Product: Wersi Saturn W3T
Price Paid: A$ 6000 USED
Submitted
08/04/2008
at
11:10pm
by
ram
Ease of Use
:
8
The device is one of the largest analog synthesizers ever built. It has hundreds of controls. It is relatively easy to use for retro organ sounds. Synth sounds require some skill a the routing switches and appropriate adjustment of the slider controls.
Features
:
10
Two fully polyphonic manuals and a monophonic pedal. The keyboard action is still quite good, even after 30 years of daily professional use. Pedal action is also quite good.
The one in my studio was the one used by Klaus Wunderlich when he did concerts and made albums in the USA in the late 1970's. It is non-standard in several respects although it was built by the Wersi factory or their reps in the USA. It has MIDI OUT and MIDI IN (the MIDI IN is especially unusual in an analog synth). It has some extra clocking and tricking lines linking various effects and some alternate sound sources.
Expressiveness/Sounds
:
9
It is a legacy analog synth so it does not react to velocity or aftertouch. It does a perfect simulation of a broad range of analog synth sounds because it is one!
It consists of several different types of tone generation (actually separate synths in the same case). A drawbar organ including percussion drawbars, a formant filtering analog organ of around 40 ranks, a piano synthesizer (not MIDIed), a bass synthesizer (mono on the pedals), and bunch of effects for filtering, phase shifting, drums, percussions, rudimentary sequencing, and so forth.
You can hear it on the Clair_de_Lune soundtrack downloadable from
http://www.hydrophones.com/MAI-Audio/More-MAI-Audio-Music_downloads.html
which is, of course, multitracked, but the sounds are the Saturn.
Reliability
:
9
Hell is is over thirty years old, still in almost daily professional use - that is pretty reliable.
Yes is does need to be maintained. It is very very heavy (well over 300 lbs) so I would not want to move it. No way you would tour with it today.
Customer Support
:
No Opinion
The original real Wersi company went bankrupt ages ago. Fortunately I have a full set of manuals, assembly diagrams, schematics, and other documentation. Most in both English and German. The parts are standard and mostly still available. Still you have to have an qualified electronics engineer interested in such things on staff, with appropriate tools and test equipment, to keep legacy stuff like this going.
Overall Rating
:
10
I wish I could find a stock of parts for it, particularly the external switches and controls. So far everything is still OK, but eventually some of the controls will wear out.
It makes a handy adjunct to modern controllers and gear in a commercial studio setting. We have two fully equipped studios, one a five channel editing and mastering studio, the other a keyboard and synthesis studio. The Wersi Saturn resides in the synthesis studio and often is the easiest way to get certain legacy style sounds for video soundtracks, advertisements, music on hold, and some styles of music.
