Where Is It Now? ( Unicorns, Prototypes & One-offs )

Gear Acquisition Syndrome: A tendency to purchase more equipment than justified by usage and/or price.

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Where Is It Now? ( Unicorns, Prototypes & One-offs )

Post by Indeterminacy »

The Octave Plateau Guitar Synth Driver. I saw and played this beast at a trade show in '85/'86.
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Re: Where Is It Now? ( Unicorns, Prototypes & One-offs )

Post by Indeterminacy »

WhiteWarlock, Mr. WhiteWarlock your table has been waiting sir.

What was this thing based on because I cannot remember?
And do you know of where this driver may be?
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Re: Where Is It Now? ( Unicorns, Prototypes & One-offs )

Post by WhiteWarlock »

No clue about the Octave Plateau Guitar Synth Driver beyond you mentioning it plus it's core must be based on Hexaphonic pickup with deep roots in the ARP Avatar & 360 Systems Slave Driver(have both & they need getting recorded soon for the Neglected Gear thread) & early cv to pitch 2 MIDI system that probably seriously sucked for note pitch tracking at that time... (also The Avatar killed ARP as there just wasn't any markey for guitar synth and it was so fucking expensive due to all the R&D and totally custom design for guitar)Is that the same "Octave"(Cat/Kitten) that was sued by ARP for exactly copying filter design in the late 70s? Octave were most likely trying to stick a big fuck you to ARP with the guitar synth driver and endded up realizing way too late exactly why ARP went under on the Avatar)
hmmm have the actual original prototypes around here for the Tyco Hot Keyz guitar(toy)
yeah not so impressive or anything unless totally redesign all the internal circuits...
bought them all in some deal for using the bodies with custom electronics...
Let me dig them out when have some extra time for posting images in this thread...
(It will be obvious for you that they are the prototypes of original production design from the creator)
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reference placeholder image for now^
wasn't happy with any of the circuit bends on them...
(the circuit sort of sucks IMO & way too 80s video game musical)
so decided saving the hardware/bodies for other projects...
sort of in the middle of multiple things at the moment so maybe later today can take some pictures of prototypes for this thread...
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Last edited by WhiteWarlock on Fri Jan 17, 2020 7:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Where Is It Now? ( Unicorns, Prototypes & One-offs )

Post by WhiteWarlock »

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Only one Audity ever came off the assembly line. At the time, it was a state of the art computer based analog synthesizer commissioned by ex-Tangerine Dreamer Peter Baumann in 1979. It came at a time when E-mu, like other synth manufacturers of the time, were making a move towards producing an instrument that was more compact and more advanced than the purely analog modular beasts they had been making. Under pressure from synths like Sequential's Prophet-5, E-mu set out to make a very powerful analog synth. The Audity was a 16-voice instrument with a massive amount of programmability and stability thanks to the computer based technology that controlled it.

Unfortunately the instrument was so expensive ($70,000) that nobody wanted to buy one. It was also a bear to program. E-mu wound up shelving it in order to start over with a new concept inspired by the Fairlight. This led to a sophisticated and much cheaper sampler - the Emulator 1. But the Audity had not been forgotten by E-mu. Much of the Audity's multi-timbral design went into the creation of the sample-playback Proteus synthesizers, which in turn paved way for the Audity 2000 sound module!

The one and only living Audity is currently in a synthesizer gallery at the CANTOS Music Foundation in Calgary, Alberta Canada. It was never actually completed, so it has never actually worked. As such, it remains a truly one-of-a-kind show-piece of what could have been - the synthesizer equivalent of a concept-car.
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Re: Where Is It Now? ( Unicorns, Prototypes & One-offs )

Post by NoiseWiki »

The most recent time the Bitchbox change hands it was sold and reverb and misslabeled as a Ciat Lonbarde

https://www.noisewiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=BitchBOX
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Re: Where Is It Now? ( Unicorns, Prototypes & One-offs )

Post by WhiteWarlock »

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Gil Melle original electronics devices for soundtracking

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