Seeker_UK wrote:Has anyone ever seen a PRX-II Rhythm Controller?
According to Chris Franke it was a unit with loads of buttons made by EKO, which eventually he sold (or gave) to Manuel Gottsching of Ashra (Manuel used in it Paris in 1977 I think...there's a famous B&W promo photo of this)
Seeker_UK wrote:Has anyone ever seen a PRX-II Rhythm Controller?
According to Chris Franke it was a unit with loads of buttons made by EKO, which eventually he sold (or gave) to Manuel Gottsching of Ashra (Manuel used in it Paris in 1977 I think...there's a famous B&W promo photo of this)
Aha! I think I know what you mean. It's the pic on the back of 'Blackouts'
Seeker_UK wrote:Has anyone ever seen a PRX-II Rhythm Controller?
According to Chris Franke it was a unit with loads of buttons made by EKO, which eventually he sold (or gave) to Manuel Gottsching of Ashra (Manuel used in it Paris in 1977 I think...there's a famous B&W promo photo of this)
Aha! I think I know what you mean. It's the pic on the back of 'Blackouts'
Here's another view of it:
But I always thought that was a GDS drum computer
I need to find that article to back this up (it might be the two part Sound on Sound article? I forget now).
GDS Drum computer? hmmm AFAIK they never made one...unless you know different mate, the only GDS I know is the Crumar GDS was a big bugger that Klaus Schulze and TD had (TD apparently used it on Thief and Schulze used it on Dig It). TD later had this midified and used it for several years before mothballing it
Although Atem was voted John Peel's 'Album of 1973', there were significant problems within Tangerine Dream. Firstly, Peter Baumann left the group to go travelling in the East. Chris Franke sold his drums, and he and Froese were in limbo. Eventually, they decided to go into Skyline studios in Berlin, and record some music to present to Virgin, who had shown an interest in the group. The resultant album, Green Desert, wasn't released until 1986, and is best described as a collection of tone-poems. It did, however, boast the use of a new batch of equipment, including a PRX2 Rhythm Controller, a MiniMoog, and a phaser. Though unreleased at the time, it landed Tangerine Dream a record deal when Virgin heard the tapes. Franke actually remembers Green Desert with excitement: "We got all this stuff and began experimenting. The phaser was really new then, and cost $1000. It did pitch-shifting and also flanging and chorus effects. The Rhythm Controller was a surprise -- it came from Italy, from a company called EKO, who made all these cheap warehouse organs. They had come up with this science-fiction-looking machine, a console with eight rows of 16 big knobs which lit up! It worked like a sequencer, which was great, because there were no drum machines in those days. I could programme a rhythm that the machine could remember. It was completely analogue -- you pushed the buttons and they made the contact -- and it was polyphonic! The lights blinked, like on an early Moog sequencer. And when the sequence or rhythm was still running I could change it -- I could delete, skip, and change the rhythm while it was playing. I always liked this aspect of any sequencer. The internal sounds were pretty lousy, but the control panel looked great, and was nice to operate. Later, I built trigger outputs and triggered other synths with the thing, so it became a controller. Years later, I saw Manuel Goettsching play it live on stage in Paris".
24db wrote:
According to Chris Franke it was a unit with loads of buttons made by EKO, which eventually he sold (or gave) to Manuel Gottsching of Ashra (Manuel used in it Paris in 1977 I think...there's a famous B&W promo photo of this)
Aha! I think I know what you mean. It's the pic on the back of 'Blackouts'
Here's another view of it:
But I always thought that was a GDS drum computer
I need to find that article to back this up (it might be the two part Sound on Sound article? I forget now).
GDS Drum computer?
20 years of misconception cleared up! Cheers mate, you're right.
I'd love to know the truth behind some of Chris Franke's equipment claims (ie that he invented a sampler, but Bell beat him to the patent office by days)...this was in the early seventies btw (with Core memory for drum sounds I seem to remember, but it would have put TD lightyears ahead of what 99% of the competition where using at the time).
