Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

There's a guy in my town in Brasil with a silver face, too.

All day long he does pantomimes by the beach, reflecting the sun's rays and absorbing the tourists' dollars...

I love old Fender amps, but how darned many are there? Time for sumthin' different, I sez.

I am in the process of restoring an early '70s Princeton Reverb (there's that word again!). Great sounding amp when it's working right. The tremolo sounds very lush on this thing.

Thanks for using the correct term!

Fender messed up the terminology for (so far) 50 years when he termed tremelo, "vibrato".

Vibrato involves amplitude modulation, vibrato involves frequency modulation. Even vibrato manufacturers (with the exception of Bigsby) often get it wrong.

The Magnatone M-10 (and many Magnatones of the era) have a TRUE vibrato, with a circuit which actually varies the frequency of the note slightly for a lush and sometimes eerie effect. But once you've heard it, you'll understand the difference.

Magnatone actually made a couple of amps in the late '50s and early '60s that had STEREO vibrato, an effect that really grabs your attention!

How about stereo Leslies?

Vibrato involves amplitude modulation, vibrato involves frequency modulation.

Eh? What's that you say?

Amplitude=volume of sound=tremelo

Frequency=pitch of sound=vibrato

Stereo Leslies are absolutely wonderful if you don't mind the space! After searching for a few months for a nice pair of (vinyl-covered) Leslie cabinets (mostly for my vintage keyboards) at a reasonable price, I've settled for an RTX Rotary Speaker Simulator, which is a stereo Leslie replicator with the ability to slow down/speed up the virtual speaker for that true Felix Cavalieri/Lee Michaels sound. It's a single U unit only 6" deep with a double foot pedal. It does a commendable job for me, until a couple of those nice vinyl pieces come along and I find the space.

Here are two of my four keyboards, both very, very rare:



A 1965 Teisco Nomad Dual, an early analog transistor combo organ from about 1965, a nearly exact copy of the Farfisa Compact Duo (probably made by Farfisa, judging from the internals). This is in a corner of my dining room. (This picture is from the previous owner, before it was cleaned up and reconditioned.)



This is my WERSI DX-400 Portable, an early digital combo organ from about 1988, and perhaps the most elaborate foldable organ ever created until some of the later digital workstations eclipsed its capabilities in much smaller packages. This is in a corner of my living room. It's very European in concept, being part jukebox and rhythm machine, yet having full MIDI capability and RS-232 interface as well. This one has auto voices and drawbars, and the capability of assigning any voice to upper, lower or pedal boards and splitting the lower keyboard at any point, too.

The top Teisco unit weighs about 85 pounds (39 kg) while the bottom WERSI weighs 170 pounds (78 kg). Yikes.

The WERSI has the Leslie simulator, feeding through two PA amps. The effect is quite convincing. All Leslies "breathe" as the scrim-covered horns rotate and create a signature "whooshing" sound as they are miked. The simulator "breathes" too, but digitally.

Here it is turned on. We use it to help heat the place on chilly nights...



It fully meets my lifetime quota of blinking Starship Enterprise lights.

"She'll nae do warrrrrp five, Cap'n!"

Park it on the roof, Paul - instant Christmas lights!! I can picture the meters at the local power station when you switch in on.......

"Thought I told you to get those dilythium crystals on special at Walmart last time we dropped into Alpha XVIICDXXII, Scotty!!"

"Aye, Cap'n, but they dooon't do Frequent Flyers....."

It's pretty funny in a Bayerischer Cocktail Lounge sort of way, too. A certain button, when set a certain way, says , "HEY!" (mit akzent), I suppose to wake up the soporific audience after a rousing set of "Heino's Greatest Hits".

What, you've never heard of Heino? Well, you're in for a treat!

Heeeeeerrrrrrrrre's HEINO!!!


He calls himself "The leading singer of the Free World".

Those are his trademark glasses, and, to be honest, this is a picture from circa 1980.

He looks much better now, thank you.

When another German singer began to wear the same brand of eyeglasses, Heino bought the factory in order to keep them all to himself. I thought only Mariah Carey did stuff like that...

That guy looks like he could scare the dudes in Kraftwerk.

Actually, he was assembled from parts of the guys from Kraftwerk.

In the basement of a Bavarian castle, overlooking a village filled with people with torches.

I'd have to compare notes with my siblings (I could just do some googling but who's got the time?)...but I think this guy was big as a child singer in the late sixties in Germany. I remember seeing the album covers in the Kaufhalle when I was looking for stuff by Rhinoceros, etc...although the kid I'm recalling (same glasses too, I think) was called 'Heintje'...could be a diminutive form of Heino, nicht wahr? All I remember for sure is it was insipid schmaltz from what I heard in the store...

Euro 'boomers', help me out with this one...

The Teisco looks kinda like a Synclavier.

Oh my God, Heino!

I spent my teen years working in a record store. I am, with regret, all too familiar with him.

We stuck him in the "international" section and tried to forget him.

Older German ladies see him as a TeutonicTom Jones, except with the pure blut of the Fatherland coursing through his veins.