Nuevos sintes en el horizonte:


De vez en cuando surgen nuevas compañías de sintetizadores que crean grandes expectativas. Han venido circulando algunos rumores sobre una de esas compañías de nombre Seekers y el sintetizador SMS2000. Aparecieron algunas fotos en algunos foros de sintetizadores y algunos decian que las fotos eran producto del photoshop y que no eran reales etc. Así, desde hace un par de meses corrieron los rumores de la existencia/inexistencia de dicho sintetizador de la supuesta nueva compañía japonesa electrónica.
Antier apareció un artículo en los foros de discusión de la revista de música inglesa Sound on Sound, dónde aparecen nuevas fotos del sintetizador y hasta un supuesto encuentro y compra del mismo.
Todo parece indicar que el sintetizador sí existe y es una especie de minimoog mejorado. Ya veremos. Por lo pronto les paso la reseña/anécdota aparecida en SOS a cargo de Steven Cooperman:

"About a week ago I received a call from a friend who likes to hop from shop to shop looking for vintage gear or interesting new items. He was standing infront of a synthesiser and describing it to me on his mobile. His description intrigued me to such an extent, I decided to take the hour plus drive to see it for myself. It happened that the synthesiser just arrived that morning and wasn't there more than three hours. After playing around with it a tad, I knew I had to have it. The synthesiser is a programmable monophonic analogue by Seekers called the SMS2000. I had never heard of the manufacturer but the bloke at the shop told me they made an analogue vocoder too.

What is it? The SMS2000 reminds me quite a bit of the Minimoog Voyager. It has an adjustable knob interface like the Minimoog, a 3 1/2 octave keyboard, a crazy set of performance levers, and even a joystick. See pictures at the URLs provided below. But it seems as if Seekers wanted to one-up the Moog Voyager in almost every respect. One more oscillator, one more LFO, one more ADSR, ring modulator, fixed filter bank - like a Moog MuRF right in there but with frequencies set to those of a typical equaliser, full dual filters, and something called an XCU is also included. That's an expansion control unit which is a breakout box similar to the Moog VX-351. I don't own a modular, but it will come in handy patching into my MS-20.

I had been on the fence for some time as to whether I wanted to put out the money for a Voyager. But there always seemed to be too many little niggles and limitations with it. The Seekers seems to have overcome many of those. For example the Voyager can't invert control voltages, the Seekers can. The Voyager forces you into using the display for programming, the Seekers puts every function out there with its own knob or button. The display is only used for patch storage and retrieval, and MIDI related functions. The Seekers has a joystick on the knob interface where vertical controls one filter and the horizontal the other filter. At first I thought it a bit daft that it couldn't be patched to control all kinds of other things too, but when I considered that it seemed like an extra bonus thrown in there, and most synthesisers don't have one at all, then it seemed pretty cool.

The manual is adequate but full of typos and poor translations. Seekers is a Japanese company. There is no mention as to whether the filters are imitations of well known filters or not. Only that the 24dB/octave is a ladder filter and the 12dB/octave is a state variable. But both filters contain lowpass and highpass which can also be combined for bandpass. Both can self resonate.

I've only had the SMS for a week, and with a busy work schedule I haven't had much time to delve deeply into it yet. I'll write a more extensive review after I spend more time with it. The owner of the shop seemed to indicate these are trickling off the assembly line and it could be a couple of months before another shows up. I would expect major players like Turnkey to carry them when they begin to proliferate.

Here are some photos of the SMS. My flat is getting a bit too crowded with audio gear, so it's only a temporary setup. The MS-20 went to the floor to make room for my SMS. My Micromoog will probably be up for sale soon. I can't keep it all."