Analogue Easter Eggs!

[The Elf]

I recently acquired an old (c 1979) Teisco S100P, and it has been a beautiful honeymoon so far. More significantly I've made a couple of interesting discoveries, and it got me thinking...

The S100P is a humble preset monosynth, with a few curious features for its date of manufacture, including onboard reverb and flanger ("delay and chorus, John? Nah!"). It's very reminiscent of the ARP Pro Soloist (the synth credits ARP's aftertouch mechanism on the underside of the case!), and some of the presets are quite similar. This thing has some inspiringly beautiful sounds that are already making their way into current tunes. I'm a happy owner.

And then I made a discovery.

While flicking the aftertouch 'Vibrato' switch on a couple of patches with built-in vibrato I realised that I could defeat the hard-set vibrato by leaving the switch half-way between stations. This instantly makes some of the cheesiest sounds much more usable; I have a bit of a loathing for 'always on' vibrato - Hammond organists and opera singers are the worst culprits!

This made me curious about some of the other switches, and I found that by setting the 'Brightness' aftertouch switch between stations I can add resonance to every patch too! This transforms some of the presets into a completely different tone than the name suggests - 'Horn', for example, becomes some wild synth lead that would grace a Pink Floyd track!

Setting the switches is a bit of a balancing act, and, short of getting a mod done, I'm already considering a carefully sized wooden plug to jam in the switch.

I'm in the middle of a couple of mixes, so no time to experiment further right now, but I will when the rush is over - and maybe I'll find more tricks.

Anyone else come across similar 'Easter Eggs' in the analogue world and care to share?

[Ben Asaro]

That’s awesome, you Hendrix’d the synth!

[Eddy Deegan]

On the Thomas Playmate organs, there is a row of push-buttons to select the drum rhythm to play. Pressing one button will auto-cancel any other button in that row. If, however, you press any number of them at the same time (it can be tricky to get exactly right) such that they stay depressed, then it will play those rhythms simultaneously.

Anyone else come across similar 'Easter Eggs' in the analogue world and care to share?

Not quite the same, but there is a neat easter egg in the Prophet-6 and OB-6 synths.

Set one of the (digital) FX slots to 'Spring reverb'. Making sure the volume knob is not on silent, give the synth a sharp knock with your hand on either end-cheek and see what happens. You need to be plugged into some form of amplification to hear the result.

[muzines]

Funny you mention the half-switch thing.

Way back in the midsts of time I had a Moog Prodigy, and there was one switch, I think it was one of the waveform switches, where if you set it "between stations" (album title there?), the oscillators would stay permanently on (like drone mode on the Pro One) - a feature it otherwise didn't have...

[The Elf]

Great stuff, guys!

Keep 'em coming!

[N i g e l]

YAMAHA Reface CP

if you balance the piano "TYPE" rotary switch halfway between two settings and power on, the sound selected is an accoustic piano patch

I replaced my 6 way rotary with a 7 way which makes things easier for regular use.

[BigRedX]

Although the Korg MS series of semi-modular synths used Hz/Volt for their CV input, the oscillator modulation inputs are calibrated at Octave/Volt, so with a little ingenuity a standard Octave/Volt CV source can be used to control them without needing an Octave/Volt to Hz/Volt convertor.

[Eddy Deegan]

Not sure if easter egg, but undocumented (and possibly very useful) function on the Prophet-6 and OB-6.

Both synths treat voices 000 - 499 as the writeable user bank, and voices 500 - 999 as the non-writeable factory presets. However, you can overwrite the factory presets with your own if you wish.

To do this, hold down both the Transpose Up and Transpose Down buttons, then press 0 while holding them. This will copy your entire user banks (0-499) into the factory banks (500-999). You cannot select the voices to copy, it will do all of them.

You now can fill your user bank with new voices to get double the normal maximum number of custom patches.

[muzines]

If you hit the prophet 6, the digital fx makes a spring reverb twonk as if it has springs inside...

[Eddy Deegan]

If you hit the prophet 6, the digital fx makes a spring reverb twonk as if it has springs inside...

The OB-6 too ... but in both cases, only if you have the spring reverb set in one of the FX slots

[Folderol]

If you hit the prophet 6, the digital fx makes a spring reverb twonk as if it has springs inside...

The OB-6 too ... but in both cases, only if you have the spring reverb set in one of the FX slots

I seem to remember reading somewhere that this was a designed feature deliberately included in some synths.

Fascinating stuff overall

[The Elf]

The thing I find most amazing about this feature is that it obviously requires the circuitry to have some sort of accelerometer - which is surely extra cost to the manufacturer and buyers?!

[Wonks]

Or something like the modern equivalent of a mercury switch. You only need a simple contact to be made to trigger a sample.

[Eddy Deegan]

The thing I find most amazing about this feature is that it obviously requires the circuitry to have some sort of accelerometer - which is surely extra cost to the manufacturer and buyers?!

It is an accelerometer. Dave Smith demos it here: https://youtu.be/fmhdYJDnfsU?t=557

I can't find the exact timestamp but somewhere in the 'Evening With Dave Smith' video I'm pretty sure he mentions that the cost of the spring reverb easter egg was negligible, adding a few cents to the production cost.

