I had one of these too:
ARIES MODULAR 300 Vintage Analog Synthesizer METICULOUSLY SERVICED synth arp | eBay
It was sold by a Boston company for several years in the 70's in kit form only. Someone had built one, but it never quite worked right. I think that I was the 3rd or 4th owner. I figured out that the problem was in the power supply, so I just ran wires from the power supply in my SWTPC 6800 computer which had all the correct voltages. It was a 1V/OCT synth as was the Odyssey, but the two never played well together, so it found a new owner who never fixed it right either.
ARIES MODULAR 300 Vintage Analog Synthesizer METICULOUSLY SERVICED synth arp | eBay
It was sold by a Boston company for several years in the 70's in kit form only. Someone had built one, but it never quite worked right. I think that I was the 3rd or 4th owner. I figured out that the problem was in the power supply, so I just ran wires from the power supply in my SWTPC 6800 computer which had all the correct voltages. It was a 1V/OCT synth as was the Odyssey, but the two never played well together, so it found a new owner who never fixed it right either.
Apparently most modules could be purchased pre-built as well, for extra cost. Back then I had them send me a copy of their 1977 catalogue showing the available modules, scans posted near the bottom of the page here:
The Electronic Peasant's Various Schematics, Articles, and Data Sheets Page
Note the prices on the second last page.
Take care,
Doug
The Electronic Peasant's Various Schematics, Articles, and Data Sheets Page
Note the prices on the second last page.
Take care,
Doug
I still have my Aries modular rig. I was building it a kit at a time as I could scrape up the cash in my late teens, so it's incomplete. And it was out on a few live gigs back in the day, so it's kinda beat up. I haven't powered it up in quite awhile, but I imagine it's still in reasonably good working condition. I keep meaning to fix it up & sell it, but never get around to it.
I had one of them for about a year. Again this one was dead and out of warranty. I bought it from a music store for rather cheap because the power supply was rather fried.
I was more interested in how it worked than how it sounded. Mine was one of the rare early flavors that had the ORB-33 chips in it. They were the BBD chips that imparted the string ensemble sound to what was otherwise a rather ordinary organ.....top octave generator chip, 12 multi stage dividers, RC wave shaping filters for "tone"......
I would up selling that one for more than I paid for it when they were still trendy.
I have a DIY Solina chorus clone module in my setup that is BBD based and sounds very nice. Lots of technical information included in this page:
JH. Triple Chorus
Take care,
Doug
JH. Triple Chorus
Take care,
Doug
Thanks for the info. I plan on replacing the whole tone generator with a WAV player setup feeding one or more chorus devices to a stereo output in a manner similar to the simple "Mellotron" I linked to earlier in post #47. The WAV player and Chorus will likely be separate modules in the rack. The WAV player is the upgraded version of the one I linked, called the WAV Tsunami. It's already working, just need to make a front panel.
did not listen to this for maybe 15years and now it seems i start to enjoy it:
Koxbox - The Great Unknown
Koxbox - The Great Unknown
Version 4 of the TTSH project is currently under development if anyone wants to build their own ARP 2600 clone. I bought my wife the version 3 kit for Christmas and she loved it:
MUFF WIGGLER :: View topic - [COMING} TTSH V4 Build Thread
Take care,
Doug
MUFF WIGGLER :: View topic - [COMING} TTSH V4 Build Thread
Take care,
Doug
Holy Crap!
Thanks so much for this info. I probably would've missed this.
The ARP 2600 is kinda special to me. It's the first synth I ever got my hands on, spending endless hours at the local music store as a teenage nerd. A few years later, working as a keyboard tech at that same store, I got to repair several of them as well. Sadly, I can't remember when I last had one in front of me - I bet it's been forty years.
There's no way I can afford a genuine used one these days. I have no problem with the clone concept at all, except for the fact that I've missed all the previous builds of course! But I won't miss this one.
Thanks again Doug.
Thanks so much for this info. I probably would've missed this.
The ARP 2600 is kinda special to me. It's the first synth I ever got my hands on, spending endless hours at the local music store as a teenage nerd. A few years later, working as a keyboard tech at that same store, I got to repair several of them as well. Sadly, I can't remember when I last had one in front of me - I bet it's been forty years.
