Victory of the Daleks poster, new pattern Daleks etc

Pleased to see that the new pattern Dalek collectables are starting to appear on Forbidden Planet's website; presumably the Victory of the Daleks poster will be the last of the old pattern Dalek collectables... and of course a Cyberman is always nice to have...

New synth - Korg Poly 800 reverse keys

Another eBay purchase I'm very pleased with - a reverse-key Korg Poly 800 for a fabulous £57. It needs some work - one key's broken, joystick's flakey, it's lost its patches - but from a quick test it seems to be substantially sound. The good thing (apart from the yummy reverse colour keys) is that it has the Moog Slayer mod fitted, so I don't have to mess around with my existing Poly 800 Mk 2 or EX 800 to get it done. Niiiiiice...!

Victory of the Daleks mods

I've done very well selling modified WW2 Daleks - or 'Bracewell Ironsides' - on eBay. They're relatively easy to paint as they're all one basic colour, and I've done a good job making ammo belts and Union Jack badges, much better than anyone else who has had a go at it. I've done 6-inch and 10-inch models, and I'll try to do some more while there's interest. And I quite like the new coloured Daleks, apart from the over-large chest boxes and the hunchback...

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.