Saturday 27 March 2010

The Gem S-series saga continues

So now I've found a Gem S2R for £180, probably the cheapest I could have got one. So far as I can make out it has all the Turbo facilities built in. I've sold the S3 keyboard, having finally figured out with the help of Andy at EMIS that the 10 basic patches are all you get with non-Turbo models - you can't do a factory reset to restore a whole set of 100. So now I have the S3 Turbo and the S2R (Turbo), which is more than enough for anyone...

Saturday 20 March 2010

New synth - Yamaha PS55

My latest purchase from eBay is a Yamaha PS55, one of the last home keyboards from the company using PCM, before they went over to FM synthesis. No MIDI, but it features a poly section, a mono section, a chorus unit, and an arpeggiator, in addition to some nice accompaniment features, and of course built-in speakers. But the main reason I bought it is that this actual unit is featured in a great YouTube demo, playing Edgar Froese's Stuntman. Now I have to figure out how to play that myself...