Until the ‘70s, the only way to reproduce the lush sound of an orchestral string section on stage was with the somewhat unwieldy Mellotron. And then something wonderful happened...
In the early 1970s, there were four instruments that an aspiring keyboard player had to have. These were a Hammond organ, a monophonic ‘lead’ synth, an electric piano of some sort, and a Mellotron. But few people — even professionals — could afford all four and, if you were an aspiring musician or, like me, a school kid with unattainable dreams, there was no hope.
In 1973, things began to change. Italian manufacturer Crumar arrived on the scene with cheap electronic pianos that sounded ghastly, cheap organs that sounded a little better, and a couple of rather pleasing ‘string synths’ that sought to emulate the orchestral string sounds so beautifully reproduced by the Mellotron. In the same year, Korg and Roland launched their first monosynths and, suddenly, a multi-keyboard rig was within reach of the amateur musician.
Crumar’s Compac String and Stringman keyboards opened the string synth floodgates, and there were a couple of dozen similar keyboards on the market within a year or two. One of the earliest and best of these was the Vox String Thing. Released in 1974, this was a re-badged version of the Logan String Melody manufactured by then-unknown Italian manufacturer, Logan Electronics. It made very little impact, and few are still known to exist. Nonetheless, the String Thing and String Melody proved to be the precursors of the instrument held by many to be the greatest of the ‘pure’ string synths. It was the Logan String Melody II, and it appeared on these shores in 1977.
The Logan String Melody II
The Logan String Melody II improved upon its predecessor by having five selectable preset sounds, which could be adjusted using the eight ‘level’ sliders.
Like its predecessor, the String Melody II was designed to generate lush ‘ensemble’ sounds reminiscent of massed orchestral strings. To do so, it used analogue delay lines to create a range of rich chorus/ensemble effects. But, unlike the String Melody — which offered merely a single preset sound and a single variable setting — the revised model offered four distinct sounds in addition to the full ensemble.
The first was called ‘Acc’ (accordion) and this was the untreated output from the organ-like sound generator. Nasal and thin, I doubt that Acc was of much use to anyone. Next came ‘Solo’, which took this basic waveform and applied a rapid vibrato to it. This still sounded nasal and thin... but with vibrato. Much more interesting was the wonderful Organ, which applied a slow chorus to the initial waveform. No previous electronic keyboard had managed to evoke the grandeur of a pipe organ or the cavernous space of a cathedral, but the String Melody II did so effortlessly. Even today, it’s a sound that commands attention. Finally, there was ‘O’ (the ‘strings’ setting), which combined the slow and fast chorus to obtain a gloriously warm and rich ensemble that was a little brighter and livelier than the preset ‘Orch’ setting.
Having pressed one of the five buttons to select the nature of the sound you wanted, you could then adjust the four variable sounds using the eight ‘level’ controls. The String Melody II offered a split keyboard with three registrations on each side (called Cello, Viola and Violin), plus two string bass sounds accessible from the lower split only. Combining these in the same way as you would use the drawbars on a Hammond organ, you could vary the output from imitations of simple, solo instruments, to complete orchestral ensembles. What’s more, the String Melody II was fully polyphonic, so each note was shaped correctly, and it even offered independent Attack and Release controls for each side of the split. In 1977, this was excellent stuff.
When the String Melody II first appeared, no less a player than Rod Argent reviewed it for International Musician magazine. Commenting upon the Organ sound, he wrote, “I would never have believed that you could get such enormous sounds out of such a tiny box.” Other players were not slow to catch on, and the Logan (as it became universally known, to the exclusion of the earlier model) became a mainstay of many amateur and semi-professional bands.
There were numerous reasons for this. Built like a Russian T34 tank, it came in its own flightcase and was easily transportable. As already stated, it was truly polyphonic — but, more to the point, most other string synths were not — and it produced a wider range of sounds than much of the competition. In live use, nothing could be simpler, yet played through a variety of effects units such as a phaser, a tape echo or a Leslie rotary speaker, it could create a remarkable range of sounds — anything from sweeping ethereal textures to the voice of doom. But most important of all, the String Melody II sounded wonderful, and it proved to be impossible to create a bad sound on one.
