Yamaha CS-80 sustain options explained...

My Yamaha CS-80 has come home!

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Part Two: The Yamaha CS-80 synthesiser basics explained:



Check out the original music especially composed on this very CS-80 for these videos:
Return of the CS-80
CS-80-f (inspired by 1980-f!)

My Yamaha CS80 reborn on its 40th birthday...

Thou shalt not covet...

OMG-1 Sneak Peek from Spectrasonics on Vimeo.

From acoustic mastery in the last post to technological masterpiece in this one! Always been a Moog (and Yamaha) man, this boasts a tweaked polyphonic Moog Little Phatty along with two iPads, iPods, mini keyboard, Mac Mini as a controller all set in a beautifully crafted wooden case... and it's a prize in a competition by audio company Spectrasonics, there will only be one made... ever!

Enter competition here (a purchase definitely required!)

Hear it working in this video, from about half way through

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Tubular Bells and Girl Power...

This is a re-creation of Mike Oldfield's epic Tubular Bells by an ensemble of New York female musicians under the collective name of The Brooklyn Organ Synth Orchestra.

If you are at all into historic synths, organs and other clever audio devices then this is definitely for you!

Read more about the project here.

h/t DV Magazine

A blast from the eighties...

Was sent this youtube link by my good buddy Peter Bigg 'tother day, who commissioned me for one of my earliest music to picture jobs for The British Television Advertising Awards.

The production became a pretty collaborative process with motion control guru and director Peter Truckel of The Moving Picture Company. Unusually, no final visual element was completed before the initial music track was recorded and therefore I only had the storyboard for inspiration. All the spot sound effects, all created by synths, were then overdubbed as each piece of video was sent over. When I submitted my very first rough demo tape Peter T immediately gave my creative masterpiece the glamorous title of G-Dung!

I can still pretty much identify every instrument used including:

• Fostex B16 track analogue tape machine
• Soundtracs 16-8-16 mixing desk
• Revox B77 half track tape machine (still have - serviced)
• Yamaha CS-80 Synth (still have - mostly working)
• Yamaha DX7 Synth (version 1) (still have - broken)
• Yamaha RX11 drum machine (might still have!)
• Roland SH-101 Mono Synth
• Moog Multimoog (still have - broken)
• Some BanksyBoy vocals! (yep, still have!)
• Cubase on an Atari ST
• Great British Spring reverb (still have - condition unknown!)
• Some cheap and cheerful delay unit
  
• Klark Teknik active monitors (still have - one broken)


• Yamaha NS10 monitors


• Auratones

It could actually be a bit of a showreel for 80s synth sounds, especially the DX7 brass! The filming and effects took absolutely ages to complete and, at the time, was all very cutting edge stuff...

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