…but pretty close, unless you don’t let the phase synchronized oscillators spoil your fun. However, my trusty old Yamaha Electone D-85 has been vacuum cleaned and its rotating speaker system oiled. A few other parts had to be replaced as well, but it’s quite nice now.

A few cosmetic touches need to be done – and polish the outer parts. As you can tell from the picture, it’s been a while since the last dust-off. Next in the agenda: customize the whole organ, insert quite a few potentiometers and have it retrofitted with MIDI. It would be nice to be able to program new arpeggios and rhythms as well, but enough is enough. It’s a shame, though, that these things don’t exist in large numbers anymore. I’d gladly get myself an E-series organ, and E-75, preferably. The only thing missing is space for that thing.

I’ve done some serious sampling on my D-85 and one day in the future I’ll put the whole library up for downloading. There’s plenty to do, looping etc., but it’s slowly taking shape. Upper Keyboard and all the related Orchestra, Custom Voices and Special Presets are all recorded 48 kHz/24 bit, with and without noise (cleaned and unprocessed). With Ensemble/Celeste and dry. It’s not perfect, but it’s actually damn convincing.

There’s still a lot to do, the solo keyboard, for instance, requires heck a lot of attention due to its nuances, controls and everything. Sampling is, after all, comparable to taking Polaroids and only as accurate as it is allowed to be: the credibility of the end result depends totally on the size and amount of the imaginary polaroid snapshots. The more, the merrier. 🙂