In 1978, my first serious stage rig comprised (to my left) a Crumar Organiser with a String Melody II perched on top of it and (to my right) a Hohner Pianet T with a Korg 700 on top of that. I had chosen these to try to emulate Tony Banks’ keyboards in the hey-day of mid-70s Genesis and, by and large, it was a remarkably successful setup. Unfortunately, and in common with most young players at that time, I made the cardinal mistake of swamping everything the band played with lashings of unnecessary ensemble strings, when a more discrete use of the organ would have been more appropriate!
Not surprisingly, I wasn’t alone in using the String Melody II... Logan sold lots of them, as evidenced by their widespread availability today. Nevertheless, few professional bands used them. Nick Magnus owned a Vox String Thing that he modified to produce the String Melody II’s wider range of sounds, and he used this extensively and very effectively on Steve Hackett’s Spectral Mornings and Defector albums. Elsewhere, the Enid used one live (see box, overleaf) but — like the Hohner Pianet T, which I discussed in the February 2008 issue of Performing Musician (www.performing-musician.com/pm/feb08/articles/retrospecpianetst.htm) — the Logan was not originally considered to be a ‘pro’ keyboard, and only achieved its greatest popularity long after it went out of production.
Nowadays, the String Melody II is sought after by analogue aficionados, and you’ll find it used by a number of tribute bands. Sure, you can create similar sounds on modern workstations, but nothing could be simpler nor more distinctive than a real Logan. In fact, you could easily describe it as unique, were it not for one thing the Hohner International String Melody II was nothing more nor less than a Logan String Melody II with the words ‘Hohner International’ silk-screened on the control panel in place of the words ‘Logan LE’. In all other ways, the two were identical!
Other Logan instruments
Impressively for its time, the String Melody II was truly polyphonic, and featured independent attack and release controls for each side of the keyboard split.
Sometime in the mid to late ‘70s, Logan also released the String Orchestra, which offered a different implementation of the classic Logan sound. The cello/viola/violin registrations were retained, as were the independent and truly polyphonic attack and release controls either side of the keyboard split, the Orchestra preset, and the two bass voices. But gone were the Acc, Solo and Organ voices, to be replaced by two new registrations: Orch I and Orch II, both pitched at the same octave as the cello.
If, like me, you trusted Logan implicitly, you might have expected the new sounds to be the warmest, fattest orchestral voices ever. You would have been disappointed. On its own, Orch I sounded like an angry wasp in a jam jar, while Orch II was heavily filtered to create a nasal sound that might — just might — have formed the basis of an interesting choral patch. Unfortunately, both of these were treated by the fast vibrato only, and there was no way to pass them through the full ensemble effect. This meant that the opportunity to create a wider range of string sounds, as well as (possibly) a primitive ‘analogue choir’, was lost.
The rebadging of the Logan String Melody II as a Hohner International instrument suggests that there should also have been a Hohner International String Orchestra. There was... but this was a very different instrument, although it’s possible that it was again built by Logan Electronics. Nonetheless, there was a Wersi String Orchestra, which was identical to the Logan version. Clearly, the Italians and Germans enjoyed a very close relationship in the mid 1970s!
Two years later, Logan released the Piano Strings Synthesiser — an instrument that had zero impact on buyers and has since disappeared almost without trace. This was little more than a basic multi-keyboard comprising electronic piano sounds, Logan strings and a basic synthesiser section. As was usual for this type of instrument, everything was generated by the same oscillator bank, with two octaves tapped and treated by a variety of filters and amplifiers to create the various sounds. The Strings offered viola and violin sounds with programmable attack and release times and, like all Logans, the sound of these was luscious. The same could not be said of the so-called Piano section. This comprised 16’ and 8’ options, Honky Tonk and Harpsichord, with the option to add a fixed release and vibrato, and it sounded horrible. Finally, there was the Synth. This was no more than the basic waveform shaped by the envelopes, and then passed through the most anaemic filter you have ever heard, with filter modulation applied by an AD envelope and an LFO, plus vibrato, all controlled by a singularly confusing set of buttons.
