What Was Your First Hardware Synth?

[JCJR]

My first was a Fender Chroma Polaris.
Still sits in my closet, long ago victim of membrane switches breaking.

Chroma Polaris is a personal favorite. I have two dead Chroma Polaris sitting in a road case out in the neglected shop. Maybe the membrane switches are bad by now but they worked when the synths failed years ago.

I got about 5 years out of my Polaris then it quit working with (so far as I could diagnose) some kind of CPU startup/reset problem. I used to repair keyboards back then and spent a week or two trying to fix it, then put it up to look at some other day. I usually could fix about anything that got brung in. Was frustrating not to fix the Polaris. Then later Alan Gary Campbell gave me another dead Polaris with exactly the same symptoms, so that's why there's two dead ones languishing away. Alan couldn't fix his either, which is why he gave it away. He was purt good fixing synths.

The idea was that maybe one live Polaris could be stitched together out of two dead ones, but both of them seemed to have the same issue. So if I could fix one, could probably fix both. Though by now the membrane switches are probably bad.

With power-on, a reset signal goes to the CPU, triggering the boot cycle. The power supplies seemed fine, the clock was working, the reset signal was getting sent, but then the wheels would spin doing absolutely nothing. Could see activity on the address and data lines, lights are on but nobody home.

Maybe it really is a symptom of bad membrane switches somehow, dunno. Last time I googled, couldn't find that particular failure mode explained anywhere. At the time I assumed it must be a common failure mode since I had two with exactly the same issue.

[DocAtlas]

I guess technically my first synth was a PAIA Gnome I built in college, but I usually think of my Sequencial Pro One as my first. I never really used the Gnome for performing or recording. I should dig it out of the attic and see what I can do with it now.

[Bubbamusic]

Two Arp Oddessies. No presets in those days. Would set one up for the next song while playing the other one........oh, and singing, too. Had a little, tiny black Moog for bass. Wish I still had that sucker. Had an Arp string machine that had a shitload of buttons on it, but everything always sounded the same. The good old days.

[ATN69]

Korg MS20 followed by Roland Juno 60. Good old days

[bill45]

Yamaha DX100 ,I still have it.

[Wormhelmet]

Roland MC303 was my first. The year it came out. Quickly followed by a used EX800 which was fairly brutal to learn about filters and envelopes on with those push buttons.

The EX800 sounded great running through a zoom 505 guitar pedal though.

I was all about guitars and drums for years before any synth thought crossed my mind. They were taboo for the most part. What a change. I have three guitars and probably 15 synths.

[Moe Shinola]

Novation Xiosynth, the first in a long line of attempts at augmenting my computer setup with hardware. I seem to have hit gold this week with my new Roland JDXi.

[bluedad]

My first was a Fender Chroma Polaris.
Still sits in my closet, long ago victim of membrane switches breaking.

Chroma Polaris is a personal favorite. I have two dead Chroma Polaris sitting in a road case out in the neglected shop. Maybe the membrane switches are bad by now but they worked when the synths failed years ago.

I got about 5 years out of my Polaris then it quit working with (so far as I could diagnose) some kind of CPU startup/reset problem. I used to repair keyboards back then and spent a week or two trying to fix it, then put it up to look at some other day. I usually could fix about anything that got brung in. Was frustrating not to fix the Polaris. Then later Alan Gary Campbell gave me another dead Polaris with exactly the same symptoms, so that's why there's two dead ones languishing away. Alan couldn't fix his either, which is why he gave it away. He was purt good fixing synths.

The idea was that maybe one live Polaris could be stitched together out of two dead ones, but both of them seemed to have the same issue. So if I could fix one, could probably fix both. Though by now the membrane switches are probably bad.

With power-on, a reset signal goes to the CPU, triggering the boot cycle. The power supplies seemed fine, the clock was working, the reset signal was getting sent, but then the wheels would spin doing absolutely nothing. Could see activity on the address and data lines, lights are on but nobody home.

Maybe it really is a symptom of bad membrane switches somehow, dunno. Last time I googled, couldn't find that particular failure mode explained anywhere. At the time I assumed it must be a common failure mode since I had two with exactly the same issue.

That's a sad story. I bought mine in 1986, the height of dx7 mania I'm buying analog! Gigged with it regularly till it started acted funky in 1991. Took it out of the lineup, moved to a new house and ignorantly stored it in the garage over winter. That took it's toll on the fragile plastic ribbons inside.

