Gear In-depth & Longer Blogs

We went to the MPG Awards for the first time (as sponsors no less!) - this our report on what we heard, what we saw, and why we support the work that the Guild do. The Soundgas Team at the MPG Awards: L to R - Tony & Jo Miln, Joel Kidulis, Declan Kitts At Soundgas we’re very keen to support good causes and as well as our giving impacts, we seek to help and encourage artists, engineers and the music community at large. The MPG (Music Producers Guild; see below for more info) is an organisation that celebrates and...

A quick run through some of the reasons that we are happy to call out the idea that Roland Space and Chorus Echoes are not reliable. We're confident that this is a myth brought into being by too many people spending time with neglected and abused machines. However, like many things, it's about arming yourself with knowledge, and realising you get what you pay for. But before we get into that here's a time-lapse video showing our tech Doctor Huw servicing one of our RE-201 Space Echoes:  A post shared by Soundgas Limited (@soundgasltd) on Jun 15, 2017 at 5:59am...

When it's gone it's gone. A recent meeting with the man instrumental in saving Abbey Road Studios from being flattened for development gets Tony thinking about what can be done to prevent other irretrievable losses of cultural history. Last week we had the pleasure of meeting Peter Cobbin and Kirsty Whalley from Such Sweet Thunder when they visited Soundgas. The pair met while working at Abbey Road and are legends in the world of mixing sound for picture (2012 London Olympics - the largest multi-track recording ever made, assorted Harry Potters and Hobbits, 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics...). Peter was the first...

I first laid hands on a synth in 1981 - a very brief ‘go’ on an older boy’s MS-10 (I was shown how to do the intro to Silver Machine by Hawkwind - great excitement). However, living in rural Derbyshire, transport was more important to this teenager than playing space rock anthems, and funds went on a succession of motorbikes and cars. My pals in Sheffield with its 2p bus fares could spend any spare money on wondrous noise making devices. In 1987, I wandered into Carlsbro Sound Centre in Mansfield to finally buy a synth: I was sold a...

  In which Tony meets Nils Frahm and his Junos and RE-501s, and Nils meets a Soundgas Binson, and The Magic Typewriter... Barely a day goes by when I don’t consider how lucky we are to live and work in the hills of Derbyshire; beautiful countryside, peaceful villages, miles away from the noise and pollution of urban life. But being a hundred-plus miles from London does have its disadvantages: we miss most of the one-off gigs and special events that tend to only happen in the metropolis. Not so this month: a week ago last Friday I got to hang...

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin. I'd heard whispered rumours of a Dynacord echo that with a flat spinning disc instead of tape, but as my searches yielded no further information, I put it down to being just another vintage gear tall tale. That was until a year or two later, when I happened upon what appeared to be a very stylish sixties typewriter, housed in a modest two tone carry case. Where a typewriter would ordinarily have a set of keys, this elegant machine had but a handful of buttons and knobs. A symphony of understated sixties...

Some information on the how, and the why, of modifying vintage Echorecs with varispeed control. Binson Echorecs were all manufactured with a fixed speed motor and Binson founder, Dr Bonfiglio Bini, together with his principal engineer, Scarano Gaetano, created something very special with their considerations for the fixed head spacings of the Binson Echorec. The four playback heads on an Echorec 2 offer delay times of approximately 75ms, 150ms, 225ms, and 300ms. Dr Bini chose these spacings to create musically-related delay times: if the longest delay tap is a quarter note, then head three is a dotted eighth note, head...

Soundgas Studio Services Update: First Audio Demos Released, Limited Slots Now Available Our remote access studio service is getting closer to full launch, but the news is that we now have limited slots available each month - thanks to our engineer, Ben Hirst, and also to our fine beta testers who've sent us some amazing music to work on. The studio is very nearly complete - as a studio full of vintage gear ever can be - and we're super-excited about the range of material we've been asked to work on. This has included the studio's first paid session - processing some...

