MATRIXSYNTH: Con Brio


Friday, June 06, 2008

Con Brio


via Dave

"Beautiful shots of old computers in a Wired gallery today... Brain was
there with one of his two Con Brio systems"

"Behold, the Con Brio Digital Synthesizer! Only four of these babies were ever made, explained Brian Kehew, who is now the proud owner of two of them. Despite their unique design and formidable musical abilities, the units never attained commercial success.

Con Brio synthesizers were originally designed during the late 1970s and housed five 6502 microprocessors. The innovate interface provide a CRT display with both graphics and text to allow composing and editing down to the waveform."

7 comments:

  1. I should send you some MP3s so you can hear how good they sound. I was really surprised...

    Keyboard Magazine is doing a special on it in an upcoming issue. Cool that they are about such things!

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  2. Oh man, Brian, I'd love to hear you play on that thing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Interesting, very interesting, but not significantly different in character than, say, a Casio vz10m.

    ReplyDelete
  4. These are old sequences from the floppies, and old sounds. Until the keyboards start working it will be impossible to program new ones. All FM0based synths sound alike, and it is similar to Synclavier, Synergy and Casio stuff. But the quality of tone, especially bass and high treble, is cleaner than those, but closest to the Synclavier.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Awesome samples!

    I remember a conversation with you a few years back about this crazy contraption... you'd mentioned you were having a hard time with fixing the floppy drive...? And now you've got two of 'em... geez. Glutton for punishment, or are you just planning for a worst case scenario involving a complete assortment of spare parts (not a BAD idea, I guess)? :-)

    Hope you can get both your units back from the dead soon! The MC on twin Con Brios... now there's a show for ya...

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  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  7. Is there any way that those of us who can't use Flash, for whatever reason, can download these samples?

    ReplyDelete

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