WBL Synthesizers

WBL Synthesizers


Crumar Performer

 This hissy old thing has two independent polyphonic sections. The Brass section has attack/decay and resonant filter controls; sounds like a narrow pulse width. The String section has a childlike Residents sort of tone to it, and has low/medium/high EQ sliders.

Realistic Synthesizer By Moog Music

 This device was manufactured by Realistic -- Radio Shack! -- as late as 1984. In some ways, I think it was the final evolution of the monophonic analog synthesizer: its two oscillators and beautiful, syrupy Moog filter were tamed with just a tiny handful of sliders.
Alas, I think I need to replace all the potentiometers on mine.

Steiner EVI

 This simple square-wave-and-filter synthesizer is unique in that it is modulated by a trumpet-like set of buttons, and a breath-controller. Some of the controls are on the hand-held part, others are built into the plush carrying case. Caliban uses this device to produce wailing threnodies guaranteed to bring tears to your eyes.

Also, the Steiner is portable.

WBL 27C512 Synthesizer

 This synthesizer is still under construction. It uses Boolean Logic Synthesis to produce binary signals with rich harmonic content.

Six square wave oscillators, each with a 1 Hz-1 kHz user controllable range (implemented using 3 556's), and 10 front panel toggle switches, feed a 16-in 2-out lookup table (a 27C512 EPROM), to produce a stereo output. Because the six oscillators can drop into low-frequency realms, a wide variety of bloopy bleepy patterns, as well as ring modulations of square waves, can be produced.

The hard part, of course, is deciding what to fill the EPROM with.

8/21/96.16:46 - 8/21/96.16:46