sci sixtraks

hi

does it worth it for 270 $ ?...any help would be great the one i am offered is in mint cond...

cheers

$270 is a very fair price for a mint one in the USA.

Whether it is worth it to you is another question.

How familiar are you with what it can do?

My very strong suggestion would be to not buy without playing it first. Personally, I'd pass on a Sixtrak even if it were free.

main plus point is it's multitimbral, and quite a nice sound, though not quite as fizzy and transparent as a p600.

main drawbacks - editing is tedious, i could never find a way to control voices multitimbrally, except for having a midi track for each one (including duplicates if i was layering voices up), um, and also those little rubber buttons get sticky with age...

what's also a bit odd is that for some reason you get rotten phase cancellation when you do layer voices up, though you can still some quite nice multi-osc patches

if you want to hear what it can do, i used it when i recorded Porton Down, there's 2 oscs doing the 'flute' part, and 3 on the 'drone'

it really depends i guess whether you like it or not...

hi

thanks for the replies...well i am already familiar with hardware stuff since i already own almost 40 synths and samplers so getting familiar with it wont be a prob...i am also in many types of music from 80s synth pop to moroder disco and trance so i think it can be of use in the productions...furthermore i am willing to use it as a single voice synth so no need to figure out how to make it work in multitibral mode...think i will pick this up...

thanks again

Yer kiddin?

With that many toys, I'm sure the six-track will be a bit of a let down.

Being able to stack six different patches makes it a monster analog mono

...unfortunately you can only store two "stacks", but they're easy enough to change.

i'd say go for it. i had a Six-Trak maybe eight years ago and haven't heard a synth yet that can really pull off its sound. there's something just 'different' about the tones that come out of it. really remember it pulling off some interesting orchestral stuff (brass, strings, winds) along with some unique sci-fi sounds and even a decent 303 emulation. i always perk up whenever i hear it in one of my old tracks, it's such a distinct sounding synth. i've got one around somewhere that has what sounds like a cat's meow morphing over time into a blood-boiling infant screech. i'll try to find it just for the hell of it.

i always hated the keybed on it, felt pretty cheap compared to the two Junos and SH-101 i had at the time as well. overall, i was never happy with the build quality. the buttons didn't feel very responsive either, though i had no problems with them not working right. i didn't mind the interface at all, every parameter is right in front of you and just a few button presses away (like the Moog Source or Little Phatty). get a manual, (i believe) there's a bunch of functions that use different button configurations.

ie - multi-timbrality... i believe this was actually the first synth that featured MIDI, so of course the spec is primitive. multi-timbrality is achieved by setting it to one of the four midi modes and sending midi info from the base channel and the next five channels (if 4 is your base, then it'll receive on 4,5,6,7,8,9). pretty simple i guess. can't remember exactly how the voice allocation is handled, but if you're using all six channels you'll only get one voice out of each at once. not sure if you're using less than six, it's probably a first/last note played type of thing.

whenever i listen to Alec Empire's 'les etoiles des filles mortes' (which was done completely on a Six-Trak, sequenced on an Atari Falcon) i get very sad that i sold it. my original intention was to buy a Multi-Trak due to the individual outputs and better build quality. i was under the impression that internally they were the same. i've since heard that there's some differences in the character of the two, and that there was a later run of Multi-Traks that were of cheaper build quality. not sure on all this.