Clef Products (Electronics) Ltd.

In the next entries I will be publishing some information about Clef Products Ltd. (sometimes called Clef Electronics). This company had very interesting kits, some of them were ahead of their time, but badly marketed. I have a couple previous post about Clef, look for the Clef tag.

I've found this web with profuse information about Clef and the kits they were selling at that time:
http://audiotools.com/en_mi_dead_b.html

In conversation with our friend Jeffrey Jones about Clef, he recalls:

"As regards Clef I have met Alan Boothman twice, once at an electronics exhibition where he had a stand displaying the piano and string ensemble, and once when I went to his premises to pick up the cabinet for the piano. He was always very friendly and helpful. I also had contact from someone who used to work at Clef. He was advertising to buy a String Ensemble about two years ago. I contacted him and he gave me a valuable insight into the company which I can share with you."
Sure we will enjoy what you have to told us Jeff! He also sent this old Clef two-page catalog pictured here:

I made this chronological list of Clef instruments/kits:

• 1972 - PE Electronic Piano (Practical Electronics, sep 1972 to jan 1973)
• 1975 - Joanna (PE Joanna - Practical Electronics, may to sept 1975, may 1977)
• 1976 - Sound Design (updated Joanna) (Practical Electronics, mar 1976 pg.215?)
• 1978 - String Ensemble (PE String Ensemble - Practical Electronics, mar to july 1978)
• 1978 - Electronic Piano (88 keys, 72 keys and 'Stage Piano', three versions of an updated Joanna)
• 1979 - Master Rhythm (PE Master Rhythm - Practical Electronics, dec 1980 to jan 1981)
• 1979 - Band-Box (PE Bandbox - Practical Electronics, nov 1981to feb 1982)
• 1982 - Microsynth (aka. uSynth and later B30 Microsynth - Practical Electronics, jun to aug 1982)
• 1984 - PDSG

I don't know if Clef had more than those instruments/kits mentioned here. From all of it, there are so little info on the web, so, with the help from some friends, in the following posts we will be talking about some of this rare instruments.

The PE MINISONIC

After some months of delay I finally found some time to post the first collaboration here.
The following article came from my good friend Jeffrey Jones who built an MINISONIC, the original, el número 1, the mark I. We both found that there is almost nothing of information about this synth on the web, so Jeff therefore wrote about his experience with the MINISONIC.

Minisonic 1

The original minisonic was designed to be as cheap as possible to allow more people to be able to own a synthesizer. All of the circuits were designed to be as cheap and simple as possible. The unit did not even have a keyboard but used a stylus and keys etched on a printed circuit board to operate. It used batteries to avoid a power supply. The whole synthesizer was built around three fairly small printed circuit boards. The kit consisted of the circuit boards and components but nothing else. The constructor therefore had to make a cabinet and etch the keys onto a PCB. On the plus side the synthesizer was very cheap and even allowing for the cabinet other extras the cost was about one tenth of that of the ETI4600 which was available as a kit at about the same time. Additionally the modules were connected by patch cords which made it very flexible.

The PCB's were very easy to construct and the unit worked first time. The obvious drawback was having to make your own cabinet and keyboard. Additionally the patchcord system required a lot of wiring from the PCB's to the front of the cabinet and the provision of sockets.

In use there were a number of problems which would be expected in a unit this cheap. The stylus keyboard was very hit and miss, it was difficult to hit the right note cleanly and there was an obvious gap between lifting from one note to another. Intermitting connection of the stylus also made notes a bit unstable.

The unit that I made covered four octaves but it was not possible to set up the span of the oscillators to cover this range in tune. In practice the keyboard could only be used over two and a half octaves. The sample and hold circuit was quite basic resulting in a drift in tune with fairly long notes. The tuning of the oscillators was not very stable and could drift even during the playing of a single tune. 

One other strange problem was to do with the way the minisonic generated a trigger pulse. It used a high frequency oscillator signal which was sent to the stylus and was detected from the keyboard. This allowed a single stylus contact to generate control voltage and trigger pulse. Holding the stylus and wearing headphones allowed the high frequency signal to be transmitted to the keyboard before actually touching it. This generated a trigger pulse to operate the synthesizer resulting in the previous note being heard.

On the plus side the original unit had two oscillators which could be used to modulate each other. The patchcord system allowed for great flexibility enabling many modules to be connected in different ways. The ring modulator was also a bonus. 

In conclusion the original minisonic synthesizer was a good introduction to sound synthesis and great for producing a wide range of sounds. It was not however very practical for playing tunes. I passed it to a friend who used the basic circuits to build a Minisonic 2. This had none of the problems of the original.

For those of you that don't know what synth we're talking about, here you can find a website with the scanned pages from the Practical Electronics magazine (nov 1974 to mar 1975) including the erratas:
Tim Stinchcombe - PE Minisonic articles ( http://www.timstinchcombe.co.uk/index.php?pge=pemini )

Thanks Jeff! I also encourage others to share info about electronic musical instruments not easily found on the web.

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.

Deadmau5 stuff

Interesting stuff in the toys room of deadmau5.

