classic synthesizer

David Vandenborn is blogging his progress restoring a vintage Fairlight synthesizer:

Lately I’ve been busy restoring a Series IIx that had sustained serious damage from a leaked battery. Thanks to Peter Wielk at Horizontal Productions I was able to replace the broken cards. And after some extra debugging, the alphanumeric keyboard wasn’t working, I’m able to start learning and using this dream machine.

While I love vintage analog synths, I find it hard to romanticize old digital synths. You could spend a ton of money to keep a Fairlight running, and it’s always going to be kludgy compared to current computers. 

On the other hand, these were used to make a lot of great music, and used to cost an arm and a leg!

Arturia have released version 1.2 of their ARP2600V soft synth, a virtual recreation of the Arp 2600.

What’s new:

• Universal Binary support
• VST 2.4 Cubase 4 ready
• A new installer, regrouping all previous updates

Here’s your chance, synth freaks, to own a small part of synth history – Klaus Schulze’s Korg PS 3300, above.

Here’s the synth in Schulze’s studio, back in the day:

Here’s the eBay info, via 550wooby: Read more…