There's no way I can afford a genuine used one these days. I have no problem with the clone concept at all, except for the fact that I've missed all the previous builds of course! But I won't miss this one.
Thanks again Doug.
i am not sure if this can be called psytrance. more i would call it experimental electronic. kox box is a genre of its own.
I bought the first PAIA when it came out. It seems like I waited forever to get the kit which was a little over $100. In 1971 I became the service tech at the largest Olson Electronics store in the US. It was a short walk from the University of Miami and the frat house occupied my music students. I had sold some of my DIY guitar amps to students and several were friends. A couple had seen what my PAIA had grown into and the beginnings of my DIY monster. A student came into the store one morning in late 1972 and told me about the new toy that got in their music lab. Even the instructor was a bit overwhelmed, so I went to have a look........yes, a brand new 2600. Amidst some high pressure sales tactics to become a music student at the school, I did manage to get 3 or 4 long play time events with the 2600, the teacher, and a room full of students.
I had already accepted an assembly line job in the Motorola plant 35 miles north, and would be leaving the area soon, so I would never see that 2600 again. The Motorola job turned into a 41 year engineering career. Would the music student thing have turned into something different? Did I make the right choice? Given my history with formal education and the fact that UM was EXPENSIVE, I think I did.
There is a forum dedicated to people who like to DIY music synths. Plenty of good material here, but finding it takes some digging until you figure out who the real builder / designers are. A coworker has been building synths there for as long as I have been here. His music room is awesome. He did a DIY version of the 2600, and even made his own "Poly ARP" before the TTSH V1 existed. See picture. Making the front panel with the slide pots is the hardest part......all my knobs are round!
There is a schematic vault there somewhere, but I haven't looked for it in some time.
electro-music.com :: View Forum - DIY Hardware and Software
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I am not sure myself either! Not that I am particularly fond of labels - conversational convenience ...... I suppose. Kox Box is good - very very good music. There is something special about Scandinavia that enables the production of exceptional beautiful intelligent work. Must be the long winter nights!
Korg have released a softsynth version of the 1972 ARP Odyssey for the iPad that may be of interest.
ARP ODYSSEi by KORG INC.
ARP ODYSSEi on the App Store
I have one, and I did spent quite a bit of time making all sorts of unique sounds with it when I got it, but for now it's waiting it's turn to be made into a rack mount module for my modular system. It's too big for Eurorack, although it is possible to break the board in half at the score line and wire the two halves together. It should fit in a Eurorack module this way, and pads for this are provided on the board.
The Behringer stuff I have collected and my current module collection exceeds the cabinet size and capability of the power supply in my case, so I sold the case/PS at the recent Dayton hamfest. A case / power supply rebuild is in order, starting with an IKEA bookshelf acquired cheap from their "last chance" area. This one will hold Eurorack and either 4U or 5U rack modules, or both. I still have the MFOS modules (large), the Axoloti, both WAV players, my DIY synths, and several unbuilt boards and modules in various sizes from the recent "moving" sales at Synthcube. This rack will have ample power, and both silicon and vacuum tube voltage levels......
Right now my time is sucked up with an RF / cellular engineering contract job and the TSE amp refresh, so my synth time has been near zero.
Korg has released three hardware versions of the Odyssey as well. Mini keys, full size keys, or no keys at all. Truth is that I bought my Odyssey because it was cheap (and dead) I really wanted a MiniMoog. It had been returned to ARP 3 times under warranty and turned into a noise box again shortly after the owner got it back. It seems the first gen Odyssey's ate the CA3080 chips in the VCA. Some blame the chip, some blame the circuit, but replacing the round metal RCA chip with a black plastic DIP chip from another vendor made the synth play nice for a dozen years or so.
I guess that ARP realized that a lot of people also would have rather had a MiniMoog, so ARP cloned the Moog ladder filter in the second gen Odyssey, Moog sued, ARP changed the filter again, and the gen 3 was born. Gen 1 was white which was hard to use on a brightly lit stage, so gen 2 and 3 were black with orange letter boxes. The Korg clones have all three filters and a switch.
