Chimera Synthesis has developed the bC16 miniature synthesizer which provides sixteen color-coded potentiometers to control sound on a unit roughly the size of a CD.
We found another gem in the May 1986 issue of Keyboard Magazine -- this one was an ad for the Fairlight C.M.I. Series III. The old black and green computer monitor takes me back, but the guy in the back is the kicker.
Gearwire Gallery turns back the clock to 1977, where we extract this Rhodes ad from an April issue of Contemporary Keyboard magazine. Obviously, the name stood the test of time just as well as the Rhodes advertisement...
Offsite Link: Visit Rhodes' official website for deals on computahs that fell off the back of a truck
Gearwire Gallery is back after a brief absence. First up is this somewhat confusing image from Dean Markley. We are still puzzled by the correlation between vikings and bass strings.
Bill Holland: So, sausages...exactly what comes to mind when one thinks of breakfast on the frontier, greasy spoon diners at 1am, and...Moog synthesizers?
Joe Wallace Are those REAL pork sausages? Or is it that...
The class of '93 were just a bunch of crazy kids trying to figure it all out. Take the pictured Miami rock band, Saigon Kick as an example. Eyewitness reports suggest that these gentlemen actually were not known for...
It's 1992 again in the Gallery. The magazine is Guitar Player and the company is Dean Markley pushing their Blue Steel bass strings. Pictured is one Vail Johnson, bass player for noted soprano-saxophone Smoove-Jazz titan...
Dean Markley strings knew better than to challenge D'Addario on their home turf. As Gearwire Gallery readers know, in the 1980s and 90s D'Addario was the undisputed king of movie spoof concepts in their print ads. Loyal...
D'Addario strings have shown themselves to be the kings of the Gearwire Gallery "movie spoof" sub-genre. In this 1990 entry from Guitar Player magazine the company has settled on imagery recalling the smash hit film "Top...
We know that without the pointy guitar, there would be no such thing as an identifiable "Guitar Player Magazine" guitar product type. If the pointy guitar suddenly became unpopular, the entire industry devoted to the...
It's 1992 again, that transitional period in mainstream rock history when the Warrants and Poisons of the industry were being replaced by the Alices in Chains and the Pearl Jams. Pictured is one Joey Tafolla, one-time...
Offsite Link: Get more information about the Carvin DC127C at the official Carvin Guitars website.
The DigiTech guitar processors of yesterday (November 1986, to be exact) included the Whammy -- hands down one of the finest guitar effect pedals to ever be built. It wasn't just that bending notes and chords with the...
It's not common for the ads that we feature in Gearwire Gallery to employ much in the way of subtlety. We've seen collapsing buildings, idiotic set designs, pre-Photoshop gymnastics and hideous portraits. This time we're...
November '86 or thereabouts saw the first appearance of inexpensive sample-based drum machines aimed at non-electronic musicians. I know I wasn't the only bass player to break down and pick up a Boss DR-550. As first...
The Guitar Institute of Technology is one of many entries in the lucrative music-career-preparation industry, but no competing school has a funnier name. Somebody once harrumphed that the United Kingdom and the United...
Want to see the future? Of course you do. Back in the pages of the February 1992 issue of Guitar Player magazine, the Ibanez company had similar dreams and worked to channel visions of events yet to come. Undoubtedly...
D'Addario strings does it again with the bizarre celebrity endorsements. Earlier in Gearwire Gallery we saw them use Tolkien characters, and in this May 1994 full-page ad from Musician magazine, we are treated to a bad...
Before their merger with Voyetra, Turtle Beach was an early player in the PC audio card business. The 56K was an ISA card that came with an optional interface box with AES/SBU connections for your DAT. This ad is from...
Take Sonar 6, subtract fifteen years and you are left with Cakewalk in one of its earliest incarnations - and even then, dominating the PC arena with staggering new features such as MIDI metronome, fractional tempos and...
Offsite Link: Get more information about Cakewalk at the Cakewalk website
Here at the Gallery, we just show the ads and make snide comments, we don't make any promises about whether or not the product ever existed - we leave that to the people who wrote the ads two decades ago. Today's Gallery...
Offsite Link: Obtaining more information on Oktal is going to be a real bitch. Good luck with that.
Culled from the pages of March 1990's issue of Keyboard Magazine: behold the Atari Stacy portable computer. Originally designed to run on 12 "C" batteries, this early laptop came out the same year as the first Mac Portable.
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Offsite Link: Get more information about the Atari Stacy at the very cool Oldcomputers.net
The time: May, 1990. The technology: the multitrack cassette recorder. The maker: Sansui. Already an eleven-year-old technology in 1990, the limitations of a multitrack cassette recorder were well-known: if you needed...
Offsite Link: To obtain more information about the Sansui WS-X1 recorder, try Google.
Let's remember 1994. It was a time marked by stylistic upheaval in mainstream rock music. In this era, a revolution was taking place, dislodging one dumb pop music trend set (hairsparay, spandex, pointy guitars) in favor...
This stop in the Gallery brings us back to 1990, a time when the Atari ST1040 computer hadn't died as a platform yet. Germany's C-Lab (I'll forever know them simply as "Clab") was a software company that produced the...
Today's Gallery piece first saw light in the pages of Keyboard Magazine's March, 1990 issue. While not known principally for keyboards, the Peavey corporation tried their hand with the floppy drive-included DPM3 seventeen...
By now, you probably get the point of Gearwire Gallery: we leaf through old gear magazines and have a hard time believing anybody got anything done with yesterday's specs. Today, feast your eyes on top-of-the line SCSI...
Some ads from the past don't visually promise a whole lot, but deliver a lesson about longevity in the music software business. Toward the back pages of Electronic Musician's May 1992 issue we find a modest entry from...
"The synthesizer you don't need a master's degree in science to master" reads the ridiculous tag line to this September 1986 ad for the Casio CZ-230S from Keyboard Player magazine. Here's a hint: if someone tells you...
Offsite Link: Check out more about vintage Casio gear at Wikipedia.
