ELKA SYNTHEX (1982)
ALL' INIZIO The Elka Synthex is one of few polyphonic structured machine to have deep bass, rich
strings, complex magical electronic sound in
30kg of pure analog circuits!
Build around 1981 by an italian
organ society called Elka in in cooperation with Orla ...ecc.. oh come on! you know that story with Mario Maggi
and Stevie Wonder last's edition ;)
Let's see and hear the Elka Synthex!
TECH :
VOICES: Featuring 2
analog DCO per voice with 16'8'4'2'1 foot , each Oscillator has the following waveforms: : Saw ,Square , Triangle and pulse PWM.; there's also individual white/pink noise generator and a 3 modes analog chorus.The DCOs are hard syncable and features an analog ring modulator with no depth between.
A total of 8 voices polyphony are generated by 4 boards with 2 voices on each, splittable in 2 layers of sound with 4 notes polyphony.
A special stereo mode sends each voice to right or left channel.
VCF: The Elka Synthex has excellent multimode analog filter based on Cem 3320 with ADSR: Lowpass 4 poles, bandpass, High pass with polarity inversion. The setup is very versatile including classical deep -24db, soft -6db
and bouncy -12db Oberheim manner.
LFO The first LFO has 4 different waveforms: Triangle, Sawtooth, Ramp, and Square assignable to osc(s) pwm(s) vcf amp.
A second LFO is assigned to a the joystick (pitch/cutoff) parameters: freq, delay
A- to OSC1 OSC2 PW1 PW2 VCF tri ramp up/down and square.
the LFOs reach a frequency range from 0.02 Hz up to 20 Hz .
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MIDI Second and third Synthex official releases feature a very basic midi interface with in /out /thru : you just have to deal with "note on" and "note off" with no velocity. As you can immagine Elka Synthex doesn't have very big midi buffer, and cpu could easily freezes for data overflows or unknown flows such as SMPTE codes... in this case just switch it off.
SEQUENCER A very good 4x steps sequencer with 128 events each clocked to sync master or slave with trigger IN and OUT - trigger pulse adjustable, write,
beats, rests, split, delete, loop, ready reset real time or step with rest pause, great for live performance! the sequence segments are transposable, and are saved in memory when you turn off the italian stallion.
This part is very well designed and really simple to use, and you will make loops ideas and bass lines in a breeze!
Memory: Elka Synthex has 40 presets, 40 user and pannel memory (the sound is actually on the pots) and since there's no SYSEXdump, you have to deal with tape load and save , but the interface is quite reliable and easy to understand.
Other features Split , double layer, polyphonic portamento/glide
Polyphonic
Glissando Envelope controls hold on/off, external pedal filter control.
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