Yamaha Electone "Synths"

Video of the Yamaha D-80 by Mattias. I always seem to forget that some of the Yamaha Electone home organs had synth sections and with the D-80, an arpeggiator as well.

Frank who is an Electone enthusiast posted the following on AH and gave me the ok to put it up here:

"I've got the 415: image

which is probably the last of their analogue spinet organs.

Very cool machine. The solo synth on mine sounds very SY-1 or SY-2'ish. You can have pitch and/or filter mod with left-to-right wiggling of the solo section keys too. It takes a little getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it can be pretty expressive.

The strings, with soft attack and longer release, through the synphonic ensemble (BBD ensemble) or the rotary speaker (!) can be very pleasant.

Jeff Koepper tried mine a couple of weeks ago and got all sorts of cool un-home-organ-like things out of it.

Yamaha made a whole bunch of these kinds of miniature three manual organs with solo synths in them. Earliest is probably the DK-40, then at least there was the D-80, D-85 and 415. The D-85 and 415 seem to be nearly identical, feature wise.

The DK-40 is technologically not too distant from the earliest group of Yamaha analogue organs, and I suspect it shares similar circuitry to the YC series of organs.

Also, the DK-40 has a 'fourth' manual, in the form of a separate 'portamento' synth, which is played from a ribbon controller to the left of the solo synth keys. You can just barely see it in this image the green tabs control the portamento ribbon, which extends right in front of them.

I kid myself that the 415 is sorta like a cut down EX-1. It isn't really, but it's fun to pretend, and I don't anticipate ever owning an EX-1, for a number of reasons! :-)

Frank
Electone enthusiast"

Update via buckystoppz in the comments:
"I also have the 415 and use it to death! People are sleeping on these, I got it for $120 on eBay locally. They were about $8000 new in the early eighties."