This series of articles, by Graeme Durant, appeared in the Electronics Today International magazine from August 1985. It described the building of a string synthesizer, with quite some similarities with the Elektor Chorosynth (which was developed years before). Graeme Durant writes: “The string synthesizer originated in the 1970s, and perhaps owes more to organ developments than synthesizer technology; the basic instrument being polyphonic with preset sounds, usually generated by an organ-type frequency divider, gating and filtering, followed by a chorus generator to enhance the massed string quality. Although the string synthesizer is very commonly used in many types of music today, due to its unique ability to fill out the sound of a small band without being too forward, it is usually used as a backing instrument to other keyboards. So, with an average sort of selling price in the order of four hundred pounds for a commercial unit, the string synthesizer is often out of the reach of many amateur musicians, as a mere second instrument. That is where the ETI Sorcerer comes in. For a mere fifty pounds outlay, the Sorcerer provides this lush backing sound albeit in monophonic form only, but with sufficient power to produce very emotive backdrops.”
Please note that all (c) are with ETI magazine and the author.
