Sunday Synth Jam: This video, via 100 Things I Do, captures a drone performance with the Red Sound Dark Star, a rare and oft-maligned synthesizer.
Here’s what they have to say about the Dark Star and the performance:
An amazingly cheap and fun desktop synth. Fantastic drone machine that can play up to 8 notes or 5 dual oscillator tones at the same time.
The Dark Star has had a hard time in the synth world, with a mix of RCA jacks for outputs, an almost obtuse ‘go your own way’ interface for sound design and some rather basic presets it emerged and faded from the EDM / DJ scene in the early 2000’s.
I hope to do a series of videos using this synth in the coming weeks. It really has some awesome sound potential and you can spend hours just tweaking away into very interesting sonic adventures. I tend to use it very much like the VCS3 and you can get some very similar / modular textures from it without too much effort. For the Average price of around $200usd at the moment your synth world might just need one
A stereo delay and some slight saturation effects and the Free TAL Chorus-LX were used in this clip.
Very nice.
The Dark Star is yet another synth I sold to pay rent in college.
What a waste of money, the college not the synth.
got your edumencation?
.. shoulda learned the saxomaphone.
I had the xp2, bought for £129 from turnkey. Great sounds, but after 2 years of moderate use the rubber buttons were unresponsive and filter pot started giving up. Wouldn’t buy it again second hand.
Dark Stars used to be a dime a dozen on eBay, back when everyone hated them. Now they’re harder to find.
Mine gets some occasional use. I thought about selling it to fund more Eurorack stuff but I don’t want to do something I might regret.
I’ve owned and sold both the DarkStar and the Elevata. I liked the really thin HP filtered saws, but figured out this patch was super easy to build on my Virus.
…cool post and video… making me want to take mine out of storage…(never used it much, and wasn’t really worth selling…)… thanks for posting… and you are right above posters, I don’t see any on ebay right now… hmmm..
sell it to me?
You used to build synths with sound like this! How ya been?
I have one of these 🙂 Sitting next to my Yamaha DX200 and AN200, and my Electrix equipment (Filter Factory, Mo-FX, and Warp Factory) which I bought on Clearance when they were discontinued for a song. I havent got much use out of the Dark Star but listening to this may have to revisit it.
just think about the tb 303
it was supposed to be used as a practice aid, but look at it now
your not really giving us much there, most of what sounded nice there seemed to be coming from the effects unit, you can make anything sound lush with delay and reverb.
except the election