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The Polymoog was a different story. I felt that it sounded by far
not as big and fat as it looked and there seemed practically no way to make
it sound "bigger". It seemed to be quite complicated to use as
well, compared to my only other "real" synth, the MS-10. The only
other keyboard I owned at that time was a strange analogue string/multi
keyboard from Elka called "Elkatwin 61" which is fully
polyphonic, has two groups of preset sounds that can be detuned against
each other, then put through one of the two separate chorus/ensemble
circuits (or both) and on top of all there's of the most beautiful phasers
I've ever heard. To cut a long story short: This was a really MASSIVE sound
compared to what I got from the Polymoog although I was always stuck with
the Elka's few presets... The situation got even worse when I got a new
toy, a Mellotron, in the summer of 1993 (instead of going on holiday that
year). This seemed to be much more interesting and so the Polymoog was
gathering dust in a corner for about a year before I took the time to play
it again one weekend. What happened then is something I still remember very
well: I don't know why, but I had never turned up more than one slider on
the mixer. This time I did it - I turned up the VCF (the attack time of the
VCF envelope set a bit above zero), turned up the "Direct" slider
a bit as well and what came out of the Polymoog then blew me away.
"Pheeaaoouuw!" It was exactly the lead sound from Kraftwerk's
"The Model" that I found by accident, and it was the beginning of
a real love affair. I cancelled everything I wanted to do that weekend and
started a belated discovery tour. There was quite a lot I discovered: First
of all FREEing the VCOs from sync is a very good idea, the resonators are a
wonderful tool and great phasing effects can be achieved when more than one
slider on the mixer is up. From today's point of view it seems really
strange to me why I didn't find out those Polymoog basics immediately.
Maybe the step upward from the MS-10 to the Polymoog was a bit too big at
first...
So then, I ended up being not only a big fan of Kraftwerk but also
made great friends with their (ex-) Polymoog. A friendship that sadly was
not to last longer than six years. The beginning of the end was in 1998
when the Polymoog started to put out a very high pitched tone (about 16kHz)
that became tiring to the ears when I played for more than half an hour. So
I took the Polymoog to a tech who worked at a local organ shop, got it back
quite soon and it worked. But some weeks later the high tone came back,
followed soon by a clearly audible distortion especially on the higher
notes. After some months of simply avoiding to play higher notes, I took
the Polymoog to the only other technician I knew who was working at a local
music store. When I got it back after more than a month, the high tone and
the distortion were gone but just to come back after two days! And while I
was still thinking what to do next, it broke down. Totally. No sound at all
anymore. The LEDs and switches first looked as if they worked but soon they
gave up, too. Cleaning of the contacts of all the cards and connectors
followed but that didn't work. Reluctant to give the Polymoog to one of the
local technicians again, I finally rang up the highly respected Moog specialist
Rudi Linhard. But Rudi didn't want to help, he told me that he wouldn't
even touch a Polymoog. So that was the end. When I decided in 2000 to sell
my Minimoog because I felt I didn't need it anymore, I sold the non-working
Polymoog as well, both to a guy called Jens (aka "Polymoogie" in
the Polymoog Owners Club). After the transaction we stayed in contact and
became great friends (we still are), so at least that was the good thing
about selling the Polymoog...
After the Polymoog had left my flat, I started to look out for a
reliable replacement and finally ended up with an Access Virus A which was
in my opinion the most analogue-sounding modern synth at that time. I must
admit that I was quite happy with the Virus for at least two years - it
never broke down, it always did what it should do, it was continuously
updated with new functions for years and it sounded analogue-ish. But
although I never missed my Minimoog for even a second, I started to really
miss the Polymoog and each time I visited Jens I ended up playing one of
his Polymoogs for hours. Especially my ex-Polymoog which Jens had got
repaired for next-to-nothing by the tech guy from the organ store! Those
were the moments when I felt that something went wrong with my life...
Meanwhile, "thanks" to Ebay, Polymoogs got more and more
expensive and because of that it became a definite "no" for me to
get one this way. But after some more years of Polymoog-less misery, Jens
offered his Polymoog no. 1144 to me last summer. He told me that
this one was working but the least reliable of the bunch of Polymoogs he
had, so he offered it to me for the same price that he had paid for my
non-working Polymoog five years before. A really fair deal from good ol'
Polymoogie and of course I DID buy it! By then my frustration with all that
pseudo-analogue machinery had reached a point at which it seemed better to
have a totally unreliable Polymoog than no Polymoog at all. The good thing
about this is that this time I was prepared. I even made a guess how long
it would work before the first breakdown! The guess was six weeks. I was
wrong.
I came home together with the Polymoog that was mine now at about 5
one sunday morning in summer 2005. Too early to ask my neighbours to help
me carrying it but as I didn't want to leave it in the car, I carried it
upstairs alone and although my back was aching badly after that I plugged
it in immediately. There was that sound again: "Pheeaaoouuw!".
One or more octaves up the keyboard, the sound was accompanied by a
"brzzzz". Not only was that sound finally back at my home, but
also that distortion! I immediately took up my "avoid the high
notes!" technique from years ago again and was happy for the time
being. About three weeks later I got an MAM RS3 resonator bank. It seemed a
good idea to check that one by putting the Polymoog's sound through it, so
I plugged the two together and the sound was simply brilliant - at first.
