what you think?

Beautiful demos!

Shame a Lambda wasn't included. (Don't know if you have one). That's the sweetest Stringer to my ears.

Lovely sounds.

So why bother with HW v SW shit? Waste of ****ing time IMO.

Avon! Is that you?

I think you have just single handedly pushed prices on stringers up. Lovely sounds.

arp omni's great too. with an extremely fat mono bass synth on the board also btw.

thanks for posting

thanks a lot

o yes the Lambda is fantastic. I search for a Lambda, very rare here in germany.

crumar performer

http://soundcloud.com/retrosound-ii/...id-sta******sic

No Solina? Tssk

Solina

[YOUTUBE]watch?v=kGL9yleR7wA[YOUTUBE]

What do you think about the new Waldorf Streichfett?

I'm a little You Tube posting challenged at the moment... however, in the interim.. please accept these complimentary pseudo Solina tokens as a gesture

I think that people were using that hardware in that era because it worked. it sounded great, and you could stack a Solina on a B3 and then stack a Model D on top of that.....it was before poly synths or samplers or romplers... Pink Floyd "welcome To The Machine'.....that's a string machine...and a Model D....The Moog shines (no pun intended) on that track big time.

This thread kind of puts a spotlight on the question .....why regress into early string machines?....I'm a bit of a die hard analog person..(not completely...I think software is amazing). But let's get real here. A Polysix can do Solina better than a Solina all day long...People weren't using a Solina because it was cool.. they were using it because they needed some simple stringish sounds.

I see that Roland string machine in the video... well... Roalnd at that time wasn't making great string machines... that thing was horrible.. but the rest of the stuff Roland was doing was amazing....as evidenced by the GAS phenomenon......

So...Don't get all nostalgic or deluded into thinking that a Solina string machine will be some holy grail sound ........it won't be...

Lambda on and off has been of interest to me - great stringer for the cash.

I have tested this module.
the effect section is really crap. digital artefacts and less warmth
but without the internal fx and with a good chorus a alternative.

Every time I hear a demo of the Lambda, it brings back haunting memories of my late Trident MK1 and the old goose bumps kick in. It carries the same trademark Korg 'Majestic' sound character that appeals to me so much.

A Mini won't fit on top without some help, its center of gravity screws things up.

Well - it was cheaper and more light-weight than dragging along an Eminent 310.

I've got a feeling that modern PCB design and a microcontroller for the keyboard should be able to make a stringer that is very light-weight and compact. The Polymoog filter is really something special. The oscillators themselves - those can be DSP, there is nothing special about those (except perhaps the monophonic bass). Just keep the complex filters analog as well as the delay lines for the ensemble. Perhaps cobbling together an Elkorus with a Moog filterbank clone and a VA can do the job.

Solina is the ultimate for me, I just love the sound.

In the era of the Prophet 5 and CS-80 with the Jupiter 4 at the tail end stringers were preferred because of polyphony. You either had limited polyphony with full envelopes for each note or you had divide down polyphony (basically unlimited) but with paraphonic envelopes. The third option was a Rhodes or Whurly (and the associated tuning and weight). Given that choice many keyboard players with more classical training chose the stringers. Yes, you had to adjust your playing style a little to navigate paraphonic note envelopes but it wasn't as big a leap compared to dealing with limited polyphony.

In that sense it's a little puzzling why the Korg Lambda didn't take off since it solved the paraphony issue (by putting a dedicated amp envelope for every note, PS-3100 style). I suspect it was just a tad too late in the scheme of things.

I agree the advent of 'cheap' polys like the Polysix killed off stringers but I also think that a lot of sounds associated with the 70's were also being pushed aside at that time.

Of course the argument "Why choose a stringer now?" can also be stated "Why bother with a Polysix now?" -- I think all of us here at Gearslutz know the answer to that.


Depends. With the right processing stringers and brassers and even those faux electric pianos can sound fantastic -- I run a Lambda through a state variable vactrol filter (Koma Elektonic) and it's a vast improvment on what was already a great sound. Many of those stringers used multiple fixed bandpass filters for certain sounds that would be impossible to replicate on even the most modern analog poly. Sure, it could be done in software but some would argue that's not the point.

Any thread about stringers requires me to post how much I like them.

I own

Solina x 2
Arp Omni mk 1
Arp Quadra
Korg Lambda

Regarding a modern stringer with DSP for the oscillators..

The architecture is a lot of digital square waves (one for each key) and these all each go through a simple VCA for each key.
After that, all the waves are individually converted to a saw wave with a selected capacitor.

To authentically duplicate the above with DSP would certainly be doable but I guess with anything emulated - the chance of loss of mojo increases.

Did I mention I love stringers?

The SK20 is worth considering, too, regardless of what Vintage Synth Explorer might say.

Korg PE 1000. Best stringer ever.

Absolutely - even further, the various paraphonic implementations mixed with analog ensemble effects created artefacts you just can't recreate on full polyphonic instruments. 'Stringers' and related synths are in fact their own category of instrument, which I think analog manafacturers are just on the cusp of realising again, after the huge glut of monos.

Nice videos. I love the sound of those machines.

to be honest? cheesy and boring sound. remembers me of the one-man-band-entertainement-guys that show up on weddings and birthday-parties and play the whole evening for 250€ - really, one must be really desperate for old times to appreciate this sounds.

Dude, no way. The Crumar Performer string pads on Duran Duran's Rio album sound fantastic. Nick Rhodes also used a Jupiter 8 all over that album. And yet he still chose to use the Performer for the pad sounds. So it's not like analog polys replaced stringers or that string machines are the exclusive province of wedding bands.

Hammond B3, Rhodes Piano, Wurlitzer, Mellotron, Clavinet....all boring.

Great sounds, and I love your YouTube channel. Don't make this about HW/SW... they both have their place. Keep up the great vids.

Has there actually been any genuinely professional string machine emulations done since 2009? They're so niche.

I think someone was trying to persuade Urs from U-He to put a string machine module into Diva, but it didn't seem likely.

thank you!

the title is a bit provocative I know.
agree with you. both have their place in the music world. I use also software for recording.