Part of the reason for working on my basement was to have a home for my vinyl albums, cassettes and older synths. The albums have fared well. The cassettes are still being sorted but my synths are another issue. Unfortunately, most of them (modules and keyboard units) have some serious issues (power supplies burning out, etc.). In fact my Rhodes Chroma was stored in the storage case that came with the unit. The foam in the case has attached itself to the instrument and disintegrated into the unit making it unusable. My Oberheim OB8 lights up and knobs turn but doesn’t utter a sound other than a click.
I purchased a USB floppy drive unit to read old notator sequencer files so that I could archive them. The drive sees the disks as empty and asks if I want to reformat them. This is all leading me to a conclusion I didn’t expect. At some point, you have to cut your losses and move on. At least I do. The thing about the analog synths is I can achieve similar results in software and it be repeatable with less tuning issues, etc. I know some purists will gasp at that proposition, but I have to say that THOR in Reason is a very powerful machine that has the ability to emulate most analog synths. Not to mention a user of Native Instruments’ REAKTOR has developed an Oberheim emulation program.
As far as the musical ideas on the sequencer disks, that is a bit more problematic. But most times if an idea was developed past a certain point, there was a cassette tape made of the idea to listen to while driving. So its not a complete washout. Its just sorting through cassettes which is time consuming to say the least.
There was one song in particular I have lyrics for and I remember fairly well except for the chord structure of the verse. It was almost like the bass line and chords met almost haphazardly. But being a creative person, I can come up with something I can live with. Otherwise, time to look forward to the new.
One way I keep it in perspective is to look to the example of Edgard Varese. He lost most of his early works in a fire. Compared to most of his peers, his output was not as great. But the works that have been preserved more than make up for the loss.
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