ESTECHO

Inside the Ace Tone Top-9 Combo Organ

17/01/20 at 5.41pm / by ESTECHO / 5 Comments

This classic-looking sixties combo organ was part of a whole range of Ace Tone organs (Ace Tone Corporation’s main product line), most of them still very much in demand even today. The model 9 was one of the high-end models available in the TOP series, with a wide variety of voices, a good-sounding vibrato, reverb/sustain on two voices, split keyboard for bass, bright tabs, staccato mode for the bass section, and also an optional bass pedal board. All of this with classic red tolex, chrome legs, rocker tabs and gray/white keys for the bass section.
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Inside the Ace Tone PS1000 Monophonic Synth

17/01/20 at 2.36am / by ESTECHO / 10 Comments

This is as far as I know the only monosynth ever produced by Ace Tone, although there were many other keyboards, including a string synth (the Multistring SY-5) and lots of combo organs, such as the Top-9. This instrument was most probably designed at the tail end of Ikutaro Kakehashi’s tenure at Ace Tone before founding the Roland Corporation, since many of its design features can be found on Roland gear of the era.
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Analog Drum Machine Primer

17/01/14 at 4.20am / by ESTECHO / 1 Comment

The rhythm machines found on this website all generate analog sounds; the different percussion voices are not samples, they are generated electrically through discrete components. Sometimes, a primitive CPU is used to store the various beats available, or to record and playback a sequence, but this digital circuitry is not related to the actual sound generation, only to note triggering and pattern memory.

Most of the time, these “drum” sounds really don’t sound anywhere near a real percussion instrument: a cymbal sounds like a burst of white noise, a tuned tom sounds like a mono-synth… Which is what makes these machines so unique and interesting, as long as one doesn’t expect to reproduce the natural tone of real percussion instruments, but instead focus on the qualities as synthetic sounds.
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Tape Delay Primer

17/01/14 at 3.28am / by ESTECHO / 26 Comments

The advent of electrical amplification in the mid twentieth century brought with it a desire to augment its dry, sometimes harsh amplified sounds with reverberation. This was mainly achieved through the use of reverberation chambers, metal plates, and spring reverbs for portability. These technologies provide shimmering, hall-type echoes, but cannot produce sharp early reflections or clear echo repeats.

Magnetic tape, which became widely available in the sixties, made it possible to emulate clear, well-defined echoes, that could be repeated numerous times, by using a combination of read and write heads to physically delay the signal along a tape. For years, tape and other magnetic supports were the only available technology widely available to achieve this. Thousands of tape delay machines were built throughout the sixties, seventies and early eighties. Such devices could be seen on stage and in studios all over the world.
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Tape Delay Cartridge Reference

17/01/13 at 5.30pm / by ESTECHO / 12 Comments

Tape Cartridges (4-track tape in upper left for size reference)

Following is a description of the various cartridge/cassette formats commonly used in tape delays, as well as information on the Univox / Melos EM-200 magnetic discs. Notably absent from this page are the Echoplex cartridges (mainly because I don’t own an Echoplex).
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