via ELECTRAUMATISME"One Sunday, my girlfriend went to the 2nd hand market just behind my flat and had the chance to find a book completely unknown to me :
Les Synthétiseurs, une nouvelle lutherie (for less than 2 Euros !!)...what luck when you check this link. It's a pleasant book covering all the synthesis basics, including analog and the golden age of Digital black box synths like DX7, Poly800, and Casio CZ line.
The book also details a few patches for each synth and includes sections for Keyboard amplifiers, Stands and so on...
Within these chapters, there is a special one dedicated to the Hohner brand who in 1985 planned to build a synthesizer called the Hohner 8D based on a proprietary technique for generating waveforms : the Multiple Event Generator.
Basically, it was about sampling existing material and regenerating them in multiples of the frequency being played in order to avoid any aliasing, and to faithfully reproduce any basic tone throughout the range of the Keyboard.
The beast would mainly have multiple waveform generators (kind of like DCO's) spread all over the keyboard scale, with noise generator, VCA, distortion stage, resonant LPF, enveloppe generator for VCA/VCF and an LFO... all for 8 voice polyphony, and with a very intuitive user interface.
It seems the prototype never saw the light of day (it should have been on Musikmesse 1985) and there is no picture available of this synth.
It should have been conceived in Saumur en Auxois in France (near where I spent my childhood) so, if anyone has any information about that synth, I'd be glad to spread it. [Feel free to comment or send me, matrix, an email and I'll let ELECTRAUMATISME know as well as update the post]
Here is the webpage of Claude Gendre who wrote this book (I'll try to contact him):
http://claude.gendre.9online.fr/index.htm
Sorry for my awful English"
No problem! Fascinating story. If anyone has more info on the Hohner please do comment and/or let me know via email - you can find the contact info on the bottom right of the site.
Hello could you find more info about the 8D or would you help to find a contact in France for research? I know it's been a while :)
ReplyDeleteThere is a conference paper which probably refers to the 8D development https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cache//b/b/p/bbp2372.1986.023/bbp2372.1986.023.pdf#page=1;zoom=75
and also an article with an unfortunately poor scan of a picture..
https://archive.org/details/music-video-systemes-005-1986-11/page/20/mode/2up
I'm currently working on a library to control the old MEG chip - so would be very interested if they extended it with some additional circuitry for the 8D (as they did for the last commercially available PSK260/E3 'macro-sampling' series)