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egotists-club
@egotists-club

Because the Yanni-keyboard wasn't enough (I pick this one up from customs tomorrow evening): I recently made a trip to Saratoga Springs, New York to acquire this legendary beast.

The Hammond Novachord is widely considered to be the world's first polyphonic synthesizer. It has 72 keys, generates tones via a vacuum tube based divide-down oscillator system, and equips each key with a VCA and an envelope generator. It has filters (albeit not voltage controlled ones.) It has about a hundred and fifty vacuum tubes on it, and each key in that keying mechanism runs on 270 volts (!) through palladium-based contacts. In short, it is a menace. This one is... is not in good shape, to put it bluntly. It is, however, complete save for one vacuum tube. This leaves me hoping that with a lot of love and more importantly a LOT of elbow grease, this will live again.

You can see someone else's restoration, and more importantly hear someone else's restoration, here.


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in reply to @egotists-club's post:

Right? If the key is depressed, the busbar makes contact with the palladium mechanism. At that point, 270 volts passes from the supply line, through the contact, to the plate voltage pin for the VCA tube, allowing the divided down signal from the oscillator to pass through. MADNESS.

I have been looking for literally years. I missed one several years ago, in Ontario, in a barn. The cabinetry is in pretty good shape, overall; the electronics are a total disaster, and there's some kind of weird verdigris on the front controls, which have all seized. It's going to be a massive gut job and rebuild, and I really have no idea what to do about a bunch of the things in it (the tuning inductor choke things are one-off.) But...