Compact DeLuxe v1.0.0 WiN

Team R2R | 29 July  2023 | 3.68 MB

…:VST2i, VST3i, STANDALONE:…

INSTRUMENT BACKGROUND. Among the many transistor organs of the past, also known as “Combo Organs” (mostly because some of them also had a rhythm section and built-in speakers), the Farfisa Compact DeLuxe, along with its big brother the Compact Duo, was one of the most used organs at least in the european beat scene of the early and mid seventies. The electronic circuit of this kind of organ is relatively simple, at least on paper: rather than using a mechanical tone generator like the tonewheel models (Hammond and Pari), the transistor organs used a circuit called “Top Octave Synthesizer”, TOS for short, responsible of the generation of 12 waveforms, one for each note of the last octave of the organ keyboard. The basic waveform was usually something halfway between a ramp and a triangular. The lower octaves were produced by means of “divider” circuits that could halve the frequency of each waveform, going so forth for each lower octave down to the pedalboard tones. At each division, something was lost and something was gained in terms of harmonic content. The result was that the same notes of different octaves had oscillators perfectly in sync, so all C notes were in sync, all C#, all D and so on. This same technique was also used in so-called “string machines” or “stringer keyboards” that emulated orchestral sounds (violins, trumpets, etc.).