EMS VCS3
More info
- Creator
- EMS (David Cockerell, Peter Zinovieff, Tristram Cary)
- Released
- 1969
- Type
- Analogue synthesizer
The small 1969 British synth where you connected modules by pushing pins into a grid instead of running patch cables.
Electronic Music Studios in London set out to build a synthesizer an ordinary musician could afford. The VCS3, usually nicknamed the Putney, fitted in a wooden case with a 16 × 16 matrix on the front: each row a source, each column a destination, and a pin at the crossing joined the two. It was a modular synth without cables, and the first proper modulation matrix to boot.
Its oscillators were famously unstable and held their tuning about as well as British weather, which made it better at space noises than melodies. Pink Floyd's On the Run, Hawkwind, Brian Eno in Roxy Music and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used it for exactly that. The briefcase version, the Synthi A, followed in 1971.