Malmsjö A 200 / Viscount S Dakota

Finally I made it! I just found out a little more about my Unknown Malmsjö Combo Organ. God knows I have been searching for info on it, thought i tried every combination on words that could match on Google. The label on it says Malmsjö but I was pretty sure it was a rebranded Viscount so anything from the obvious "Viscount Combo Organ" to specific parts such as the "Synth Effect" has been Googled with no success. But today I found this post on Infrequent Sound a Belarusian blogg which seems to be about odd gear of any kind.

So today I found out it was called S.Dakota (not a big guess that the S stands for South). Tried to search a little more on Google after finding out. But all I found was some Italian classified ads. Guess I'll get in touch with the guys at Infrequent Sound at first. And then if you as a reader by any chance has some info on the organ don't hesitate to contact me.

During Christmas I took the opportunity to open it up to get rid of some of the noise and tune it properly.  I got it in pretty good shape although I really don't think the synth-part is working as it should.

Here's some photos of the different parts on the outside and inside.

Restoring The Fostex Model 350 Recording Mixer

Last week I got me a really cheap Fostex 350 Recording mixer. My plan was simply to get something temporary to replace my borrowed Mackie Onyx 1620. Not that I thought this was a good replacement but something to keep me going. Already when I saw the ad for the Fostex it looked dirty and it was without any guarantees of working condition. But I thought it was worth the chance since it was not far away and it costed only about $50.

When I got it home it sounded all but good. Loads of noise from the pots and switches. To be honest I wasn't that pleased even to the low price and instead the Traynor 6400 that I got more or less for free ($15 extra) caught my interest. But that one wouldn't do as my everyday mixer.

Therefore I got into restoring the Fostex to some kind of usable condition. I took of the cover and all the controls and gave them a proper cleaning (fortunately I do not spend every friday night showering an old Fostex). The insides of the mixer also got quite some amount of contact cleaner to get rid of the noise. All had to be done from the top of the mixer since the bottom was covered with a giant circuit-board, glad I didn't have to do anything with that.

When both the inside and outside seemed fairly clean I simply put it together and connected the most important gear. It took a while to tort out where to set all the switches and even where to connect my amplifier and the iPhone I use for recording. But when I finally figured everything out, after consulting the manual, it really sounded quite nice. Compared to the Mackie it sounded kind of thick and it handled all the frequencies of my Solina String Ensemble through my DOD Phaser. Something I never really got that good in the Mackie. I'm really looking forward to record something with it to see how it can affect the final mix. Haven't thought to much about analog/digital or preamps in mixers before. But thinking about it, why wouldn't it matter.

Right now it feels really nice to be limited to 8 channels and it sure looks like a dream after cleaning ;-)

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Traynor 6400 & Fostex 350

Since my borrowed Mackie mixing console had to return to it's original owner I have been looking for cheap alternatives. So this weekend I replied to a classified ad on two consoles for about $70 together. And a couple of hours ago I picked them up.

The one that actually caught my interest was a Fostex 350 Recording Mixer. Not in it's best shape, but I gave it a try. 

The Fostex 350 Recording Mixer

After running through it quickly most things seem OK and I just have to dust it off to be able to use it. 

The second one a Traynor 6400 Mixer Amp wasn't that interesting at first but after connecting it to my new Malmsjö Combo Organ it really got me. A match lade in heaven.

The synth of the Malmsjö Organ and the Traynor 6400

It certainly looks and sounds as if these two were meant for each other. The built in reverb and quite powerful amp of the mixer brought the organ to life. Haven't checked all the possibilities of this one eather, but a proper clean up is a good start.  

6400 Mixer Amp Made in Canada

The in and outs of the 6400

The 6 channels of the Traynor 6400 Mixer Amplifier

The quite descent eq of the 6400

The sound of - The unknown Malmsjö combo organ!

Last week I got me a new organ again (you can read about how I got it here). This time a combo organ with synth part by a Swedish company called Malmsjö. However the organ might actually be a re branded Viscount, more about that in a later post.

The organ in itself sounds pretty much like an ordinary but quite good Italian organ. I haven't tried to many Italian ones but the Piano sounds are not far from but better than for example the GEM Instapiano. The organ sounds are a bit behind my favorite Philicordas but the bass and percussive sounds have quite some punch. I made a brief demo of the organ parts of it:


The most interesting part of it is the Synthesizer found on the bottom right of the organ called "Synth Effect". Actually it works mostly as some kind of filter for the piano (incl. spinett and clavi cord) sounds. With High Freq, Low Freq and Mid Freq buttons. Two simple envelopes ( kind of soft / hard attack) and a selector for square ore sine wave for the filter. Apart from these on/off selectors there are four sliders for Frequency, Amplitude, Response and Intensity.

