Music Thing: The Elektron SidStation
Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:
It's hard to believe that people will spend $950 on a synthesizer built around the sound chip from an old Commodore 64. But Elektron, a Swedish synth company, have been selling the SID Station since 1997, and they're still in production today, on and off. This week Elektron announced that they'd found a stash of 100 'new' SID chips, so they're producing another 100 SID Stations.
The SID chip (or MOS 6581) was developed in 1981 by Robert Yannes, (who was later responsible for the Ensoniq Mirage, the first mass-market sampler). It was an engineering wonder - an analog/digital synth-on-a-chip including oscillators, filters and ring modulators. There was a SID in every one of the 25 million Commodore 64s sold, and it became the most hacked music chip ever built. That's why, 24 years-later, people are still using them.
If you can?t stretch to a SID Station, there are plenty of alternatives. You can build a MIDIbox SID which transforms an actual C64 into a real synth, with 15 knobs and loads of LEDs. Or there?s the SID Module Project, in which a German engineer is building SID components for modular synths. The cheapest and easiest SID devices come from HardSID, who have been making SID-based PCI soundcards since 1999. They?ll sell you a two-chip card for 199 Euros.
Finally, and perhaps most bizarrely, people are still developing new software for the Commodore 64 itself. Prophet 64 is an all-new suite of music software released for the machine last year. It includes a Roland TB-303 emulation. So that?s a 23 year-old machine being emulated on a 24 year-old one. My head hurts.
