Turtlerock Forum

Hi there,

For any of us analog synth junkies after a bargain, there is always a time and place where bad timing and karma intersect, and leave us with....... the one that got away !

Unlike our fishermen brethren, we can usually prove our *whopper* stories because we were so close to reeling it in, we actually have the photos to prove it.

So begins my sad story of fate....

A normal day at Brashs in Brisbane (where i used to work in the early 90's) started with a phone call.

* Hey Nymo, I know this guy that has this synth he is trying to sell.. and I've told him you would be the only guy that might be interested...here's his number*

What is it i asked ?

*Dunno* he said * but he got it through the Uni*

Ah...The Uni... that bastion of Moogs, Arps and other things that bored music students don't want because they are all using Korg workstations and crappy PC programs !

I ring him up and he tells me its an EMS Synthi 100...only the most collectable and desirably huge analog synth in existence. There we only 30 ever made !!

A couple of days later he wanders into the shop and after a few minutes of negotiation, we have shook hands on a gentlemens agreement of $3000.
I want to give him a $500 deposit there and then, but he tells me he has taken one of the modules out of the synth to work on, but once it is fixed, he will be happy to sell it to me. (He was an honest trader and didn't want to sell me anything that didn't work 100%)

That saturday morning my 2 year old son and I went to his house in Red Hill and walked into his loungeroom... low and behold a real life Synthi 100 was sitting there!
After a lot of drooling, and some photos being taken, I left there with the original manual and the promise that he would ring me as soon as it was fixed.

I rang him up a couple of weeks later to see how the repair was going, but it wasn't ready yet.
A couple of weeks turned to a couple of months and a couple of months turned into six.
I didn't want to harass him, as he was a fairly emotional guy (and i was a pushy bastard!) so i waited.

Nobody knew about this...this was my little secret, and like a cunning spider, I was going to wait till my prey was ready for the taking.

Thats when Karma and bad timing stepped in....my marriage ended and I moved up to the Sunshine Coast and with all the upheaval I ended up losing his phone number and even forgetting his surname !

When I eventually caught up with him a year later, he apologised, but said people had told him it was worth a lot more money and he now wanted $10,000 for it !

I had no choice but to let it go....

When I look at that photo of the Synthi 100 and my 2 year old son..... it always reminds me that i lost more than an EMS Synthi 100 that day.....

Cheers
N
Y
M
O

PS I think Jack Dangers from Meat Beat Manifesto ended up with that synth !
Photo avail on request.

Ouch... Mind you $10,000 would still have been a bargain, but nowhere near as bad as losing a marriage.

I shrivel up when I think about how cheaply I sold things over the years, and even seeing a complete Roland system 700 in the trading post deciding not to buy it for $3300.00 - the seller was ready to go, but I decided it was too much to spend.

When I lived up in the outback, I let go a TB-303 for $200 and a TR-909 for $250. At the time I had just bought my DX7 and stuck an E! board in it
and I was a bit snobbish about those old dinosaurs. C'mon, it was the 80's!

Then about 3 months later, I bought my System 100, for $200

The uni I work at, there's a guy in the music dept reckons they have 2 Synthi AKS or VCS-3, he is not sure which.
I wonder how I approach him about them? I figured if I made a donation to get one of them restored, I could buy the other but I don't want
to scare them off.

I had a Korg MS-10 I tried to sell when I was real broke in a garage sale, for $150. It didn't sell and I hung onto it until about 3 years ago.
I gave someone their own "gear bonanza" when I finally let it go for $300. The guy who bought it was practically salivating. I half thought it was
going too cheap, but it was quite rusty and had a broken low F key and a cigarette burn. The left side was actually a bit bung.
The story is, it cames from the "Reels" when they did a show in some country town and someone threw a bottle of beer at them and
apparently that's how it got broken. I sort of regret selling the MS10, but at the same time I will never forget the guy's face who bought it....

I won't let any of my gear go now, but I don't regret missing out on some things in the past.
I still want to see the fabled 303 "transistor radio, not working" in the local community shop, though :wink


rachel

I've given up on the thought of owning a 303... far too expensive. I am on the waiting list for an x0xb0x kit. Should be fun building that!

The one that got away? For me it was a Moog Prodigy - I thought it was going to be expensive, but the highest bid was only around $700. I would've easily paid that and more, even if it is one of Moogs 'budget' monos.

rachelp wrote:The story is, it cames from the "Reels" when they did a show in some country town and someone threw a bottle of beer at them and apparently that's how it got broken.

rachel

My god - The Reels - havent heard them mentioned for so long!!
I sat at a table at the APRA awards in '91 with Dave Mason and his girlfriend = very strange couple.
However, it was quite entertaining to watch them..
Ghosts Of The Civil Dead goes back a fair way now..

the reels recorded "bad moon rising" when i was a kid at festival , i got passively stoned through the airconditioning three rooms away
i looked up from the console to the cuttting lathe and it was on fire from some blocked swarf- a very dangerous situation
i just sat there staring at it smiling , untill i eventually realised something was not right with my state of mind.

i opened the door to clear the smoke from the swarf fire but there was more smoke in the hallway then in my room ,

i opened the studio door and it was clear the sum of all of the dope i had ever seen was smaller the the task ahead of the reels that night.
i reminded mark opitz (the producer ) of it one day and he was diplomatically unsure of exactly what went on in that session :)

Festival was a fantastic place to record, I worked in there on a Jimmy Barnes album and never had so many laughs...