Long before it was fashionable and long before it was even inexpensive to own a synthesizer, before the days of digital, I became interested in electronic organs. Starting from scratch, I created the circuits that formed sounds you probably can't create today and maybe wouldn't want to!? Some of the 'melody lines' here were created on a synthesizer bought by Tom Demattos somewhere about '73. Don't remember what the name of it was, but it was pretty cool playing around with it. The rest of the sounds were created by soldering a bunch of passive components together, feeding them with an oscillator and pumping that into the mic input of a Realistic stereo cassette recorder. Half the time the sounds were modified by the input impedance of that sucker. I had a small plastic box with four or five pushbuttons on it, which passed for keys. Don't even think about tuning, because I was never sure what the proper resistor string was for separating notes. When I had enough of the single tracks recorded on cassette, these were played back onto a Teac reel to reel tape recorder using 'Sound with Sound', meaning the tracks bounced back and forth as you recorded them. You'd record one line on track A, then play a 2nd sound and it would be recorded with Track A onto Track B. The third line/sound took it back the other way. And, of course, there was a limit. You got roughly six 'bounces' and then things really became muddy. If you needed more than 6 lines, you had to use a mixer and multiple sound sources (tape recorders usually).
Now, of course, the whole process has changed, but these old tapes have been digitized, the noise filtered out, by Cool Edit Pro. This program does more than my old workshop of components and tape recorders ever did.
Here's a sampling of what I did then, in the now format of MP3:
Syntellation Sometime by Steve Tomporowski (5.6 MB)
Don't worry (or Warning!) I'll be posting more as I get the time to convert them from tape (reel to reel) to wav and MP3.
New! Rather than post more here, I've put up a couple of musical pieces up on Soundclick. www.soundclick/syemak