To be honest though, whatever I do with the different knobs not much seems to happen. Might bee that all functions are not 100% working but since I haven't found any other demos or examples it's hard to tell. The Intensity slider however goes pretty fast into feedback on most settings and that might indicate that not everything is as it should bee.

I made a demo of this part as well:



As you can hear it's no Mini Moog that you get in the bargain with the combo organ, but it's a quite nice addition since you can mix the sounds freely and you also get a separate output for the Piano/Synth part.

I'm still trying to find out what the model is called and maybe if I find out more I'll be able to get more out of it.

I'll get back with some detailed photos to help trace it in a later post:

The unknown Malmsjö combo organ

There are quite a lot of used organs in the classified ads in Sweden. And normally I do not pick up a new one if it's too far away from home. However I look for organs all over the country and check them out a little extra if it seems to be something interesting.

When I discovered my latest addition to the collection it first didn't seem to be something special. But I have been curios about Malmsjö since the Swedish organist Nils Dacke uses them and this was a combo, which is always a bit more interesting. Therefore I asked for some more pictures and one of the pictures i received was this one:

I think you can see why it caught my interest the "Synth Effect" part. Was this actually a swedish combo organ with a built in synth? I starterd searching for information on the piece but found nothing, really nothing, on Google or elsewhere. It was really cheap (about $80) but located 350 km from my home, and not in a direction i normally travel so it was a bit to hard to pick it up and eventually I simply let it be.

But about two weeks ago the seller contacted me again and said the organ still hadn´t found a new owner. So I started looking for alternatives for the transport. Finally I put out a question on Facebook if anyone was going to do the trip from Värmland to anywhere near my hometown. And it worked, a friend of a friend was going to do the trip in just a week and was kind i enough to help me with the transport. And yesterday it arrived in my studio. I was quite eager to try it out, to see if there really was a synth and if so how it sounded.

At first I couldn't figure out how to get any of the synth effect features working. But finally I found out that the Piano part was the basis of the synthesis. And the synth effect was practically a kind of filter for the piano sounds. I guess you could call it a synth, but it's not quite a built in Moog or Arp.

More about the organ and it's sounds here

I stumbeled upon an Analogue Sequencer

A couple of years ago I bought a pretty cheap Yamaha AN200. Although Virtual Analogues in general and Groveboxes in particular hasn't been my area of interest I couldn't resist it thinking that it could be fun for the kids at least. They had actually just started to show some interest in some of my drum machines and synths. The Grovebox however didn't catch their attention for more than a couple of hours as they were fiddlin around with the preset techno rhythms.

Since then it has mainly been standing around in a corner in the studio just getting some attention every now and then when I needed some thick polysynth sounds. Actually it does sound quite good, but being bit of an orthodox when it comes to synths and organs I can't get the right feeling with the multifeature knobs.

Last week however I dug it out to try and use it as a sequencer for my Doepfer MS404. Don't know why I haven't thought about it earlier but I came across the idea after using my Roland TR626 as sequencer for the MS404 on my track DSTS. Even I realized that the AN200, even though beeing bit of a technobox, would be wiser to use is a sequencer instead of the TR626. One of the drawbacks, as I see it, with these multipurpose boxes is that you have to walk through the manual to get anything out of it. I mean with the Yamaha CS5or the Boss DR55 you just turn the power on and you know what to do. Anyway I sat down with the manual to the AN200 in the sofa this Wednesday to try to get a grip of the realtime and step programming features and pretty soon it came up to me...

It works just like an analogue sequencer!!! AN ANALOGUE SEQUENCER!!! I have had it for more than two years and hadn't discovered that feature yet (actually I think this was the first time I payed any attention to the manual).

Ever since I saw the Doepfer MAQ16 sometime in the mid nineties I have been dreaming about having an analogue sequencer of my own. And in the last years with cheaper DIY kits and the DarkTime I have been pretty close to ordering one. But someway with two kids, two cars and a house there is always something with higher priority in the households budget.

But now I actually own one, or at least a machine that works just like one. In the eight step mode (12 and 16 is also available) it is pretty straightforward and as long as you use it on an external synth instead of the internal VA you don't need to mix up your filter or osc settings with the pitch or the gate. I made a short demo of how it works on my Youtube-channel and hope to get a new track out on SoundCloud with this set up soon.