[The Elf]

We need more thinking like that in the world in general!

[nathanscribe]

The S-100P is my secret weapon, it's a very underrated synth I think! Aftertouch routing is a lot of fun, the reverb is wonderfully characterful, the bass is really good, and it has plenty of charm overall.

I've got two, and one of them has never been in tune. On certain settings it flips wildly between two adjacent notes, and I've never fixed it because I like the wonkiness. Broken? Nope, just 'quirky'.

Not so much an 'easter egg' as a technique, but on the old Juno 60, I set up an organ patch using the pulse wave, 1-oct down sub, and resonant filter tuned to an octave and a fifth to crudely emulate drawbars – then add just a touch of VCA boost to get a bit of overdrive, just enough to grit it up a touch. The 60 lacks the 6's smooth HPF, but the VCA level control (meant to help balance the output level of different presets) had its uses too. Run the output through even a basic rotary speaker sim and it sounds pretty good.

[The Elf]

Not so much an 'easter egg' as a technique, but on the old Juno 60...

I also used to create Hammond sounds on my old Juno 6 - set fastest attack and fastest decay with low sustain and send this to the filter to get 'key click'!

[Rich Hanson]

The thing I find most amazing about this feature is that it obviously requires the circuitry to have some sort of accelerometer - which is surely extra cost to the manufacturer and buyers?!

It is an accelerometer. Dave Smith demos it here: https://youtu.be/fmhdYJDnfsU?t=557

I can't find the exact timestamp but somewhere in the 'Evening With Dave Smith' video I'm pretty sure he mentions that the cost of the spring reverb easter egg was negligible, adding a few cents to the production cost.

I used to have a guitar pedal that had a spring emulation, I used to wish it had something like that. No particular practical purpose, it just would have amused me

[Martin Walker]

Not sure if easter egg, but undocumented (and possibly very useful) function on the Prophet-6 and OB-6.

Both synths treat voices 000 - 499 as the writeable user bank, and voices 500 - 999 as the non-writeable factory presets. However, you can overwrite the factory presets with your own if you wish.

To do this, hold down both the Transpose Up and Transpose Down buttons, then press 0 while holding them. This will copy your entire user banks (0-499) into the factory banks (500-999). You cannot select the voices to copy, it will do all of them.

You now can fill your user bank with new voices to get double the normal maximum number of custom patches.

You can perform a similar manoeuvre with the Prophet 12 if you need more custom patches.

Martin

[N i g e l]

YAMAHA Reface CP
if you balance the piano "TYPE" rotary switch halfway between two settings and power on, the sound selected is an accoustic piano patch

Yamaha have finally issued a statement about this "test tone requiring low memory use"

https://www.yamahasynth.com/reface-cate ... ster-egg-1

[The Elf]

It's not the first time Yamaha have done something like this.

Anyone that has a DJX Mk1 - connect up with MIDI and marvel as you witness the controllers send MIDI CCs in they way that the manual specifically says they don't. This was a feature from the higher spec models that probably was meant to be switched off in the budget models! Oops!

Now if I was a manufacturer I'd put features like this in and let people, erm... find them...

[Dashanna]

Jamming in two or more of those old self-cancelling radio buttons used to give unintended but interesting results, as far as I can remember.

I'm thinking of the Dimension D chorus, and certain drum machines where patterns could be combined, but I think presets on some synths too (Korg Micro Preset? Jupiter 4?)

[muzines]

Jamming in two or more of those old self-cancelling radio buttons used to give unintended but interesting results, as far as I can remember.

Also, famously, the 1176, where "All Buttons In" ("British Mode") (pressing all the ratio buttons in) gave the some quite wide-ranging unintended circuit behaviour, which gave a really interesting characteristic.

But in All-Button Mode, a few more things are happening; the ratio goes to somewhere between 12:1 and 20:1, and the bias points change all over the circuit. As a result, the attack and release times change. This change in attack and release times and the compression curve that results is the main contributor to the All-Button sound. This is what gives way to the trademark overdriven tone. The shape of the compression curve changes dramatically in All-Button. Where 4:1 is a gentle slope, All-Button is more like severe plateau! Furthermore, in All-Button mode there is a lag time on the attack of initial transients. This strange phenomenon might be described as a "reverse look-ahead".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1176_Peak_Limiter

[The Elf]

Jamming in two or more of those old self-cancelling radio buttons used to give unintended but interesting results, as far as I can remember.

I'm thinking of the Dimension D chorus, and certain drum machines where patterns could be combined, but I think presets on some synths too (Korg Micro Preset? Jupiter 4?)

I have a Dimension D and can say that pushing multiple buttons doesn't do anything particularly useful, but I do recall certain drum machines doing interesting things!

[Eddy Deegan]

Not an easter egg I suspect, but something I found interesting. It's easier to see in a dark room. On the OB-6, when you press any key it activates a blinking LED tucked inside the case underneath the patch number display. You can see it if you align your eyes to be on the same horizontal plane as the keybed.

It could be quite an attractive mod to bring that out to a coloured LED exposed via a new hole drilled in the case somwhere, if you were that way inclined...

... but I wouldn't do anything like that without checking with DSI support first