bitflipper Posted February 22, 2022 Share Posted February 22, 2022 I found this fascinating. All I really knew about Tom before this was that his first product was a ring modulator. The first time I ever laid hands on an Oberheim was c. 1978. I had gone into a studio to lay down faux strings for a friend's record, bringing along an Elka String Synthesizer that belonged to my band's drummer that he let me use on stage. That thing didn't really sound like strings, but it met the expectations of the day. Compared to a Mellotron it was the frickin' London Philharmonic. After the first runthrough of the first song, the engineer approached me and said "I've got something you'd probably like to see". He took me into another room and there was an Oberheim 4-voice. It was beautiful. He then set out to set it up for strings, which took him a good hour to dial in because it had no programmer and therefore required tweaking each of the four modules in turn. In the end, we used the Oberheim on the record because it sounded amazing. After that, I literally dreamt of that synth nightly. But it was way beyond my financial means, and though I did pony up for a single SEM to slave off my Micromoog (that one SEM was $800!), owning a real Oberheim was never to be. Until last year, when I bought the 8-Voice emulation from Cherry Audio for something like 40 bucks. It sounds like the real thing, even if it's not as pretty. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CoveCamper Posted February 22, 2022 Share Posted February 22, 2022 Cool Story. Was suprised by what Behringer did. Thanks for sharing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RBH Posted February 25, 2022 Share Posted February 25, 2022 I had an original 4 voice with sequencer and sold it about 5 years ago. Selling prices have at least tripled since. They are amazingly fun to play and do wish I had kept it. About 20 years ago I was able to score : The Oberheim 4 voice - A hammond X-5 with Leslie 760 - a Roland Re501 - a set of Moog 1 Taurus pedals - and a Rhodes suitcase for $850.00 Still have the Roland though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bitflipper Posted February 26, 2022 Author Share Posted February 26, 2022 Yeh, some of the stuff I've gotten rid of over the decades would be worth a lot now. Silly me, I actually thought that stuff would completely lose its value if I didn't dump it quickly. At one point I had some young guys come over to buy my Jupiter 6, talked them into taking my Juno 106 for a hundred bucks more. They ended up buying pretty much everything, including my 3-tier keyboard stand, mic stands, a drum machine and my Oberheim SEM. At the time, I thought they were suckers for taking all my old crap off my hands. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RBH Posted February 26, 2022 Share Posted February 26, 2022 Thanks for sharing the pain ! I'm really not much of a keyboardist.... so -that was my main justification. Now I'm stuck with a load of Kurzweil, Yamaha and Roland modules. I have a feeling as soon as I get rid of them, they'll spike up in price too. As much as I've tried to replace and re deploy with VST's - nothing is quite as good sounding as the real tools. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Roseberry Posted March 2, 2022 Share Posted March 2, 2022 Oberheim, Moog, and Linn created some amazing musical tools. Never met Oberheim or Moog... Got to meet Roger Linn at GearFest several years back. Roger himself demonstrated the Linnstrument. It was great to be able thank him for all he's done. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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