Showing posts with label Dewtron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dewtron. Show all posts

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Aliens, Dewtron and stuff


Here is this second article collaboration from a source that wants to remain anonymous, despite this I can tell you that this story is real.


Many of us, synth fans, ask ourselves for why reason synth companies or kit builders in the 80's, went down in business.

Many of us argue that it was caused by the japanese invasion.

But what many of us doesn't know is that the aliens also had something in this business, as was the case for the Dewtron company (it can't be another one that you Dewtron!)

Please take the time to read this weird/funny/strange story about the people of Dewtron and some info about the customer service, you won't regret!

"One day in about 1974 a man knocked on the door of my basement in London. I was in my early 20s and this man was about in his mid-40s. He was dressed in a blue shirt and black trousers.

I thought he was a policeman, but he was not. He had met a friend of mine called Antoinette in Wales and she had suggested he talk to me.

This man was called Nigel Woodfine and he came to talk about his friend Brian Bailey, of Dewtron.

This was a big coincidence because I had already built a Dewtron synth and so had my friend Max Norman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Norman

Then Nigel showed me about 12 typewritten pages. Brian had been possessed by aliens. He was an electronic engineer with no past interest in aliens or UFOs or anything esoteric whatsoever. 

Over a period of about a week he had felt compelled to write down what was dictated to him in the form of automatic writing. Someone else's hand controlled his pen.

The messages in general went along the predictable lines of 'We come in peace to bring you this message etc.' All very interesting, but you could have put it down to the imagination of someone.

But in these pages was one thing which was a specific experiment. I don't have the pages any more, but the message went like this:

'Take a diamond and cleave it in the quadrant mode, so that a beam of light of x angstroms strikes the third axis of the diamond at Y degrees.'

I have forgotten what x and y numbers were.

My father was a PhD in geology, working for BP research, so I showed him but he could not understand exactly how to do the experiment.

As far as I know nothing was done about these messages, but I kept in touch with Nigel for a while and Brian Bailey went crazy trying to understand what it all meant."


Later, the anonymous friend adds:
"The Dewtron synths were very bad because all the circuits were set in brown polyester resin and when they were built they could not be repaired. If you bought 2 VCOs these had to be matched and ordered together. I bought 2 and somehow both were destroyed. I sent them back with Nigel and Brian replaced just one for me, he would not give me both. A one oscillator synth is not much good to anyone."

In the following email, I asked to 'anonymous' why Nigel was sent to him and he reply:
"I am still in touch with Antoinette. I should ask her how she came to send Nigel to me about Brian Bailey of Dewtron. I know Brian went to talk to the people at Porton Down. Porton Down is a government and military research station in Wiltshire who also used to investigate UFO cases, maybe they still do. I don't think they were very interested."

I know, this entry is not very synth related... but you can't deny that this story made you laugh or -at least- put a smile in your face! Oh Dewtron! you have so much to tell us...

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Surprise!!! More Dewtron


Weird, I have the blog almost abandoned because I don't have all the time I wished but last months I saw several comments about the rare stuff we're talking here, seems that Google sent me all the people interested in rare/old synths, I hope this can help the visitors in any way. Sadly very few people give an email address or webpage to contact for a chat about the subject.

Luckily that was not the case of Patrick Kirby (of Planet Television London http://planet-television.com) who wanted to collaborate with the blog and all the people looking for information about Dewtron stuff. Patrick also likes old instruments, he told me he wrote an article about Selmer Musical Instrument company some time ago

Patrick scanned and cleaned this info-sheet about the Dewtron "Ring-O-Lett" Ring Modulator RM2 we're showing here. Obviously this short information doesn't reveal the magic behind this mysterious module but is a great help for all the people looking for a way to connect or test an RM2 module.

Also this little manual give us some interesting news about Dewtron, it seems that the name comes from "Design Engineering (Workingham) Ltd." a company located at that time at 254 Ringwood Road, Ferndown, Dorset, BH22 9AR - ENGLAND, the name of the owner was Brian H. Baily.

