Keyboards and other stuff I have known and sometimes loved...

This page is a sort of a memorial to the keyboard equipment that I've come across in the last 50 years. It's roughly in chronological order by when I was playing them. Check out my Synthesizers page to view what I currently have in my studio. Meanwhile, here's my trip down "Memory Lane..."

Hammond M3

The church I attended when I was young had one of these in the education building.. I recall going over to play Beatles and other pop music on it some afternoons when nobody was around. The pedals were mystifying to me but it sure sounded great! I have a M3 in my garage now that's not being used. You can buy these for very little on eBay; I think I paid about $105 for mine. They are still a wonderful sound and with a Leslie and some wiring modifications they are a cost effective way to get the Hammond sound.

RMI Electric Piano

Around 1970, the head of the Music Department at my first college (who was also my father) bought one of these and a Fender Super Reverb amplifier for the college's use. I'm not exactly sure why they called this a "piano" because about the only thing it has in common with a piano is the keys. The keyboard is not touch sensitive and the piano sounds are very bright (tinny). The harpsichord tab on the instrument is its most authentic sound and since the harpsichord is not touch sensitive either one might entertain the notion that it's acceptable. The most famous musician to record with this is probably Rick Wakeman of the band Yes.

Arp 2600

This is the first synthesizer I ever saw, and what a synth it was! In 1971, synthesizers were just emerging from the lab into the public consciousness. Walter Carlos recorded a couple of albums with a Moog; you may be familiar with "Switched on Bach". The Arp 2600 came on the scene as a more user-approachable keyed instrument. One could actually play it without having to use any patch cords, but the patching made it more fun. What a sound!

Analog synthesizers have developed a certain mystique in the keyboard community and some of the older gear such as the Arp 2600 have become strangely desirable. That translates as "spendy"; I recently saw one of these on eBay for somewhere between $4000 and $5000 with no keyboard. There's even a virtual synthesizer software pack available.

MiniMoog

This instrument was developed around 1969 as Moog's entrance in the portable synthesizer market. Its previous models were too large to haul around and too complex for the average musician to use in a live venue.

MiniMoogs have a characteristic sound that has to be heard to be appreciated. It was not designed to simulate any particular instrument (nor were other contempory synths). The instrument is not particularly pleasant sounding but it makes a lot of quacks and wheezes that were popularized by Keith Emerson (Emerson, Lake, and Palmer) and Rick Wakeman (Yes). Probably the most famous MiniMoog recording is Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's Lucky Man.

Mellotron

These were made popular in the 60s as the signature sound of the Moody Blues. There were around 32 keys on the model we had. Each one operated a pinch roller that would pull a tape recording of that note over a tape head and spill it into another compartment. (So it was like having 32 tape players in the same box). Each tape had 3 sounds recorded on it so you could tweak the mechanism to play flutes, orchestral strings, or one other instrument. When you let the key up a spring mechanism pulled the tape from the spill compartment back into the "ready" compartment. If you held the key down too long (I think it was about 15 seconds) you would run out of tape and there was a risk of damaging the tape.

This electro-mechanical nightmare was over $4000 (a lot of money in 1971) and quite fragile.

Arp Odyssey

Arp's 2600 model was somewhat impractical for the average musician due to its cost, size, and form factor. Moog had released its MiniMoog keyboard and Arp was being beaten up in the commercial market, so they released the Odyessy. Like the Mini-Moog it was expensive, limited, and thermally unstable. The last time I saw one of these, the bass player I was working with referred to it as a "blat weasel".

Kimball 42" Console

In the mid 70s I spent some time selling home keyboard instruments for a Wurlitzer and Kimball dealer. Kimball reached the pinnacle of their instrument building in the area of pipe organs, especially theatre organs, in the first half of the 20th century. There are hundreds of these hulks all over the US in major theatres. The Jasper Furniture Corporation bought Kimball in the 1960s and it's no exaggeration that they became a major player in home organs through their furniture building expertise and marketing methods. They were also one of the first companies to offer a "1 finger" feature for automatic accompiament. I am restoring one of their top line spinet organs, the Apollo model, which came out before the automatic play features were invented.