The asq16, a starry sequencer

I'm coming again with strange stuff. The ASQ16 sequencer. I think this is very interesting because googling about this there is nothing. I never saw one of this and never saw any product from this company, BASTA sound+movie, Berlin SO36.

It seems a very simple sequencer, but certainly I can't confirm if is 'simple' or not because I can't read the panel labels. And the 16 in the name is confusing because it seems that have 2 channels of 8 steps, barely I can read the first knob could be "sequence lenght"and can see 8 stops in the selector, but below there is a switch and maybe this could chain channel A with channel B to get 16 steps. The second knob is "speed control" that is clock or tempo, of course. Below there are two buttons, green and red, easily one can think that is 'start' and 'stop' or 'reset'. Then, there are two CV outputs and a knob that seems is "range", the other controls and jacks are unreadable.

I think is an interesting thing to share here, not because a sequencer is a rare bird, but this brand and model maybe is not so common. This was seen on eBay Germany
(http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dllViewItem&item=180604369266#ht_500wt_1156)
possibly the link will have a short life so I grabbed the pics to put here. I think someone else know about this rarity, judging for the 35 bids and for the price payed (202€)

I waited a time to see if the usual blogs about synths (Matrixsynth, Sequencer.de, etc.) mention this, but nobody talk about this sequencer. I think is rare enough to let pass away, hope you find interesting too.

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.

To take the Live control

Recently I was watching a Plastikman video where he used a MIDI controller designed (or built?) by his father, and I though: why my father never built a MIDI device to me?... surely I really liked if he had, but my father wasn't involved in electronics or technology at all.

Anyway, if you are interested in the controller of the Hawtin family you could see it in action in this YouTube video, I took a picture of it and shown here:

Making some research I was able to found a better picture of this console (some knobs changed) in Derivative website:

Hmmm suspiciously it seems built around the MIDIBOX circuitry, this makes me remind another famous control surface based on the MIDIBOX................... aha! I recall now: the Monolake's Monodeck, visiting Monolake's web there is a lot of information but I can't see it very clearly to compare with Plastikman's CTRL Live controller, but 5 seconds later I found this better pic:

There is not much information about Plastikman's console, but is possibly built with some MIDIBOX boards, at least to me it have 'that MIDIBOX look'. This two consoles seems somewhat expensive, custom-built, today there are too many controllers out there, being the Akai APC40 the most popular or the cheaper one Novation Launchpad, but what is evident that using a 'custom-built' controller could be more productive or give a fast-feedback for live gig.

The soft synths and sequencers are a great advance in music technology but without a doubt, the computers doesn't have the human interface that a musician needs.

Minisonic music missed

Pages ahead, from my previous post, I've found this ad with PE Minisonic kits, parts, pcb's AND the "Symbiosis" cassette by Malcolm Pointon.

The Minisonic series of articles was published in Practical Electronic magazine between november 1974 and march 1975 issues, by a man named G. D. Shaw. I don't have any of these magazines, but I've saw the scans of this synth in the Anders Sponton's Cloned Analog Gear web, but the scan of Anders don't came from the magazines, is from a book published with all the constructive articles of the Minisonic and other things.

Judging by this ad, it seems that in the last article of the Minisonic was offered to the readers a companion tape with the music created with this synth.

I must admit that I never heard about Mr. Malcolm Pointon never in my life, then Wikipedia came to help me and I've learned about the very tragic life of this man. Obviously, I didn't know their music. I think it will be very interesting to hear this cassette, in first place because is related with the main role of this blog (electronic arts-electronic instruments) and then because it could be the only "electronic work" of this man demoing a very particular instrument.

I call all the people out there, mainly to the UK people, to search in the old pile of cassettes looking for this gem... and please share with us!
 
For more information about the Minisonic (and the PE Synthesiser) you could visit the Julian Bunn webpages about it, here and here. Very nteresting is the Minisonic serial number 001 (at the bottom of this page) maybe this was the used by Malcolm Pointon?
 
At the end, I want to show an alternative casing for the Minisonic with keyboard in this ad by Phonosonic, in this same magazine (also pay attention to the alternative casing for the PE Synthesiser and the kits for the PE Joanna piano that I've wrote before) .

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.

Joanna, the "shE-Piano"

Has been a while since the last post, to reward the curious visitor here this time I bring a piano. There are many builders of synthesizers, a bunch of organ builders ... but how many people have built a piano? And I'm talking about e-pianos, of course.

Reviewing my old magazines I found in Practical Electronics a series of articles to build the "Joanna" a very complete electronic piano for its time. The designer was a man named A. J. Boothman, I believe this man had a sort of relationship with the CLEF company, and certainly had a kit available through this company (although there were other companies offering it).

I did not have the opportunity to see the full series of articles, this was published between May and September 1975 and I only possess August and September. Judging by these two parts, it seems to me that was well designed and really well tested because at the end the author makes some recommendations on amps and speakers to obtain a good sound, making references to the equipment he used.

I really like to see the full serie of articles to have a further insight on this instrument, because how many people you know, that had made an e-piano? And if we could get some sound samples that would be really great! The interesting thing here is an e-piano that sound... 'electronic', because if you want more real pianos (and cheap), the samplers are the easy ways. Enjoy the pictures.