If you’re curious…
nice! what were your waveforms on the mini?
Thanks. I had only one oscillator going, with the “wide rectangular” wave (second square wave). Careful, and slight, control of the pitch bend wheel allowed for detuning effect with the delay.
Sometimes, less is more appropriate…
I don’t know exactly what John Paul Jones used for his studio performance. Though I’m sure it wasn’t a minimoog. Maybe a Steiner-Parker Synthacon ? Anyone knows for sure ?
wwwoooOOOOAAAaaaawww, nice sound !!! …
I bet this thread is going to turn into a D vs V match 
I bet this thread is going to turn into a D vs V match
don’t you dare! 
The Voyager makes sweet rectangles too, FYI!
How about let’s turn it into a “I need to buy a Poly synth to play underneath my Voyager” thread? Your Korg does a nice job there alien- My MS2000 has 2 broken keys and a dead screen- It’s time for me to…invest! The question is, which one? Hmmmm… Prophet 08? I’m not tech saavy enough or rich enough for a P 5… What else is out there as a good layerizing workhorse?
Thanks.
If you’re looking to spend little money and get a lot, and don’t mind using virtual analog, there’s the Roland JP8000 or Alesis Ion.
If you’d prefer to stick to analog (or hybrid), there’s the Roland JX3P, or Korg DW8000 (very nice integrated programmable stereo delay).
If you’re willing to spend a good amount of money, and still stay analog, then there are those:Moog Memorymoog, SC Prophet 5, Oberheim OBX, Yamaha CS80.
TIFWIW
Looks like we were both busy yesterday heh.
Nice video!
If you’re willing to spend a good amount of money, and still stay analog, then there are those:Moog Memorymoog, SC Prophet 5, Oberheim OBX, Yamaha CS80.
hmmm, I think the most practical choice would be the CS80 then…
of course I’d have to hire a tech roadie to assist in gig transport and the subsequent retuning… “looking for synth tech roadie NC area- must look like he/she’s in a band, without trying to look like he/she’s in a band- cant be under 20 or over 50…”
haha- your DW8000 sounds nice, but I get nervous menu-diving- anyone used the Roland JP8000 on here? say vs the MS2000? that zipper sound on the filter kills me (in a bad way)
if clubs around here paid more I could justify a bigger purchase, but I just use the Voyager live anyway…
and by the way, that mini sure looks minty- nice restoration job!!
Excellent my friend, One of my favorite Led Zep songs.
Very nice and very true to the original. I’ve read that John Paul Jones used a VCS3 for that intro.
If you’re looking to combine polyphonic synth with live tweaking of it, and you don’t like zipper artifacts, then you can set aside almost all the virtual analogs (except the Alesis Ion which has 8192 values for each knobs).
Some early hybrids also suffer from lack of parameter resolution, like the DW8000, JX3P, JX8P, ESQ1,
Even some expensive beasts do suffer from this, to an extent: the SC P5, and probably a few others too.
Computer technology was quite limited in those days…
But generally, in my humble opinion, a polyphonic synth will tend to be used as a backing for a mono synth by playing chords, and will less likely to be tweaked in real time than an analog mono synth. That’s not to say that you can’t produce the occasional “wah” effect on some chords though by twisting that cutoff knob…
If I had the money, I’d love to get my hands on an Alesis Andromeda. 16 voices of pure analog sound, combined with extreme knob resolution, and straightforward single layer menu system. Next best thing to a memorymoog. It doesn’t look very good, but it would be in the shadow of my Mini anyway… 
I believe you are correct Mr. Spartan. http://www.reocities.com/jpjkeys/emsvcs3.html
Thanks for the kind words guys, and that link Rob !
I knew I had read that somewhere before… So the note relating to that on the Steiner-Parker Synthacon page on Vintage Synth Explorer is wrong. I thought so…
Nice vid Alien! Pristine recording, suggests landscapes… cool 
About a polyphonic synth… funny because I’m looking for one to learn synthesis a friend of mine. I’m quite surprised nobody introduced the Nords or Virus (A or B, keep this moderately old school) in the blooming debate.
Is there any reason I, young Padawan, still ignore?
is the Opus 3 not a contender in the polyphony discussion? just curious, since it never seems to be brought up when discussing polyphonic Moogs…
My friend had one back in the eighties, but it’s too far back in my memory. All I remember is that it sounded good (as all Moogs do) but not much else…
The Opus 3 is very much like the Polymoog and MG-1 in that it uses divide down circuitry to create polyphony. Divide down chips are getting very rare these days, and I don’t see the demand for divide down synths, or string synths for that matter, being all that great.
Some clarification…
Divide down chips can be broken into a few camps:
Simple dividers, the simplest being flip-flop chips (commonly available)
Counters (commonly available)
Top octave generators (rarer)
Today, top octave generators are rare as original replacements.
However performing top octave generation isn’t terribly hard to do using a CPU.
Instruments like the Polymoog and Opus had no CPU inside and relied on discrete chips to perform their magic.
But if someone wanted to make a polyphonic instrument today, CPUs have more than enough horsepower to generate every note on a keyboard simultaneously.
Much of the reason top octave generated/divide down instruments aren’t terribly popular today isn’t so much the unavailability of the chips, but rather that every note is phase locked to every other one.
That is, they’re not so desirable.
For example, if one holds down a C note on a divide down instrument and plays another C note elsewhere on the keyboard, there is no phasing or rolling to the sound.
The two notes don’t sound all that much richer together as there is no detuning possible between them.
It’s the same reason why instruments featuring sub-octaves usually don’t sound as rich as instruments that feature two discrete oscillators.
So it’s not so much that they’re rare.
There are simply easier and cheaper ways today to generate the notes and at the same time, sound richer when played together.
The reason TOG chips are rare today is a lack of demand.
“Supply and demand” is the rule behind the situation.
Kevin, out of curiosity, which chips did the Opus 3 use?
This is off the top of my head, but I believe it was a standard 50240 TOG (same as M083) and either 5523 dividers or TDA1008’s.