Crumar Orchestrator

doesnt get much easier, just turn it on and pres some keys. no deep editing or anything, just move the sliders

nothing exciting

great analog sounds, the one I have is a bit screwy, but when it works right the sounds are pretty dope

its really old now

yeah right

pretty nice synth, not heavy on features, but great to tool with

Very easy to use just plug in and play. Selection of sounds and editing is done with sliders.

The keyboard is more or less got pitch,filter(for Brass), piano, violin, ensemble. It has a reverb and chorus. Also has a bass treble eq slider and tremelo slider. Not a ton of features but still worth it for those with processors that need a sound source. Sounds can be split up and or combined for more variety.

Not realistic but that was why i wanted it. As soon as i plugged it in i decided it was worth it. I immediately recognized the piano sound as something i've heard on many Autechre or Aphex Twin albums. Just run it through a fx processor if you need more variety. I could see where you could get drones or sounds similar to stereolab with this thing. It's good at the few sounds it makes. I don't want it to sound exactly like a piano anyways.

It's very heavy. I don't think it would break from rough use of the sliders. Everything is very solid.

I think they are out of business.

I own a proteus 2000 and this thing sounds more bass like than that but i do realize it's an analog. I don't think the proteus is quite the same kind of beast since it's digital. This is my first analog though i have messed around with my friend's korg poly six. Sure this doesn't have as many features but it was worth it. I run it through a boss vf-1 processor and it sounds beautiful. If it was lost or stolen i would hope to be able to replace it but doubt it since it is no longer in production. I guess i would get something with more features but i love this synth. It has plenty of value for creating melodies over top of harsh digital beats or multitracking with it to get thick layers.

This is a very simple instrument with an oscilator per voice. It has string soungs, brass sounds, piano sounds ans clavinet/harpsicord sounds. It is very easy to select the sound and you can have one or more sounds active simultaneously. The keyboard comes with a volume pedal that could also be mapped to the brass filter section so that you could darker or brighten the brass or do filter sweeps on the brass.

It has a 61 on note keyboard, the action is not great, but it works fine for playing cords, but the action is a bit slow for playing fast runs. Not too bad though. It had vibrato effects which are not very useful, you can simply turn them on or off. There is no MIDI and the keyboard is not presseure or touch sensitive. This is a strait keyboard instrument - no sequencing etc. So this instrument was definately designed to fulfill the needs of keyboardist who needed string sounds (these class of instruments were commonly referred to as "String Machines"). Despite is limitations, it was one of the best string sounds available in its day. So the feature rating is low, but it would have scored a lot higher in its day.

None of the sounds are realistic. They are very musical though. Especially for the mid-late 70 sounds and disco type sounds. There was one great feature that made the instrument very useful in some cases. The foot pedal volume (awesome 20 pound pedal that felt really nice!) could be used as a filter sweep for the brass sounds. So you could use it to darken the brass, or to fade from a dark brass sound to a bright very synty brass sounds. This was great for emulating sounds like the ones found at the beginning of the ToTo song: "Goodbye Girl". I used this instrument a lot for basic sounds until I got my PolySix. I still used the Orchestrator for string pads. I would say that was its greatest strength.

It seems that this instrument has an oscillator for each key. I had several capacitors go out on individual notes and had to have them repaired. The instrument is also rather heavy at 40+ pounds, so its difficult not to knock it around a bit. The good news is that it is built using common electronic parts and should be repairable by most good techie shops. I don't think Crumar is still around though...

You can get somthing that does what it did and a whole lot more for a few hundred buck, so I would never consider replacing it. It sits in my dead keyboard room with my CP-70B, Kawai K1, Yamaha DX7. I have instruments that can outperform all of these old timers now. I have switched to a lot of the virtual synthesizers because they are cheap and they sound great. But for its time - it was the top of the line "string machine" type instrument for several years and the brass pads were very decent as well. So at the time I would have rated it very high. But now it is not very useful at all. My rating will be an average of it original rating and what I would rate it now.

This is your very basic analog string synth. It claims to have
brass and piano but these are virtually unusable unless you're really
look for a cheesy sound. The string section is fabulous as long as
your looking for that 70's era ARP String Ensemble sound. Chords
tend to get a little flaky but the single note lead sound is straight
out of 1978.

If you're looking for the string sound of Peter Frampton's "I'm in You"
or perhaps the Bee Gee's "Nights on Broadway" this is the synth.
Good mainly for single note string leads to give your track that
shimmer you don't get with FM or other modern keys.