Poly Synths...suggestions?

mmm, there was a lad here in Dublin selling it for €400...and to add that on with the Kiwi...too much :(

Yo boys my Poly 800 arrived today, but I've got a problem with her!

Hmm that doesn't sound very promising... It should work without batteries. Check all the switches on the back, maybe it's set to some weird state.

Sounds like something came loose in the post, it happens. I'd open it up and take a look inside. Do you have a soldering iron?

ya I'd open it up and carefully look around for a loose wire or broken solder joint. If you're lucky you'll find something simple to fix. if you're not, you won't find anything at all. :D

I bet a Korg service place could fix it up for 50 bucks or so.

Thanks for all your concern, gentleman - delighted to say that the ebay lad I bought it off is being super helpful and offering to fix it and return it back to me, and to cover the postage costs.

Seems he's a bit of a synth head - says he's serviced and fixed tons of Poly 800's in the past so should be in good hands! Got very lucky, could have just been some lad who doesn't care.

In other news, i'm picking up a jx3p later today! On the rebound from the Poly not working myself and fellow band member decided to just buy it for use in the mean time till we get the 800 back, and then see if it's worth keeping both or selling one on. Didn't get it cheap, €400, but at least it'll quench our Poly desires

jx3p is definitely the better synth, I think you will be very pleased.

I'm currently looking at an ad for JX-8P. Any opinions on this one?

Better than the JX-3P?

Yes! It's pretty great.

GR-8p.

yo gentlemen - i'm having a lovely time fiddling with these synths, but now I wouldn't mind dabbling with other peoples patches, at least as a new start point when programming - does anyone know of any online database of free patches for the Jx-3p and the Poly800?

Also - when loading new patches onto these synths - does it wipe and change all your patches in one go, or can you load 1 patch at a time? I have a few tasty patches I wouldn't wanna loose.

I actually just finished adding fm, cutoff, and resonance knobs to my Poly-800 a few days ago. Makes the thing much more fun to play. Hoping to add CV control, audio input, and the filter 12/24db knob in the future if I can figure that stuff out.

Of course you can, just write them down!

I think you can use the "Tape Memory" function to get patches on the JX-3P, but I've never tried. Nor do I know of resources for such a thing.

Mmm from what I've briefly read in the manual it seems like you can load patches much like you do with the Poly 800, as Danke said with the 'Tape Memory' function

also, this lad seems to be selling patches, so I can only assume you must be able to load them, no?

Agreed! Especially when it comes to the JX3P which is a dream to program and has quite an intuitive input method, however the Poly 800's parameter options aren't as initially user friendly - so it would be nice to play with pre-made sweet sounding patches and tweek from there...

So anyone know if you can transfer individual patches at a time or does it wipe all your patches with a new set in one go?

I'm pretty sure it's all in one go. Also, I don't think poly800 is much harder to program than jx-3p is... what exactly is giving you a hard time?

Here are the factory presets for both synths: http://www.dlse.nl/downloads/synthdownload.html

  On 4/17/2014 at 4:57 PM, kokoon said:

I'm pretty sure it's all in one go. Also, I don't think poly800 is much harder to program than jx-3p is... what exactly is giving you a hard time?

Ah it's not really a 'hard time' - the JX3P is just a bit more intuitive and simpler and seem's the be labeled with more obvious parameter options like LFO rates etc. etc. but i'll just sit down some day soon and get more acquainted with the poly800 and i'm sure i'll get the hang of it

I remember back in the day, when poly-800 was my only synth, I knew all the parameters by heart. It's actually really easy, the bank (first digit) denotes the module and the second digit is a control of that module. And envelopes are all alike, I think (or maybe one has an extra param?) so you only need to remember the order of envelope controls, which is easy, just like on every synth (that has a "break point" stage, haha).

And 41 is cuttof, I'm pretty sure about that. I used to do a lot of filter sweeps on this synth. Before moogslayer, of course, almost 20 years ago. The sweeps sucked.

everything is properly labelled on poly800. what more would you really need? it's no yamaha dx7 (even though with yamaha you have the diagram that pretty much explains everything, in VISUAL form, which is actually pretty great once you understand whats going on)