A day with CS-80 V

One of the most famous synth of all time has to be the Yamaha CS-80. Funny how things turn up, CS-80 sold around 2000 whereas Minimoog sold 15.000 (i think). Anyway, CS-80 was popular but with a price tag beyond any avarage musicians budget. So i settled for visiting my friend at the Yamaha store quite often just to put my hands on this huge monster. Sooo, we now have 2008 and i've had Arturia's CS-80 V lying around my harddisk for 2 years without some serious use. I find the CS-80 V somewhat hard to work with because some parameters dont behave like i thought they would, mainly the modulation section. Setting a nice smooth velocity transition was so hard i gave up several times.

K, so i played around with the ARP feature which is very cool and simple. Then i moved onto making a split preset with bass in the left and arps in the right. Now since this machinery can be programed to act like 8 mono synths in one preset i decided to make the ultimative CS-80 V single preset. ;)

The preset has 4 oscillators runing the ARP from C#3 and up, each of these oscillators are programed with a different sounds like pure square, brass, etc... This leaves us with 4 osc's left for bass and a 3 osc lead-brass. The bass covers from C3 and lower and the lead-brass covers the whole range but without being assigned to the ARP feature.

It looks a bit like this:

<---1 osc--------bass-><---4 osc----arp------------------->
<---3 osc-------------------lead-brass--------------------->

This gives us a max use of the 8 osc's and can sound like this when played live using this single preset:

http://www.synthtronic.com/demos/MK_CS80_ARPSplit2.mp3

or

http://www.synthtronic.com/demos/MK_CS80_ARPSplit.mp3


For a non-live performance i would probably turn the preset into 2 presets having the lead-brass stacked with the bass and arp on another instance to avoid tones getting clipped.

Thats about it :)

/Michael