Vintage Gear Part 1

Hello and welcome to this, well, kind of extraordinary and uncommon video, uncommon at least for me!

I´ve got some – no – I´ve got A LOT OF vintage equipment from an old man, who has had these things in his studio for nearly 40 years.

Now he´s seriously ill, he must stay in bed and will stay there for the rest of his life, which – sad enough – doesn´t seem to be a long time span anymore.

It was me to get these things, because he is convinced, that I´ll cherrish his old equipment and use it and – that way- won´t allow, that he´ll be completely forgotten after a while.

And he is right – for sure!

I got these things for free – ok, I paid the transport across Europe, but that was only well under 300 dollars – but I got them under a condition. More about that later in this video.

Let me talk about the instruments and studio equipment now.

There are two Atari 1040 ST from 1985. One of them is even equipped with the original Atari Hard disk. Both computers are fully functional and in perfect condition. There is some software too, the most important of which is “Notator”, a composing and arranging software. “Notator” is the direct predecessor of Apple´s “Logic”.

I´m going to produce at least one video about the Atari and the “Notator” software later.

Let me just introduce the – well, let´s say “inherited” - things today and then there will be more detailed videos about each of the pieces later.

The Atari 1040 ST is not the oldest piece in the gained collection. The oldes piece of gear is the Yamaka CX5M music computer from 1984 – let me repeat myself: fully functional and in perfect condition.

The CX5M is eqipped with an SFG-05 FM module – let me say it can be seen as an indirect predecessor of Yamaha´s flagship synth of the 80s, the DX7.

Again: more details in a later video.

The largest pieces I´ve got are two Roland XP Synthesizers/workstation, the XP-60 and the XP-80 from 1996.

These fully digital machines are kind of famous for their high quality PCM sounds. They have 64 voices polyphony and there are extension slots to add specific kinds of PCM sound to the synth engine.

The XP-60 of mine – yes, now it´s mine – is equipped with one of these expension cards, called “Orchestral Sounds”. This expansion board houses 255 natural sounding instruments of a classic orchestra.

Well, You´ll see and hear more about these two Roland Workstations on this this channel.

Then there is this Kaway synth module called GMega, a 32 voice synth module from 1993. It´s sound covers partly the sonic range of the Roland synths, but it sound a bit brighter, a bit cleaner without getting sterile. Its sound is quite easy to add to even complex mixes.

I think you can imagine, that I´m going to make a video even about this little synth module.

Alright, and then there are a sony double tape deck, a double CD player-burner, and some mixers, the Behringer one I´m going to use as a submixer for these vintage machines, the other ones, well, I don´t know yet.

And cables, cables, cables, cables, cables, cables …..

And then there is this!

A cycle of classical compositions, mainly chamber music. I´ve stadied music and composing myself, but these works are jewells! They are excellent to an amount, that I feel even more indepted to fulfill the condition of this man, than I felt, when he started talking about endowing his studio and his work to me the first time.

The condition was: “Take care, that these pieces of music are getting played some time and that my wife gets at least a bit of money from them.”

Well, I have to find a way to do so. Perhaps I´ll find a music publisher, who´d like to print and sell these scores.