Synthesizers have been part of my life for over 30 years. Back long ago when I was 14 (I'm 43 now) I was always into electronics and I read the article about the PAIA synthesizer. So, I went to work cutting lawns to make some money. I etched my own pc boards from the articles and bought parts from Allied and DigiKey. Next came the keyboard. I saved enough money for one from a surplus store and had to build my own contacts for it, pretty ingenious for the time. So, after about nine months I had a full 2700 series, but I didn't finish there. I was listening to ELP and remembered seeing California Jam on ABC and saw Emerson's Moog. I wanted one like his, so I built more kits and bought a used Minimoog for $650.00 (back in 1975, try to find one now for that price) and built a custom patch bay for the Mini allowing the VCO's outputs and inputs to the Filter. Then, I built a cabinet for the whole thing. including a portable keyboard with a speaker built in it on the bottom to get feedback (an Emerson thing) from it. After about four years I was done with it. My friends at the time would borrow it to play at bars and showed me a few simple riffs to play. Then after high school I found other things to keep me amused so it sat in the basement collecting dust at my parents house. I cut up the cabinet years ago but always wanted to put it back together for my children one day.  

Then my son Evan started to ask me questions about it about a year ago. He started playing when he was 4 1/2 and I started him on the Minimoog since that was the only keyboard we had. He played for about 2 months on it so we bought him a piano. My dream came true with my son playing piano and then of course the power struggles came into play and he stopped when he was 7. So on and off he would ask me about the broken synthesizer downstairs. Then, last year he asked me to put it back together so he could play it, so I made him a deal that if he would start playing and practicing again I would rebuild it. So immediately he started playing and practicing on his own and asked when could he start lessons again. So I had to live up to my end of the deal so I started to research Analog Synths on the internet and found Synthersizers.Com. Of course, I fell in love with the systems because of that Moog look and the rest is history. My son is an avid ELP and Yes fan, I wonder where he got that from? Now he wants a cabinet with two sequencers and a ribbon controller. He'll have to wait a while for that. Yes, I know I'm crazy for doing this but he has learned about electronics and how sounds are produced, so its a small investment for his future.

Email: evan@bigsynth.com