| Digisound 80 modular synthesizer |
The Digisound 80 modular synthesizer was a (largely) kit-built synthesizer designed, primarily, by Charles Blakey who ran a small family-owned company called Digisound Ltd near Blackpool in northern England. Many of the early modules appeared as construction articles in two British electronics magazines - Electronics Today International (ETI) and Electronics & Music Maker (E&MM) in the early to mid 1980s.
The Digisound 80 series - a number of whose modules were based on the CEM (Curtis Electro Music Specialities) range of ICs - was not, however, his first collection of synthesizer modules. He had, previously, produced an early series (the Digisound 20xxx series) based around the SSM (Solid State Microtechnology) range of ICs.
History
By way of some background to the Digisound 80 Modular Synthesizer, here’s an updated version of a 'personal history' I did some years back for a small, quarterly DIY newsletter called Modulus which was co-ordinated by Paul Maddox. The original article contained a few inaccuracies and is now out-of-date with respect to my intentions and the current state of CEM chip availability - hence the updated version.
There’s also a more recent article from January 2000 about the Digisound modular written by Paul Nagle (a British composer of synth music and user of the Digisound synth) available in the internet archives of Sound-on-Sound magazine. To quote from Paul’s (previous) web site “Great, smashing, super - this is an amazingly versatile, superb-sounding modular - full of character” - ‘nuff said!
Resources
You can follow this link for a list of all the Digisound modules and from there to individual module descriptions. These have (for the most part) been taken directly from the various Digisound brochures. Pictures and other documentation (including cleaned-up PCB foil pattern image files) for the various individual modules will be added as and when I can acquire them.
Additionally, I have created a page containing other Digisound-related information such as user guides, old price lists and other pertinent documents. Whilst not always relating to the modules themselves, there is much useful or interesting information either from an historic perspective or because it supplements the module information.
Digisound-related links
Here are some links to other web sites containing information or content relating to the Digisound 80 Modular Synthesizer:
- Ben's "Synthnut" web site
- Charlie Griffith's Digisound synth page
- Neil Johnston's "Old Magazine Projects" page
- Kevin Lightner's Synthfool site (there are Digisound-related items in the "Docs" section)
- Muffwiggler forum: Digisound 80 restoration project
- Seb's Digisound 80 page
- Ken Stone's synth site (click on the "Modules" tab then check under "Signal Generators" for his variation on the VCDO Wavetable module)
- "Wall of Digisound" blog
Synth DIY
The My modular and Modular restoration pages in the Music section of the site contain some information about my own Digisound synth and will be updated with more information once I start the restoration of my original synth along with the other modules I’ve acquired.