Sounds Of The Rare Logan Vocal Synth
The Vintage Audio Institute Italia, a vintage gear collection and recording studio in Florence, shared this ‘shut up and play’ style demo of the rare Logan Vocal Synth.
The Logan Vocal Synth is similar to some ’70s ‘orchestration’ keyboards, which combined combined multiple synthesis approaches – string ensembles, formant-based vocal synthesis, lead synth, etc – into one instrument.
“This instrument is really inspiring,” they note. “So, we also ended up making a couple of songs of which a few are included in this video but some were left out to keep things snappy.”
They shared the following info about the Logan Vocal Synth:
“Most of the performance info and some technical details are in the video already as text but a quick introduction and recap would go something like this:
Logan Vocal Synth
Weight 50 kilos
61 keys and 61 slider potentiometers
The upper panel is dedicated to instrument selection buttons and Voice vowel sound selection, panning left and right, the monophonic and polyphonic synthesizers presets, volumes and modulation controls.
The front of the panel is dedicated to the volumes, attack and decay controls of the instrument sections Strings, Piano and Voice and their distribution to each side of the keyboard split point.
The architecture of this instrument is unique and might have been a bit of a gamble that sometimes worked out great and other times less so.
Our service technician had to slightly change the trigger circuitry to render the triggering of the notes more reliable and generally stable.
We also decided to non-invasively modify the two octaves below the split point to continue down to the lowest note on the keyboard instead of starting over two octaves up – essentially repeating the range of the 2 octaves above it.
This rather odd engineering choice might have been a remnant from a double manual, organ approach to the keyboard that perhaps was scrapped late in the engineering process.
You change to the modified “normalized” note distribution with the foot pedal switch, and it can be disengaged to return to the factory setting.
Our service tech also had a “tester board” with an extension connector cable custom made to more easily test components without having to continuously pull out the boards one by one.
This was a game changer during the long service and restoration.
The Vocal Synth does have an empty card slot so it’s likely it came equipped with a similar tester board from the factory.
We also installed LEDs to each circuit board – that lights up when in operation – to see which card the master oscillator distribute commands to – just like you would to a Yamaha CS60 or CS80 – although they are quite a different animal the technical principle is the same.
Some of the engineering wonkiness was decided to be kept intact and you can hear the fluctuations, a slight tremble, on a lot of the sounds.
If you have further technical questions the schematics are available to download thanks to the internet archive. They’re not exactly straight forward but it’s all in there and we couldn’t really explain things better than in the video anyways.”
For more info about the Logan Vocal Synth’s capabilities, view this video by German synthesis Hainbach:
Finally, check out this Italo-Disco synth duet between Hainbach & Sam Battle, aka Look Mum No Computer.
Watch the videos and share your thoughts about the Logan Vocal Synth in the comments!
