Moog Music Forum

Noisebug has an ms20 for sale. Looks like a great buy.
http://www.noisebug.net/used.cfm

Thought you might like to know.


Eric

It is a great synth. I bought mine for $1,200.

Got mine for 800 around 4 years back on ebay. I can't believe how high these have gotten over the years. totally worth it though...

If you and Theremint ever got together and put all of your gear in the same Room, the Moog Museum would want to come to see YOU.

This is the synth I wish someone would make an exact replica of, but change the hertz to volts. The ms50 too, if not the whole ms line. Korg you guys are idiots, you used to make such interesting stuff. By the way who bought this before I could even send in the pictures of one of my stage echos for trade. (my mint se 500, I feel guilty using it cause its so nice) You Rat.

Do you want to sell the SE-500?

I got my MS-20 for about $500. Then again, it was the summer of 1980. I actually walked into the store wanting to buy an Arp Axxe, but it did a lot less and cost a couple hundred more. Glad the salesman talked me into the Korg! I still have it after 29 years (!!!), and it still works perfectly (and I've never had to calibrate/scale it ever!). That same summer, I also got a Rickenbacker 4001 mapleglo (for $700. I saved all the money from the summer job - inventory counting of resistors and capacitors in an electronics warehouse - just to get the bass and synth). Still have the Rick, too. Never had to change the intonation in 29 years (using Thomastik Jazz flats on it). They're the 2 instruments I'm never selling/trading!

-andrew bunny

I don't want to sell it. My friend in Rotterdam has already offered me quite a lot of money for it, the dutch and their money that is actually valuable. Europeans are buying up all our good gear. They're smart. I know if I sell it I won't ever find one this nice again, if I find another at all. Stage echos are so much more rare than Space echo's. So much better too. I have a much rougher se-300 that I use all the time and save the 500 for special recording sessions that only the 500 can do. Mostly it sits in a climate controlled room covered up. I know, pretty ocd.
I would possibly trade for a fully functioning clean ms-20.
A clean ms-20 and a ms-02 would seal the deal. I haven't seen an ms-02 for a while. The noisebug ms-20 was nice plus they have a good rep and everything would have gone super smooth I was into the deal, after I thought about it too long. When you buy something vintage you take a risk. My se-500 looks like its 2 years old instead of over thirty and everything works like new. I would rather trade something vintage that is mint and works perfect for something vintage that is mint and works perfect, than sell it. That way, you don't run the risk of paying too much for something that is rough and doesn't work right. It is going to be sad for me if I let my 500 go. I have felt like I am the guardian of something sacred, trying to keep it as nice as it's former owner did for another 30 years.
Are you a Korg fan too? Or do you just know your tape echo's? I think the stage echo 500 is the only tape echo with cv input, a square wave into the speed control jack and it can even sound like the roland re-201.

So in conclusion to all this senseless Korg love on the Moog site, I'll probably keep my stage echo collection. Continue to work the bleep out of my 300, it can take it.(I should get it modded and have a cv speed control jack put in) Continue to treat my stage echo 500 like the special treasure it is(the king of all tape echos) taking it out when that special something only it can do is needed, and feeling like it's christmas, always babying the hell out of it unless someone decides to trade me an immaculate ms-20 and a ms-02. But ponder this, if the gear Korg made in the late seventies didn't really get fully appreciated or realized until the nineties, does that mean we should all be stashing away the crap they make now for when it get's appreciated in 15 years and people will pay 2800 for a kaoss pad.
Also, everything I have always read makes the hertz way of Korg and Yamaha's old synths sound more simple, more stable oscillators because temperature doesn't affect pitch, just generally more rugged and reliable, you see ms20's that have died many deaths that still sound good.
Is their an advantage to volts since most of the company's went that way that I don't know, besides all my gear is vpo. Or was it kind of like the betamax getting beaten by vhs because more companies went that way.

If you really want my stage echo pm me and make me and offer. I think I've finally talked myself into an ms-20, even though it doesn't play well with others. No promises but I'll think about it. I'm weak now with all these ms-20's for sale now. It's kind of sad, people are selling their treasures.

I found this week, a very simple schematic of a volt/oct to v/hertz converter. Three op-amps, 2 transistors, a dozen resistors.

I don't have a link for that, but for those interested (build it or not) it's yours for the asking. While the circuit is very simple, you will also need a -15/+15 V power supply, but that shouldn't be a problem for people who have the skills to build the circuit anyway.

RE: MS-20's Hz/octave "problem." Try this:

1. Plug the performance wheel into the keyboard cv input (middle, right) to disconnect the keyboard.
2. Plug the V/OCT cv from your MIDI/cv converter or another synth into the Total jack (top left).
3. Plug the s-trig. from your MIDI/cv or synth into the MS-20 trigger input.
4. Play a note on your MIDI keyboard or the controlling synth, and adjust the MS-20 performance wheel until you get a sensible pitch.
5. Adjust the VCO mod. levels until playing an octave on your MIDI (or other synth) keyboard gives an octave out of the MS-20. Then adjust the MS-20 performance wheel to coarse tune the MS20 and use the tuning pot to fine tune it.
6. The filter mod level pots adjust filter tracking in the same way.

NOTE: this was copied right from http://www.korganalogue.net/korgms/mstt.html

If you're trying to control w/ a gate instead of an s-trig, plug the gate into the external signal processor, and use the trig out from the ESP to the trig in on the patchbay. I've tried it, and it works just fine controlling my ms-20 w/ my voyager signature! Hope this helps!

-andrew bunny

My friend bought a perfect MS-20 for $200 at a pawn shop a few years back.

D-rex wrote:My friend bought a perfect MS-20 for $200 at a pawn shop a few years back.

::kaboom::

best i ever saw was a shoddy looking mono/poly in a pawn shop that was going for $375, but it had broken keys and a lot of scum on it. Seemed like a fixer-upper I didn't want to deal with.

I wish I had been in the market buying this stuff in the early 90s, people getting 100 dollar 303s and crap. c'est la vie...