It all begins about 20 years ago, when I heard this sound like nothing I had ever heard before. I wanted to learn what this was, and found out it was an analog synthesizer. But, they had not made these in many years, and finding them was almost impossible. But I began my search to try to get this sound.
The first synthesizer I owned was a casio CZ-1000. Despite you might think this sucked, and it was digital. Well, it was actually a pretty fun little synthesizer to play with. But still, it didn't have that sound I was trying to achieve. Next I found all these Yamaha TX and DX boxes and this rack of DX7s that the rock star was getting rid of. Not knowing what it was I purchased it ( I have most of them still) but, these were nothing at all what I wanted. Impossible to program, and could emit abrasive tones. It didn't sound analog.
At last I found this guy who fixed Hammond organs. He was also selling these old analog keyboards. The first true synthesizer I ever saw was a Prophet-10. Now, this thing has nuclear fire in it. Unfortunately the rock star who owned it did something to it, and it would power off after about 10 mins of continous use. No matter what we did, were never able to figure out why the power supply would shut down. So I bought it for $1000 and spent a fortune trying to make it work for more than 10 mins at a time. It was worth the pain, because you will never hear anything like the fire in that beast.
Next I acquired a Roland Super Jupiter. Problem. I was a total noob at midi sequencing. Now this thing sounded so huge and so analog it was insane. Unfortunately it went into my ex-brother in laws studio to replace the poly six I accidentally. But that comes later.
Then I acquire the Oberheim Matrix-12 This was great but six of the voices had melted. So to use this you to very carefully program it or if you hit certain voices it would cause harsh clipping on the mixer. But, this thing was awesome. It didn't have the fire of the Prophet-10 though, but it sure was so liquid. But again, I never managed to get anyone to figure out why the voices were like that.
So all these years later, you can buy analog again. At last, I have the sound I wanted 20 years ago, I can buy it new. There is no end now to my happiness thanks to all the people who understood analog is a kind of instrument and even though people laughed at my pain, I just zap them with high frequency piezo noise and continue my physics lab experiments.
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