In the DIY world these are known as the original filter, the pre-lawsuit filter, and the lawsuit or post-lawsuit filter.
Schematics can be found for all the old Moog and ARP stuff on the web. I found a "leaked" schematic of the Behringer D on the web. Many say it's a fake to throw people off, but other than some parts values I haven't seen any obvious differences. I havven't really dug that deep into my D, but I will be building a "clone of a clone" filter from those schematics when time allows....just another addition to the rack
Behringer has also created an Odyssey clone. It's not out yet though. The 2600 uses much of the same circuitry. It's would be logical.
The Arturia V collection that I use has a software clone of the 2600. I played with it a lot a few years ago and it did wake up some sleeping memories.
One of the latest trends in soft synths is the wavetable synth. Here the usual VCO is replaced by a wave file player, often one that can mathematically "morph" from one wave file to another over time, MIDI or "CV" control. The first such creation was Serum, but at over $200 for a plug in I "just said no." Now there are several, including some built into DAW's like Ableton's aptly named Wavetable.
Arturia came up with a software multi synth which includes a wavetable source, and some conventional sources as well. Again the high price put me off, until they offered the "Arturia customer crossgrade" for $69 last year. It's definitely the most fun soft synth that I have played with in a long time.
The Behringer stuff I have collected and my current module collection exceeds the cabinet size and capability of the power supply in my case, so I sold the case/PS at the recent Dayton hamfest. A case / power supply rebuild is in order, starting with an IKEA bookshelf acquired cheap from their "last chance" area. This one will hold Eurorack and either 4U or 5U rack modules, or both. I still have the MFOS modules (large), the Axoloti, both WAV players, my DIY synths, and several unbuilt boards and modules in various sizes from the recent "moving" sales at Synthcube. This rack will have ample power, and both silicon and vacuum tube voltage levels......
Right now my time is sucked up with an RF / cellular engineering contract job and the TSE amp refresh, so my synth time has been near zero.
Korg has released three hardware versions of the Odyssey as well. Mini keys, full size keys, or no keys at all. Truth is that I bought my Odyssey because it was cheap (and dead) I really wanted a MiniMoog. It had been returned to ARP 3 times under warranty and turned into a noise box again shortly after the owner got it back. It seems the first gen Odyssey's ate the CA3080 chips in the VCA. Some blame the chip, some blame the circuit, but replacing the round metal RCA chip with a black plastic DIP chip from another vendor made the synth play nice for a dozen years or so.
I guess that ARP realized that a lot of people also would have rather had a MiniMoog, so ARP cloned the Moog ladder filter in the second gen Odyssey, Moog sued, ARP changed the filter again, and the gen 3 was born. Gen 1 was white which was hard to use on a brightly lit stage, so gen 2 and 3 were black with orange letter boxes. The Korg clones have all three filters and a switch.
In the DIY world these are known as the original filter, the pre-lawsuit filter, and the lawsuit or post-lawsuit filter.
Schematics can be found for all the old Moog and ARP stuff on the web. I found a "leaked" schematic of the Behringer D on the web. Many say it's a fake to throw people off, but other than some parts values I haven't seen any obvious differences. I havven't really dug that deep into my D, but I will be building a "clone of a clone" filter from those schematics when time allows....just another addition to the rack
Behringer has also created an Odyssey clone. It's not out yet though. The 2600 uses much of the same circuitry. It's would be logical.
The Arturia V collection that I use has a software clone of the 2600. I played with it a lot a few years ago and it did wake up some sleeping memories.
One of the latest trends in soft synths is the wavetable synth. Here the usual VCO is replaced by a wave file player, often one that can mathematically "morph" from one wave file to another over time, MIDI or "CV" control. The first such creation was Serum, but at over $200 for a plug in I "just said no." Now there are several, including some built into DAW's like Ableton's aptly named Wavetable.
Arturia came up with a software multi synth which includes a wavetable source, and some conventional sources as well. Again the high price put me off, until they offered the "Arturia customer crossgrade" for $69 last year. It's definitely the most fun soft synth that I have played with in a long time.