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...

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...

Novation Supernova

... and just for the hell of it I also got a Novation Supernova. It was £250, which I thought was cheap, but it turns out I was thinking of the Supernova 2. Never mind, it's a great bit of kit and full of swooshy noises. I got it linked up to the Doepfer MAQ16/3 and got immediate sequencer heaven, so I'll certainly be using it on my forthcoming album... On a separate note I had to give up on the Gem S2 Turbo keyboard, as it was proving too difficult to transfer the Turbo board to the S3, or even to transfer the patches (brilliant design there, Gem...) So now I'm just reprogramming the S3 by hand - it sounds great and the keyboard is fab, so I can live without the Turbo facilities and I've sold on the S2.

Novation Super BassStation and Kenton Control Freak

I was very pleased to get a Novation Super BassStation from eBay for £116 - the cheapest I've seen one. It adds more patches, stereo output, sample-and-hold, noise, ring-mod, stereo chorus, arpeggiator and other good stuff to the spec of the original BassStation Rack I have, so I sold that for more than I paid for the Super BassStation, which I thought was remarkably clever of me.

I also got a Kenton Control Freak - not the Studio version with 16 sliders, but the standard one with eight, unfortunately, but it should be useful for applications such as editing the Oberheim Matrix 1000 and Doepfer MAQ16/3.


Update - So then I got a Control Freak Studio as well. I'll have to figure out whether there's any point in keeping the two, or whether the original can be sold.

Doepfer MAQ16/3

I've finally got around to buying a Doepfer MAQ16/3 sequencer. Despite its age, it seems to be the best digital/ analogue style MIDI/CV sequencer on the market - certainly the only really affordable one. Looking at the manual, I'm sure it's capable of all sorts of timing, transposing and ratcheting tricks given the necessary programming, so I'm planning to use it extensively on my second album - the first one is pretty much composed already, and isn't very improvisational. But once that's finished, it will be wibbly sequences all the way...

Oh, and I also picked up a Yamaha CBK-K1 MIDI controller keyboard for under £40 - I already have a CBX-K1XG which has built-in sounds, but I thought this was too good to miss, particularly as it came with an Emagic MIDI-to-USB convertor...

Doctor Who DVDs

I've made a start on a long-planned project to start buying Doctor Who DVDs ('real' Doctor Who, not gay Doctor Who), and I've picked up around 30 from eBay at prices around £5 each. There seem to be a few which are only available at silly prices, but I can wait. I've watched a few at random, and of course, the extras are always entertaining. I've also picked up some of the Target novelisations for the hell of it - I never read any of them when they were published, so that may be interesting, though I have no intention of trying to get the whole lot.

Doepfer Minicases

There's only one thing better than a Doepfer modular synth system mini-case, and that's three Doepfer modular synth system mini-cases, which I was lucky enough to grab from eBay at reasonable prices. Now I can expand my system a bit without investing money or space in a full-size case - though the spare modules I have at the moment won't amount to anything on their own.