Minimoog Serial # 4322

This is the back panel of my Minimoog showing the serial number stamp. It's number is 4322 which places about the middle of all the Minimoogs produced. It hasn't really been in functioning order since the late 80's. It was in my Dad's shed when the roof leaked and unfortunately the keyboard was filled with water. I pulled the keyboard into about a million pieces as it became a little more than a ball of rust. Luckily the electronics survived and is completely intact and relatively original. About a year ago I gave up on rebuilding the Kimber-Allen keyboard that came with it. I had sandblasted and powdercoated the original metal frame but the small springs that form the contact had all fallen to pieces and I considered making a different contact system. I found an old Italian organ at a pawnbrokers quite cheap and that has formed the basis of the keyboard rejuivination. It is of a similar vintage so it dosen't look new and wrong in the cabinet and we are slowly heading towards it being integrated back into the rest of the system.

Symbiosis

Well things are going slowly on the ORT at the moment as I have been distracted by a number of things... One of which is a score by a chap called M.Pointon that was printed in an electronics magazine called Practical Electronics. It is not often that you get a music score in an electronics magazine! This work was in the June and July edition from 1975. It was written to be performed on a synthesizer called the Minisonic, which really is a pretty apalling bit of kit but I suppose at the time was interesting. I have had the article squirreled away for an awfully long time. I bought the magaines, from which it came, sometime in the early eighties. I think from the Save the Children Fund book sale at the University of Western Australia. I have scanned it in and made it into a pdf file which when I find enough space on the net somewhere I will put it so you can all see it. In the meantime I have been having some fun trying to recreate the piece on some software tools that I found on the net. It is quite interesting when you realize some of the problems that exisited trying to record a fairly simple score on equipment in an amateur situation about 30 years ago. If I finsh it I will post an MP3 or OGG of the result for your listening pleasure. It almost certainly isn't going to be easy listening... I can tell that already!!!