pan the outputs left / right and pass a 16th hi-hat through the key input. Hey Presto! You got an autopanner. Heres a cute little number, a Wasp synth i bought from a colleague years ago for £180. It must be worth a lot more than that now. I believe there is a device called a Spider which can be used to synchronize it.