In his latest video, German synthesist Hainbach demonstrates the Hohner Multimonica II – a rare electro-acoustic oddity from the early days of electronic instruments.
Video Summary:
“Made with both a spirit for the experimental yet deeply rooted in tradition, it combines a monophonic vacuum tube proto-synth voice with a fan driven organ, all in one beautiful 1950s case.’
Ever since I heard of its existence I knew I had to find one. Here is how we got on.”
Topics covered:
00:00 Intro Music
01:00 Background and Overview
04:33 Recording The Instrument
08:32 Functions Explained
14:11 A Different Way Of Playing It
18:34 History Of The Multimonica
20:38 Final Thoughts
Check out the video and share your thoughts on the Hohner Multimonica II monophonic vacuum tube ‘synth accordion’ in the comments!
i prefer how these synths have the cases built into them
Fetishizing old junk. The best that instrument can do is a bad accordion impression.
This is the typical, not very versatile instrument where you take a couple of sounds, add delay and reverb to make some ambience, and after playing with it for a while, you don’t use it anymore.
This contraption sounds very pleasing to my ears … that combo of air pump and tube synth = PURE BEAUTY
It has a nice enough tone, but it mostly sounds like someone humping a vacuum cleaner. It took a lot of swing-and-a-miss tries like this to get to the much broader basics we can take for granted now.