My ARP Avatar works!!!!

[Rodgre]

I have had an ARP Avatar guitar synth in storage for a good 15 years. I never had the pickup for it, and I was unable to get it to make a peep with my Korg Mono/Poly controlling it. 

Recently, I had a friend go through it and get it working. Today, I finally was able to plug a guitar into it and get it to work!

All these years of wishing for a DIY P-V converter to be able to play analog synths from a guitar.... I'm finally able to do it!

So far everything works well. I'm not using a divided pickup, but instead, my friend was able to wire a 6 pos rotary switch to select which string I want to use (each string's input is specially filtered for that string's pitch range, to help filter out harmonics from fundamentals). Keeping it set on the G or D strings gives me a good range to play. It scales pitch well once tuned.

I'll post videos soon. I thought you'd all share my excitement!

Roger

[Jaicen_solo]

Awesome!! I'd love an Avatar but the cost..... 

Have you tried wiring it up using a GK pickup? You can take the hexaphonic string signals, filter and compress then feed it to the ARP. That will probably perform a lot better than the original pickup ever did.

Congratulations though, post some sound clips if you can, there are not many out there being controlled from a guitar.

Also, now would be the perfect time to clone it......

[Rodgre]

I do have both a Roland G-505 and spare GK-1 old school hexaphonic pickup, which I could cobble together some sort of breakout box with a +/- 15v power supply and outs for each string, or roll my own hex pickup out of an old single coil pickup. The Avatar seems to just want pickup-wire-input, without the
Fuzz/amplification of the Roland setup. It has that circuitry built into the unit, itself.  For now, just for experimenting, playing single notes at a time straight in, works quite well.

This setup might be incredible as an analog bass synth, with super clean playing. The synth is a very rich and beefy 2-oscillator Odyssey with ramp and square waves, with pwm, crazy FM capabilities, ring mod, 2 env generators, LFO, S/H, a chewy 24db resonant low pass filter, separate high pass filter, portamento....  I am salivating thinking about the possibilities!

As for the DIY pedal community, I post about it here because this is a concept many of us have wrestled with for years. The trick of filtering out the harmonics to get the fundamental of a guitar note for accurate, quick and consistent pitch detection to convert to a control voltage. The Avatar, though showing the same glitchiness that plagues every guitar-based P-V converter, seems to work really well so far. Even though this beast was really misunderstood and under appreciated at the time it came out in the mid-70s, and it legendarily sunk the ARP company down the tubes, they did put a lot of R&D into the project and it works better than I thought.

It sounds totally different than my Roland GR300 and can do many things the Roland cannot, since it's monophonic. It's very fun to do leads and baselines, especially with portamento, which I've wished for. Blending un-portamentoed dry guitar with a slow bending lead synth tone is a very cool effect.

So maybe it's not perfect, and it's a heavy and inconvenient beast compared to a modern Roland digital GR system, it's much more romantic to me to use brute analog force to play a classic mono synth from my guitar!

This more than makes up for my Paia Gnome never working in the 80s!

Roger

[soffa]

Awesome!

I'd love to see/hear a clip...

[Mark Hammer]

I do have both a Roland G-505 and spare GK-1 old school hexaphonic pickup, which I could cobble together some sort of breakout box with a +/- 15v power supply and outs for each string, or roll my own hex pickup out of an old single coil pickup. The Avatar seems to just want pickup-wire-input, without the
Fuzz/amplification of the Roland setup. It has that circuitry built into the unit, itself.  For now, just for experimenting, playing single notes at a time straight in, works quite well.

This setup might be incredible as an analog bass synth, with super clean playing. The synth is a very rich and beefy 2-oscillator Odyssey with ramp and square waves, with pwm, crazy FM capabilities, ring mod, 2 env generators, LFO, S/H, a chewy 24db resonant low pass filter, separate high pass filter, portamento....  I am salivating thinking about the possibilities!

As for the DIY pedal community, I post about it here because this is a concept many of us have wrestled with for years. The trick of filtering out the harmonics to get the fundamental of a guitar note for accurate, quick and consistent pitch detection to convert to a control voltage. The Avatar, though showing the same glitchiness that plagues every guitar-based P-V converter, seems to work really well so far. Even though this beast was really misunderstood and under appreciated at the time it came out in the mid-70s, and it legendarily sunk the ARP company down the tubes, they did put a lot of R&D into the project and it works better than I thought.

It sounds totally different than my Roland GR300 and can do many things the Roland cannot, since it's monophonic. It's very fun to do leads and baselines, especially with portamento, which I've wished for. Blending un-portamentoed dry guitar with a slow bending lead synth tone is a very cool effect.

So maybe it's not perfect, and it's a heavy and inconvenient beast compared to a modern Roland digital GR system, it's much more romantic to me to use brute analog force to play a classic mono synth from my guitar!

This more than makes up for my Paia Gnome never working in the 80s!

Roger

+1

I have two of those Penfold mono P-2-V units that I need to finish wiring up, so I can control the SCI Pro One I have.  And remember, mono never stopped all those old MInimoog players from sounding outrageous.

[Morocotopo]

Roger, we NEED a video. Really really NEED it!!!!

I guess many, if not most of us forumites have never seen or especially heard one of these. I personally only saw a picture once of, I think, Pete Townshend playing one.