Vintage Synth meets 21st Century Multi-Effects (and a live gig!)

Back in the 1970s, analogue monophonic synthesizers didn't often have on-board effects. In the 1980s, DCO-based polyphonic synths added chorus to try and make up for the single oscillator. When the DX7 ushered in digital synthesisers in 1983, that didn't have any effects either. It wasn't really until the late 1980s that effects started to appear, particularly on workstation keyboards like the M1. 

Aside: Mawhrin Skel et al

As I've mentioned before, I have a couple of vintage synths, and enough outboard gear to do quite a lot of transformative processing on their sounds. But going to a live 'showcase' gig at the Smokehouse in Ipswich, kind of gave me a different perspective on current live performance. When you have seven performers in 4 hours, you need to be pretty slick with changeovers, and the solution they used was to have tables for the early acts (I spotted a 404 Mk1 (maybe II), a Crave, a Model:Cycles (or Samples), an (original?) MS-20 and more), with the penultimate act, Girl in a Gale, having a Nord Stage Piano, looper and various other bits of gear set up at the back of the stage, and the headliner, Mawhrin Skel, using a custom multi-tier stand with laptop on top, Push 2 for control, and various other bits of gear.  

Compact, minimalistic, and easily transportable were definitely high on the priorities for the rigs that were being used, and it was a refreshing alternative to the H9000s, H9 Max, Big Sky, Empress Zoia and CXM1978s that you find in all of those flashy 'home' studio pictures on Instagram. Which got me thinking about the opposite of Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS), which is something like Making The Most Of Budget Gear (MTMOBG - the acronym definitely isn't going to catch on!)... 

In fact, I was deep in thought about this when Girl in a Gale leaned over to me and revealed that ear plugs were available at the Bar. As it happens, I had actually bought my own ear defences: almost invisible and scarily hi-tech German ones that were totally essential at that amazingly loud Ableton Loop Concert in Berlin... But the sound at the Smokehouse was more constrained and controlled - I saw the sound engineer using a spectrum analyser on his phone, as well as an SPL meter. So, the usual low frequency 'physical' wobbles to remind you that music is visceral, and one of the early acts was intent on producing standing waves at about 70 Hz, but the PreSonus desk was coping very nicely, thank you.

An excellent gig, by the way... Mawhrin Skel was suitably sci-fi and enthusiastic, Girl in a Gale was a powerhouse of skilled invention, giving glimpses or sketches of music that left you wanting more, and overall, a varied 'selection box' of electronica. Venue and Music: Recommended.

The Opposite of Expensive...

But anyway, back to the opposite of expensive out-board gear... Some time ago, I started to look at something to process my Yamaha TX7 (the one where I replaced the LCD with a back-lit version ...), and started with thinking about something 'Multi', like an Eventide H9 or a MOD Devices MOD Duo, rather than a Sytrmon Big Sky, and then I realised that I was approaching this from totally the wrong direction. I was going to use a multi-effects pedal that was several times the original cost (and current value) of the synth - which seemed silly. So I happened across multi-effects designed for guitarists, and after realising that the top-end (the Line 6 Helix, Boss GT-1000, Headrush et al) was a money magnet, I deliberately looked at the opposite end - Amazon. (Well, Smile.amazon.co.uk, to help charity a bit). 

I've got a couple of pedal boards. The 'cheap and nasty' one has those 20 to 30 quid Behringer 'Boss' clone pedals on it, and is fine for live use and abuse. But I have learned that pedals boards, even with the considerable investment of crazily expensive switching/routing units, suffer from problems with recalling specific sounds. You can put the effects pedals in the right order, but what were the settings of all those knobs and switches? High-end pedals can use MIDI to store and recall presets, but that seems dangerously like a full-time job. 

It turns out that there is an alternative to the 'Pro' guitar multi-effects - for about 130 quid (150 Euros or dollars) you can get tiny little boxes that have built-in Expression/Volume pedals, colour LCD screens, and a couple of foot switches, and which do a very good job at providing quite a lot of the functionality of the 'around a grand, mate' 'Pro' multi-effects boxes. So, after a bit of research on YouTube (I hate the adverts!) I bought a Valeton GP-100 and connected the TX7 to it...

Okay, so there's a definite set of design decisions about the 99 Factory presets - and this is a 'Guitar' multi-effects (Actually, because of the 'Will be Mis-Used by Guitarists' design requirement, it is all-metal construction, and feels like it might survive live use quite well!). So there's a lot of fuzz, overdrive, saturation and just plain distortion, exactly as you would expect. But those 99 User presets and a computer editor (or the front panel controls) and you can concentrate on the Modulation, Delay and Reverb effects, plus a few extras that you might not be expecting: like a Ring Modulator, or a 4 Step Filter Sequencer. also, it turns out that having IR-modelled Amps and Cabs can give subtle tone variations, and you can load in your own .wavs for the Cabinet modelling, which opens up all sorts of experimentation. Oh, and you can arrange the effects in any order you like - so the Reverb does not need to be last in the chain... There's a looper built-in as well, and a Tuner. That's a lot for your money...