But I digress. A piano almost identical to this Kimball 42" piano was in my home through the 70s and mid 80s. It wasn't a great piano, but it sounded better than most spinet pianos, had a better action, and held its value well. I sold it after playing it for about 12 years for what I paid for it.

Wurlitzer Spinet

I included this to represent the scores of models of Kimball and Wurlitzer home spinet organs I sold. I don't recall the exact model of this Wurlitzer, but you can see the green tabs on the lower left cheek block which turn on various "toy counter" (a term from theater pipe organs) rhythm instruments. The tape recorder in the lower right cheek block was an interesting touch.

Wurlitzer was a leader in integrating synthesizer technology into home organs. They had a very nice spinet that had a 3rd keyboard which played an actual synthesizer. The organ was very pricey.... but I saw one on eBay a couple of months back for $120. I think it was a Funmaker 555. I would have loved to bought it, but I would have had to ditch something else to make room for it.

Farfisa Compact Combo

These beasts were popular in the early to mid 60s due to their relatively low cost and portability. Also, the public's ear wasn't tuned to the Hammond sound at that time so these and other similar organs like ones built by Vox were acceptable. I owned one of these briefly in the early 70s. It was a mechanical nightmare... the key contacts were shot and it was grossly out of tune. It was more fit to be hauled to the dump than to the bandstand.

Wurlitzer Model 200

These were originally developed by Wurlitzer as part of their Piano Lab product sometime in the late 50s or early 60s. There would be a room full of these equipped with headphones; they all would plug into an instructor's console where any individual piano could be selected and monitored. They also had built-in speakers for practicing. The original cabinet was made from wood rather than plastic.

The escapement action on this electronic piano is similar to a real piano. The key operates a hammer that strikes a metal tine (instead of a string). I spent thousands of hours playing one of these on stage. I learned how to do field maintenance on this instrument because I couldn't either find or afford someone else's labor to fix it. I used to carry a toolbox with a dozen or so of the reeds that I would break more frequently than others. It wasn't too hard to fix, once you learned not to file too much lead off the reed while you were tuning it. There was a repair shop in Minneapolis that carried reeds for the 200 and I think they sold for about $6 each.

Norah Jones uses a Model 200 and she has helped foster a minor rise in their popularity. Come to think of it, maybe that's why she's one of my favorite artists.

Elka Rhapsody String Synthesizer

I couldn't find a picture of the exact model of this that I played so this will have to do. Why instruments of this class were called "synthesizers" is somewhat puzzling to me. They were supposed to sound like a string ensemble, which they somewhat resembled if you were listening to the orchestra down a long hallway through a box of bees. I was never satisfied with the limitations of this instrument. If you tried to play any fast figures on it, the excess sustain plus the bogus long attack to simulate a bowed instrument made it sound like mush. I suppose it provided another tone color that sort of resembled strings, but I'm guessing nobody in the crowd was fooled. It sure didn't fool me. I hauled one of these into Sound 80 for a session one time and they managed to mix it into the oblivious place it needed to be to be passable.

Roland SH-1000

I'm not exactly sure why I ended up buying this instrument. It was a strange little monophonic synthesizer that had several different presets which were not editable and then one set of synthesizer knobs that you could develop a single "patch". This keyboard never really sounded that good to me and I used it rarely. I gave it to a friend of a friend when I finally decided I couldn't really use it. 

BTW, the "SH" stood for "sample and hold", an electronic trick that has nearly zero musical value but was vogue at the time.  How it worked:  the keyboard's pink or white noise generator created a stream of random pitches.  The S&H electronics would take a snapshot at a regular interval that you specified with a speed pot.  This creates a totally random series of bleeps at different pitches that apparently we used to think of as "computer sounds", even though no computer I've ever heard made any sounds like that.  I will try to find an example of that and post the .mp3 here.

Korg Poly-800

These were kind of interesting. This was an 8 voice poly synth with 64 presets and a built in sequencer. The unit has a collection of techno-looking graphics on the top right of the control section that actually are quite useless.

The sequencer was a nice idea, but the playback speed control was an analog slider rather than a digital speed showing the beats per minute. This made it useless for live gigs because you would always have to audition it for tempo before you started the song.

It has a killer accordian sound.

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