Wow! I think this was a great collaboration because to my knowledge there is not much information on the web more than all written in my previous posts. Thanks to Patrick Kirby for that, and I encourage to all of you who want to share any info about any old and rare electronic musical instrument to contact me, I will give you all the credits for that.




Saturday, June 26, 2010

Updating Dewtron

I'm very busy now to write new posts but will be some news when I finish the research of some rare devices. Recently, I realized that on my past post of Dewtron lost one image from the Dr. Robert P. Fletcher website. Is my intention to not duplicate information on the web and for that reason I don't copy resources in my blog and usually I put links to the sources. The web is dynamic, some webs are deleted frequently, so then we lost some information, even the archive.org can't catch all and we lost some pictures, maybe I will change my mind and do the same as Matrixsynth, duplicating to preserve the information.
Well, in any case as I saved the picture from Dr. Fletcher website, I've updated the link in the previous post and also posted here:


I've found this ad in the www.secuencer.de website;


But the most interesting discovery was on the Discofreq's Effects Database, under Dewtron brand name, is found the Fuzzorama effect. I can't found more info on the web, but all indicates that is the same Dewtron company.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Dewtron, or how to hide your magic (if you have it)

As I told in my previous post, I was re-reading my old magazines and this ad from 1975 got my attention:

I remembered that I saw this before but can't recall where, all I know about Dewtron (from D.E.W. Ltd.) until now is that this company was selling potted modules to build a synths... so I've started to search a little more...

In the Synthmuseum description for Dewtron they list the following instruments:

A1/Apollo
Gipsy
Mister Bassman
Modumatrix
And they are missing the "Project-X" that I just remembered now


In Tim Stinchcombe's website there's a scan of an article appeared november 1972 in Practical Electronics which include an D.E.W. Ltd. ad and a picture of a synth built with Dewtron's modules.


In the Dr Robert P Fletcher webpage he mention the Dewtron modules and give us a picture (linked here):

"My earliest synth was built from DEWTRON modules in the early 1970's. Here's a picture of the inside of a box with modules in place!"
In a post on MusicThing from 2005 some people remarks, about one strange synth on eBay that was possibly built with Dewtron modules (as MusicThing sometimes 'lost' the pictures, I put here again as a 'backup' for this very ugly instrument) and an anonymous writer said::
"Dewtron was the the trademark of the company run solely by Brian Bailey: Design Engineering Wokingham. Brian moved to Ferndown, Dorset, where he started to get messages from aliens which he was very mystified by.


The modules were awful, potted in resin so you could not repair them. The 'Modumatrix' switches were a great idea, but cheaply made. If you got a badly contacting switch in the middle of an assembly, you had to take them all apart to get at the one that was bad.


I think many people bought the modules and like me was disappointed. He claimed to have built a system for Led Zeppelin."

In this SounOnSound forum thread there's the following statement about the basspedals used by Mike Rutherford (Genesis):
"The Dewtron bass pedals Rutherford used were made by a small (now defunct) UK company based (IIRC) in Cornwall (or suchlike) that sold synthesiser kits. You could buy the boards ready made or you could buy them in kit form. The bass pedals were one of the few actual fully assembled 'products' that they made. They were pretty cheap even back then and intended for cheesy home organs that didn't come with bass pedals supplied."
And other comment:
"In terms of Bass Pedals, he used the Dewtrons "Mr Bassman" up to Selling, and moved to the Taurus for "The Lamb"."
Also about Rutherford's bass pedals, in "Hollow Sun" website there's an article about the Moog Taurus and they're assuring the following:
"Famous users include Mike Rutherford of Genesis who replaced his old Dewtron bass pedals with the Taurus"
So, Dewtron were in fact the brand for DEW ltd. custom 'potted modules', and judging by the references nothing magnificent. With this modules seems they built different synth incarnations (Apollo, Project-X, etc.). The fantastic "Modumatrix" was nothing more than a patch-matrix built with pushbuttons. And the Mr. Bassman seems was their "almost" recognised instrument, a factory built bass-pedal used by top rock bands (or at least for a while). That's all the info about the Dewtron I can found at the moment, if you know something more, I invite to share your comments with dewtron-gnorants like me.