Muson Synthesizer

noreply@blogger.com (Yip-Yip) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 02:09:00 +0000

Welcome to Yip-Yip's Audible Archive, an online museum of our favorite electronic musical instrument finds from the past ten years of collecting.

Up first is a demo of one of our favorites: the Muson Synthesizer. This colorful little gem is a mini organ with a built in sequencer, created in 1978 by Mego Corp.

The keys play just over an octave of whole notes. The colored pegs above the keys are where the real magic lives: the sequencer. Each color represents a note on the keyboard. You can remove and rearrange the pegs in any order to make up different melodic loops at 4, 6, 8 and 10 steps. The slider on the left changes the speed of the sequencer loop, going from very slow to insanely fast, sounding strangely like Pac-Man and other old arcade games. The slider on the right changes the pitch from low to ear-piercingly high.

This one is pretty rare, but you may have seen or heard it before. If you look closely at the music video for Devo's "The Day My Baby Gave Me A Surprise", you can see Bob 2 playing a Muson Synthesizer. It was also used by Crash Course In Science on their song "Cakes In The Home". There are rumors saying that KMFDM used one at some point, but we've yet to determine if, when, or how they used it.