Fall 1992 - TX Treasure

When I think of the vintage gear tsunami I fell into, it's remarkable to think it really "only" lasted 2 years - first toe in the water in 1991, last great deal found in 1993, after which point I started to retire pieces of gear. One great find for me was the TX816.

I believe this beast was actually built in 1985: Eight Yamaha DX7 synthesizers in single rack, with just a few buttons and one angry red 2-digit LED for each. You couldn't program these things from the front panel - they were strictly for playback. But by this time I was using a bit of software from Opcode called "Galaxy" which offered visual editing and library management on my Mac (which in 1992 was STILL my SE - imagine, I actually used the same computer for 5 years), so I could load up my favorite sounds and let it rip, and I could tweak them in the editing software.

The TX816 was sort of legendary for me - while it was heavily used by a lot of very hack-y sounding LA musicians (who used the 8 synths to layer up the most lush fake electric piano patch ever), it was championed by my sequencing hero David Gamson of Scritti Politti. If you listen to Cupid+Psyche, you'll hear all of these little clavinet-synth sounds, all a little different, weaving lines of melody, trading parts, almost like a Bach Invention. That was the power of the TX - you had all this SOUND to work with, but all of the sounds were sort of SMALL, so they could dance around eachother without making the mix a mess.

If you're wondering what this sounded like... try to remember "Things Can Only Get Better" by Howard Jones - that funky bassline with a little clavinet interplay - that was the classic DX sound.

Listening to my tracks from this time period, I hear all 8 of those synths going - some doubling lines, one synth being used just for a triangle sound twice in the track... It was ridiculous luxury to be throwing the sonic power of a full DX7 (when new, a $2500 synth) to that single purpose.

I found the TX in a second-hand store in St Paul called Encore Music - they typically had used synths I WASN'T interested in, but I made the rounds anyway. There was always a Korg Poly 61, or a Crumar Stratus, or a Roland Juno-6, or a early 1980s E-Piano module of ill repute and sound... but it was always worth looking. And one day, I saw the TX816 sitting there, with a treasure almost as great: 8 20 foot XLR Cables (high quality) with 1/4" adaptors. $800 for the works, and honestly the cabling was worth at least $200 of that. I couldn't say no, and took it home.

Of course, this officially overloaded my mixer, so I needed to get a second 16-channel submixer. And it was a little noisy, so this was what brought the noisegate into my house. So all told, it was at least $1200 of "deal", but it still felt like a deal, considering not 6 years earlier this would have cost in at least $5000. In fact, watching the auction prices, TX816s STILL go for around $800, having peaked up to closer to $1400 by the late 1990s. So while it wasn't a $200 Jupiter 8, it was still a good deal.

The TX wound up leaving the arsenal in one of the earliest rounds of studio pruning in 1995: By that time, I had used it on a few dozen tracks, but had fallen into a familiarity with the sound, every time I dialed it in, I was using it for similar things, and I fell out of love with its reedy thin sound. And having a huge coil of cables running behind everything was getting to feel unreasonably cluttery. I found a good home for it for a bit more than I paid for it.... and it never cost me anything in service costs (which I can't say about my other big treasure I haven't told you about yet).