Excellent news for Ace Tone PS-1000 monosynth owners, there has been a significant increase in the amount of documentation available for servicing and adjustment of these capricious units.
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How ESTECHO’s Visual Effects Are Created
Recently I’ve realized that most people watching ESTECHO videos have no idea what kind of process leads to their creation, especially when it comes to the psychedelic, colorful background visuals that adorn them. For this reason I’ve decided to write a series of posts that will describe how these visual effects are created, and what makes them so unique. In this first installment, I’ll be focusing on how the various graphics assets are fabricated.
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Inside the Ace Tone Top-9 Combo Organ
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
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
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
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
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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Hillwood Super Variation HR-2
This small drum machine doesn’t look like much, but in fact it has a good amount of nice features, and is more versatile than one would expect from a preset drum box. This is mainly due to the presence of five ‘cancel’ buttons which allow you to remove unwanted sounds from any of the rhythms; very useful, because so many times you find a great beat, but one of the sounds ruins it…
The HR-2 also has a digital numerical display that actually writes the bar number, instead of the usual blinking light in other units from the era. This must have been pretty exciting at the time!
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Ace Tone Rhythm Ace FR-6
The FR-6 represents, in many ways, the ‘classic’ Rhythm Ace drum machine. It doesn’t have all the features of more sophisticated units such as the Rhythm 77, but it has the standard Rhythm Ace voice board and sounds, plus the typical array of preset rhythms you’d expect from a drum machine of this era.
The FR-6’s voice board (where all the sounds are generated) is identical to many other Rhythm Ace units of the era (check out the Rhythm Fever page for more info about this). It’s fairly simple, with only six sounds, but it’s a classic sound heard on many recordings from the past forty years.
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Roland CompuRhythm CR-5000
The Roland CR-5000 and CR-8000 drum machines, both released in 1981 (around the same time as the TR-808, TB-303 and TR-606), are very closely related; they share the same chassis, boards and general design, the sound generators are identical for both units, except the 8000 has twice the amount of presets, and also programmability. So basically the 5000 is a more affordable version of the 8000, with some features removed. It’s also very similar to the Korg KR-55 series of drum machines (the first one released a couple of years earlier), although with a few distinct features.
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