But after about 10 minutes the Polymoog started to put out some heavy
crackling noise, the sound got quieter and quieter before it completely
died, the LEDs started to flicker, there was no reaction to the VAR/PRE
switches anymore... and then it was gone. In the following weeks I tried
again and again but apart from a very quiet sound (sometimes) and some
flickers from the LEDs it had nothing to say to me.
So it took three weeks to break down, not six. Maybe I had been too
optimistic. And maybe it was a mistake to put that little 19" unit on
top of the Polymoog, right above the power supply, on a warm summer day.
Whatever happened, I had to face the fact that I had a broken Polymoog
again... Some time later I talked to a friend of mine who is a big fan of
analogue synthesisers as well and he suggested to take it to a tech called
Peter in Hamburg who is an engineer in electronics
and supposed to be a real specialist in analogue synthesisers. I finally
did that and when I appeared at Peter's workshop, the first thing I got to
hear from him was that he didn't like the Polymoog because it was the most
simple divide-down circuitry ("like a Bontempi organ!") in a
badly constructed and over-complicated package. Bang! :) But we talked a
little bit more and Peter told me that he was just customising a Korg MS-20
with a self-constructed midi in/out interface that is able to send and receive
controller data for all knobs and has master keyboard functions as well. He
also told me that he had just done the same to the Polyvoks that was
waiting in a corner, but writing the software for the MS-20 interface was a
more difficult job because the ROM chip only had 512k... I was impressed to
say the least, so I left the Polymoog there.
After a week I got a call from Peter: He had just opened up the
Polymoog to check it but it worked! I couldn't believe that, so he asked me
to come round and check it myself. When I arrived, he had already done an
in-deep check and discovered that the distortion was still there. It was
interesting to view that on the scope when only the rectangular wave was
on: The rectangle had a clearly visible "peak" before the line
went horizontal. He had already checked the Faratron PSU as well and showed
me that most of the parts had a much higher temperature than they should
usually have. Also, the Faratron's output was more than unstable so that
there was a lot of noise in the circuits which could be the reason for the
distortion. Peter suggested that he would build a custom PSU for my
Polymoog because he felt anxious to work on the Faratron PSU which some
"non-professionals" had worked on before. I said ok and the final
deal was that I only had to pay the full price if his new PSU would kill
the distortion - otherwise the price would have been split in half. Nice!
Two weeks later I got another call from Peter: The new PSU was ready
but he was not really sure about it. So went to Peter's again and was blown
away, again... No distortion anymore, everything was crystal clear up to
the highest note! And how nice and clean that new PSU looked, compared to
that old Faratron thing! That was a really happy day although I had to
leave the Polymoog at Peter's because in the meantime he had found some
other small issues like a loose transistor etc.
But some days later the Polymoog was ready to come back home again.
A friend and neighbour of mine helped me to carry it upstairs, we set it up
and it sounded better than ever before so that I immediately planned to
record a whole LP just with the Polymoog! A really nice plan, but it was
disturbed after five minutes of playing by a distortion from the sawtooth
VCO that was worse than ever before! I switched off the Polymoog and off we
went to my neighbour's flat to have a coffee. I had to get some different thoughts
into my head. But when nobody was looking, I returned to my flat, switched
the Polymoog on again and the distortion was gone! That was something I had
never experienced before - if the distortion was there it was there to
stay. I played it for 20 minutes and nothing changed, so I left it switched
on and happily returned to my neighbour's flat for another coffee. When I
returned to my flat again, everything looked fine except for the beat LED
which was alight but did not flicker anymore. And there was no sound at
all, a situation I had become familiar with. So I switched the Polymoog off, went
back to my neighbours and changed from coffee to beer.
The next morning I had the idea that there must be overheating
problems with the new PSU. The day before I had already noticed that the
Polymoog did not become as hot anymore as it did with the Faratron PSU but
it was still quite hot on the back. And Peter, logically, only worked on it
with the top lid taken off. So I took off the top (of the Polymoog) as well
and left it switched for about 10 hours. Everything worked! After some
experiments I found out in the following weeks that there's enough air
circulation in it when the lid is only a bit open - I simply left the
screws removed and put two crown caps under the lid so that it's lifted up
by about 1/2 centimetre which is better than drilling holes into the lid
like the Kraftwerk guys had done. That seems to be final solution, the
Polymoog has its new PSU now for about two months and has turned out to be
absolutely reliable since then, even in those hot summer days we have at
the moment and even though it has the lowest serial number in the
dubsounds.com list. The only problem was some quiet crackling in the
resonator section that I didn't even notice that first because it sounded
like a firework outside (there's a lot of fireworks in Hamburg in the summer and I had put the
Polymoog through a long reverb...). After I switched it off and on again,
the crackling was gone and didn't come back.
So, after all these years the Polymoog finally became the centre of
my little studio again. I play it every day when I come home and on the
weekends it normally stays switched on from the first coffee in the morning
to bedtime so that I'm able to play a chord when I need one of these
chords... and that's often the case! A wonderful synth, I don't think I'll
ever get to hear one that I like more...
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