A couple of hours programming, and I had about fifty 'synth-oriented' presets that turned the TX7 into a host of alter-egos. One particularly nice sequence (the Arturia KeyStep is your friend) ended up as the sting/jingle for a corporate video I was working on... (I forgot to mention that it is also a class-compliant USB Stereo Audio Interface... which made recording it into my DAW a doddle...) Because every setting (and order of effects) is stored by the preset, then it just becomes a quick 'Paint By Numbers' 'Choose-a-Preset' procedure to turn a bland TX7 sound into something that sounds like it came from... well, from something else entirely. No need for trying to remember which pedals to switch in, and what the knob/switch settings were - you just select the preset. Simple - the sort of thing that even I could get right live!

Hiding the Truth...

I am considering putting the TX7 and the Valeton GP-100 inside a box (with suitable ventilation, of course) so that it isn't immediately obvious what is making that killer bass sound, or those ambient jangles. But regardless of pimping it up, it has been the bargain of the century. My only problem is that I have a feeling that at some stage, GAS is going to kick in and I'm going to end up upgrading... But they do say that:

Limitations are the Spur to Creativity...

So perhaps I should leave well alone, and leave my TX7V as my 'live' minimalistic secret weapon.

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Yamaha TX7 Backlit LCD Upgrade

There was a time when 7-segment displays were in fashion:

They were followed by LCDs, which consumed less power and provided more detail in a smaller space. But these early LCDs had a problem - they used ambient light because they didn't have any internal illumination. So they weren't very easy to read in the dark - unlike 7-segment displays. (and for guitar pedals and some other 'need to be visible in the dark' applications, then 7-segment displays are back in fashion!)

The second generation of LCDs had LED backlights, which were often green in the early days, although yellow and red were also possible (red looks very distinctive!). Nowadays you can get green, yellow, red, blue and even white, although LCDs have been, to some extent, superseded by OLEDs, although there is a tendency for OLEDs to be very small, maybe even tiny, in size.

But back to the 1980s, and my TX7. Here's my TX7 as it was:

The TX7 is an interesting device to photograph, because the sloping front panel means that it almost always has a reflection of a window or a ceiling light in it. In the photo above, the only way to avoid this is to take the photo from an angle which is so low that the LCD is being viewed from the wrong angle, and so looks worse that it actually is. But a photo where the LCD is readable also has windows and ceiling lights reflected in it! Modern house building trends, like large windows, skylights and arrays of small LED ceiling lights, just make it worse. Even taken from a crazy angle, there's still a reflection - you can see an edge between the T and the X.

So years of struggling with the TX7's display finally persuaded me to do something about it - and I bought a backlit LCD. There are two types of backlight for LCDs: electro-luminescent panels (several different variants), and LEDs, Electroluminescent panels use a high frequency, high voltage oscillator to light up a panel behind the LCD, and the pale blue 'EL Foil' variety seem to have lives of a few years - so for example, my Kawai K5, Korg Wavestation and Yamaha SY99 all have electroluminescent backlights that no longer work. Replacing these displays (or the inverter electronics, which seem to contain the parts that fail) buys you another few years, and then they die again (my K5, for example). On gear which is already vintage, then the strain of major surgery to replace a display every few years seems like a dangerous gamble...

Notable 'classic' electroluminescent panels were used in the HH IC100 amplifiers in the 1970s. Curiously, the green-blue backlight, which illuminates all of the markings on the rotary controls on the front panels, seems to have a very long life, with many still working...

(Photo of an HH IC100 in the dark by James Davies,  https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesdavies/14764665183 )

Anyway, I bought a replacement LCD (with a green LED backlight) for the TX7 from Chris at CPMagneticMedia on ebay.co.uk. It arrived very quickly, and was well packaged, bubble-wrapped on the outside, and then that dark reflective anti-static plastic inside. Fitting it was straight-forward: the TX7 needs only a few screws removing to open it up, and the LCD is easily accessible. The small black plastic 'pop rivet' connectors that are used to fasten the LCD onto the mounting brackets are quite fiddly, so here's a quick guide to releasing and installing them if you aren't familiar with how they work.

Releasing the pop rivet is kind of counter-intuitive. You can try to pull out the top of the mushroom part, but it is much easier to just push at the stalk with a small screwdriver and the mushroom part will just pop out.


Installing is the fiddly bit. First, you push the rivet in place, to hold the LC module onto the bracket.

Then you push the mushroom part into place in the round hole side of the rivet:

The mushroom part will lock into place and the sides of the rivet are pushed out slightly, holding the LCD module securely to the metal bracket.

Once the LCD is securely held in the brackets, there's a temptation to over-tighten the screws on the brackets, which the detailed instruction PDF warns you not to do! It was interesting to see that Yamaha had put an empty header with +5 and Ground on the main PCB, which made the backlight power easy to hook up, and I did wonder if Yamaha intended it to be used for a backlit LCD upgrade...

The end result tones with the cyan buttons on the TX7 rather nicely, and it is consistent with many of the 1990s Yamaha LCDs that also used green backlights:

Most importantly, it is now easily readable in high ambient lighting, with reflections, with ceiling lights, and in the dark. Much better, and I wish I had done it a long time ago. If it wasn't for my bad experience with the K5, then I might consider doing it for some of my other vintage synths. (although in general, many 80s synths require quite a lot of disassembly in order to get to the display and replace it, and that can be a lot of work...) Maybe one day...

However, I have to say that recent 'hardware' excursions have rather whetted my appetite for minor updates, and after the TR-505 and TX7, there may soon be additional posts on simple updates to some more of my vintage gear...

Links

HH Electronics on Wikipedia
CPMagneticMedia on ebay.co.uk
Yamaha TX7 on Encyclotronic

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