I know I say this all the time, but this footage of Stevie Wonder playing 'Living for the City' with TONTO really is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. TONTO was two guys, one British and one American, with a vast polyphonic analog synth built out of Moog, Serge and Arp components. So here's Stevie jamming with Robert and Malcolm tweaking the machine in the background looking like a biker gang made up of mad scientists. And they're doing it in Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady studios. Wow. If that's not enough, there's also this extraordinary clip, which I won't even try to describe.
Mark writes: "Your site needs more Stevie Wonder, and I'm dismayed that he's not one of your MT heroes. Come on! Stevie is all about the toys." He's right, and Stevie is the patron saint of ludicrous synth gear (like TONTO). Here he is with his exceptionally cool Robotron Eureka, a PC for blind people. Here is a fantastically naff advertisment which he made for Kodak batteries, featuring some very mild gear porn, and finally here is an utterly awesome YouTube clip of Stevie singing 'Close To You' using a voice tube...
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Apologies for yet more YouTube stuff, but I'm watching this now, because pretty soon it will have all evaporated.
Pray silence, please, for possibly the most ludicrous music gadget ever to appear on eBay: Item #7354713788 is a Yamaha GX-1 Synthesizer with over a week to go, but no bid yet at US$200,000. The GX-1 was the predecessor to the CS-80. It's a mighty three-manual synth, with 135 circuit boards and tiny analog sound cartridges, which are programmed by turning minature pots with a jeweller's screwdriver. Around 50 were made, and few ever left Japan. Stevie Wonder bought two at £40,000 each. John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin had one, as did Keith Emerson, Hans Zimmer, Benny from Abba and the Church of Scientology (but we already knew that L Ron Hubbard was an organ nut). The GX-1 also inspired one of the most wonderful articles that Sound on Sound has ever published: This story by Gordon Reid telling how he bought one through a local paper small ad in Australia and had it shipped back to Cambridge, where he had to demolish his garden fence just to get it into his house. Curiously, this GX-1 is also in Australia.
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If you saw Stevie Wonder at Live 8, hammering out 'Higher Ground' and 'Superstition' on a battered old Clavinet D6 and Boss AW-2 Auto Wah pedal, you'll know that we have a lot to thank Hohner for. The company was founded in 1857 and was the first to sell harmonicas. They made the harmonica Abraham Lincoln used to carry around, and gave Wally Schirra the tiny one he played on the Gemini IV spacecraft in 1965. But I'd never heard of Hohner's Guitaret. It was invented by Ernst Zacharias, who went on to develop the Pianet and Clavinet. The only English description I can find is this: "It's a kind of reed autoharp. It had buttons to select chords and a lever to activate the plectrum mechanism, and was intended to replace the rhythm guitar in dance bands" (via). It plugs into a guitar amp, and may sound a bit like an electric thumb piano. Now, one has turned up on German eBay item #7335307871. It comes in the original box, looks like it's in good nick, ships worldwide, accepts Paypal and is currently only €20. If you buy it, do let me know what it's like... UPDATE: Not THAT rare, perhaps: item #7337947775 is another one!
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They don't come up for sale very often, so if you didn't get what you wanted for Christmas and need a bit of cheering up, how about spending £1,000+ on a fully working Yamaha CS80? It's perfect for recreating the soundtrack to Blade Runner, and it weighs more than me. Of course, your synth snob friends will complain that it's merely a cut-down version of the Yamaha GX-1 - the vast and endlessly expensive organ-style synth that Keith Emmerson and Stevie Wonder bought. But considering the CS80 cost £5,000 in 1977, it's really a bargain. Sure, you could buy Arturia's CS80v virtual version, but in this case, it really isn't the same.
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