Regeneration: Synths Beyond Sustainability by Tony Miln The recent climate change coverage in the media is a wake up call that we ignore at our peril (looking at you, President Trump). I've written about the importance of us educating and training new technicians to ensure the future of the classic instruments and gear that we all use and cherish, but is there also an environmental argument for doing so? Most modern synths, effects and amps are surely more energy efficient than their predecessors, but what is the cost of continuing to deplete precious resources by churning out an endless stream...

NEW ARTICLE FOR PREMIER GUITAR MAGAZINE: Modulation Nation: Explore the History & Mystery of Chorus, Phasing & Flanging Effects Tony's latest article for America's finest guitar magazine, Premier Guitar, is out now. Attempting to condense the history, use, and notable examples of chorus, flanger and phaser effects, into a single magazine article is far from easy for someone who could fill a book writing solely about phaser pedals. However, this turned out to be a labour of love - in the process of researching the article, I remembered and learned a great deal, and put a few misremembered 'facts' to bed. ...

Synthfest 2018 Report - Soundgas Bring The Noise This weekend we returned to Sheffield for Synthfest UK 2018 organised by Sound On Sound Magazine. While we’d agreed to bring a more sensible amount of gear than last year, there was still more than a Volvo estate full - even before we realised we’d missed out the Roland SH-5… More information below, but we managed to get out from behind the stand and film some highlights for our new IGTV channel - click on the stills to view (part three featuring the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble's performance of John Carpenter's Escape...

The EMS Synthi HiFli by Tony Miln If you’re a guitar pedal nerd, then the EMS Synthi HiFli is the pinnacle of desirability: it is the stuff of legend; a rare and much-mythologised beast that is seldom-sighted - sporting many sliders with alluring names. In his book, ‘Analog Man’s Guide To Vintage Effects’, Tom Hughes officially anointed the HiFli king of kings - rarest of the rare - big chief amongst the hen’s teeth. In short, the EMS Synthi HiFli is the ultimate vintage guitar ‘pedal’; good examples are very few and far between. I set out many years ago now...

How To Buy Vintage Gear Well (Part One) We all love a bargain; it seems nearly everybody knows someone else who got lucky and picked up a classic for next to nothing, though it never seems to happen to you or I (although, on reflection the price I paid for my first Grampian 636 now seems a steal, but at the time £70 was the going rate for one in need of work!). I remember the eagle-eyed guy who spotted a very early Marshall amp head sitting abandoned in a skip (dumpster US fans) full of garbage that, once restored,...

Part two of our series about the people who can fix all this old gear, people who really KNOW it inside out. And it’s also about what can be done about the slow but steady loss of this deep knowledge and real, hands-on experience from the world of vintage audio. Are you a tech looking for work reading this? Or maybe you want to learn (and are local to us)? More info below, but we definitely want to hear from you! This weekend I Iearned that we lost John Leimseider - a lovely, warm and generous man and a true...

To describe Daphne Oram's Still Point as groundbreaking is akin to suggesting the Beatles sold the odd record. Composed for double orchestra, turntable manipulation and echo chambers with additional filtering - in 1948, when Oram was only 23. It predates the rise of the DJ as instrumentalist by three decades or more and is thought to be the first ever composition to feature real time electronic transformation of instrumental sounds.  IMPORTANT NOTE: You can listen to the entire Pioneers of Sound concert right now on the BBC iPlayer (if you are in the UK) - but this link will only work until mid-August!...

This blog is not a another guide to Synthi AKS, but rather it's about my experience encountering and using one of these remarkable instruments while "testing" the one shown above following a full restoration. This process gave me pause to consider what it is that makes some pieces of gear so completely captivating and endlessly inspiring. A longer video demo of my AKS experience features at the bottom of this post... (And just before we get into it, special mention to our remarkable in-house techs Doctor Huw and Chris for their tireless work to bring this beauty back to life, and also to Keith...