[risome]

MS 20 and SH101 still have my MS 20

[damoog]

first hardware synth I got was a Yamaha SY55 back in 1993,used it as a workstation for techno?(why I don't know) even though it wasn't aimed at using it for that,the sequencer was mega sloppy and using the filter in the sequencer brought the damn thing to meltdown!!!..its worth noting that the sy55 had no sampler onboard so I used a tascam tape recorder for sampling!,stoping and starting the sample with my finger

I eventually got a sore finger and got an akai2000 and a korg prophecy but still used the SY55 as the workstation until 2001 when I got a Yamaha motif and used that

I finally saw the light in 2003 and got a laptop

[pethu]

A Yamaha CS-01.. although I didn't "get" synthesizers until very much later, and I have no recollection of when or where I got rid of it (but I modelled it decades later (http://pethu.se/vst-instruments), so I feel I've paid my dues! )

[Vectorman]

My first was a Fender Chroma Polaris.
Still sits in my closet, long ago victim of membrane switches breaking.

Mine is just sitting there on a stand looking all nifty retro and weighing a ton. Membrane switches are fine, but it developed a number of other problems. Started with one of the oscillators on one voice refusing to tune (which I disabled so I could continue using it as a 5-voice synth). Then the ring mod went screwy. Turned it on for the first time in 4 years a few months ago and it had developed more issues that made it completely unusable.

I suppose I could try to have it serviced one day, but in reality, even when it was working I didn't find it as useful as I'd thought I would. Long filter sweeps and cutting "Jump" style sawtooth poly sounds could sound rather good, but its somewhat rough-edged sound limited the things I found myself wanting to use it for.

[Vectorman]

(duplicate post)

[JCJR]

It is surprising how many Chroma Polaris must have been sold, considering several posters on this thread having had one, and some other Polaris threads on gearslutz and such.

Maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but I recall Polaris ads hitting Keyboard Magazine $1895 retail or whatever, and then only a few months later the thangs were price-discount blown out and gone from stores. At the time, guessed maybe there wasn't time enough for more than one big initial manufacturing run.

I had barely noticed the Polaris ads when Rhythm City in Atlanta started blowing them out for $600 or maybe it was $800. At that price it was a no-brainer and I ordered sight-unseen. Maybe the time-scale was longer than I recall, but Rhodes was in financial trouble and at the time I figured the early blow-out was a symptom of cash flow vs sluggish sales.

I really liked my Polaris. So far as I recall it was just a rather standard curtis chip kind of design, chip-wise similar to some Sequential, Oberheim, Moog products. But for whatever reason the Polaris seemed to have a wider sound palette than some other synths with similar chips in the guts. Just seemed to have an "arp mellow sound" rather than "more synthetic" fat sounds of some other brands based on similar chips.

For one thing, it had an excellent shallow, fast and light, velocity-sensitive keyboard. Maybe merely the velocity-sensitive keyboard contributed a lot to the "wider sound palette" compared to Prophet 5, OB, or MemoryMoog.

I had lots of playing-time experience on the Sequential, Oberheim, Roland analog poly synths owned by friends and customers, but wasn't wealthy and only owned three "mostly analog" poly synths-- Yamaha CS-60, MemoryMoog, and Chroma Polaris. I liked the Polaris sound better than the bigger Arp Chroma. Liked the Polaris better than MemoryMoog and CS-60, and probably wouldn't have traded the Polaris for an Oberheim or Prophet 5. I like Roland, but Roland poly analog just "wasn't on my radar" back then, dunno why. Wasn't much impressed by Korgs such as poly 6 or 61.

Got more interested in digital and digital hybrids about that time, so never bought any more poly analog machines. The Polaris was usually routed thru a fairly early Digitech digital delay, pre-microprocessor design. Had clean sound for the time, pretty good high frequency response, decently long max delay, and very good LFO pitch modulation for chorus and flanging effects. The digital delay designs before microprocessors, the LFO would directly modulate the sample clock rate, which may have been easier to get smooth pitch modulation compared to later designs which had a fixed sample clock rate and used DSP to modulate the delay time. I recall eventually selling off that Digitech because it didn't have preset storage, had to twist knobs to change the sound. But maybe should have kept it because it sounded pretty sweet for some uses.

[kokotte]

an ensoniq vfx, after a ms 10, an emax, a asr 10 rack, a nord lead 2, mpc(60,2000) sp 12, korg delta, fantom x6 .... and now some good ad/da
and some plug in.