24k #9 -- Electric Avenue
For Bob Moog’s birthday last week, I suggested that you might want to upgrade a minimoog synth with MIDI. I apologize for this heresy. Instead, let‘s rock down to Electric Avenue (and then we’ll take it higher) for our ninth installment of 24 x 24k for 2024.
“Electric Avenue” creator Eddy Grant used a minimoog himself and other equipment typical of the period to build his sound. Just about the same time Electric Ave peaked at #2 on the UK singles chart in 1983, KORG released the affordable Poly-800 synth. Like the minimoog, it lacked full MIDI when it was released (MIDI itself was brand new, debuting in a series of Roland products in late ‘83). The affordable Poly-800 had a lightweight polycarbonate frame and ‘keytar’ lugs that let it work as a performer’s instrument but it picked up a reputation as an unserious toy for those same features, as well as for bleeps and bloops somewhat less sophisticated than … the big-name bleeps and bloops of the decade.
While the KORG may be remembered for fewer big ‘80s tracks, its affordability made it a first synth for many. How many people still remember their home Commodore or Spectrum but have utterly forgotten the IBM minicomputer at the office?
Fast forward about a quarter century and you get the Hawk-800 — an upgrade kit for the Poly-800 down in the basement. That kit, our subject today, features 24k of program memory for the synth’s original Intel 80C85 processor. The Poly-800 retained just enough nostalgia for people to keep it and not so much that it seemed wrong to modify it. Not a bad way to be remembered.
The 80C85 was an incredibly versatile chip that showed up in chess machines, proto—laptops, music synthesizers, and all of the new types of computerized gizmos that would show up under a Christmas tree or on an office desk until at least the late 80s. These machines differed more by what we believed their limitations to be than by what they could actually do.
With 15 more spaces in our 24k for 2024 series to romance the silicon stone (also Eddy Grant, Going for Broke, 1984), the 80C85 is likely to come up again. I welcome your suggestions!
Naturally. this post pairs well with “Electric Avenue“, Eddy Grant, 1983.