Nonetheless, there was still something worthwhile about the Piano Strings Synthesiser. For example, you could adjust the filter carefully and combine the Synth with the Strings to obtain a ‘formant’ sound similar to the so-called ‘male voices’ generated by early analogue synths. If you then applied vibrato, you could obtain a passable vocal sound. Alternatively, you could adjust the filter in different ways to create a range of ensemble sounds that you could not have obtained from a String Melody II alone. Not better... just different.
Final thoughts?
I bought the Logan String Melody II pictured here from Rumbelows Music in Reading in the Summer of 1977. Described as ‘ex-demo’, it cost me £375 (which was a significant discount from its £525 list price) and I immediately pressed it to work in a succession of instantly forgettable sixth-form bands and a working men’s club band (which was a horrible experience, but great experience, if you see what I mean). However, it came into its own when I went to university and formed a prog-rock band in the middle of the post-punk new-wave revolution. (Bad timing or what?) It then survived through various incarnations of two progressive rock bands until its last live appearance in 1989 or thereabouts. Since then, it has appeared on various studio recordings, and it was also the instrument that produced the Logan sounds in Roland’s S-series sample library. (Don’t ask me how my samples got there; I was unaware that Roland had ‘acquired’ them until I bought a second-hand S760 sampler last year!) In all that time, it only went wrong once. Exactly one day before its one-year guarantee ran out, a diode failed, and it then played an F-sharp constantly. The dealer didn’t bat an eyelid at the timing, fixed it promptly and, despite a great deal of use (as well as a certain amount of abuse including being hurled at a guitarist in 1980), it has performed faultlessly in the 30 years since.
While string ensembles now have little monetary value, they have never been completely replaced by either polysynths or samplers so, despite the availability of cheap and increasingly powerful polyphonic synthesisers, my String Melody II has enjoyed a long and illustrious career that is far from over. Given that Logans currently change hands for under £200, and that Rod Argent’s original statement is as relevant today as it was in the mid ’70s, there’s really no excuse for anybody interested in string synths to fail to have one in his or her live rig. 
Sampling the String Melody II
Like so many other analogue keyboards, String Melody IIs have found their way into a number of sample libraries, and they no doubt feature in many artists’ personal sample collections. But to get the best out of a Logan sample you need to have a lot of memory. After all, the whole point of having a swirling, unpredictable sound is that it should not sound static, so the samples need to be long enough to capture the extensive — and extended — motion. One company that has taken the trouble to do this for you is G-Media, who sampled my Logan String Melody II for the revised ‘virtual’ String Melody II in their forthcoming Virtual String Machine Expansion Pack. I can confirm that, while it’s not identical to the original instrument, the results are extremely satisfying. And here’s a twist... another young lad who inhabited the music department of Rumbelows in the Summer of ’77 was none other than Dave Spiers, one of the principals of G-Media Music. Apparently, he was very fond of my Logan, and he was rather disappointed when I bought it. When he laid his hands on it again in my studio in 2008, there was a tear in his eye. Or maybe both eyes...
Another viewpoint
For many music fans in the 1970s, their first encounter with a String Melody II (whether they knew it or not) occurred when listening to cult group, the Enid. Many years after they had stopped using it (replacing it with a succession of analogue and digital polysynths) I interviewed the band’s primary keyboard player, Robert John Godfrey, and he told me: “I remember very clearly why I purchased the Logan. I needed a keyboard that gave me a full, chorused sound, something with the harmonic richness of a church organ. The String Melody II gave me exactly that. It added a sound that, at the time, none of the other keyboards I used could produce. It was ideal for live work, very simple and immediate, although I never used it in the studio. The cathedral organ sounds on our recordings were painstakingly created, stop by stop, on other instruments. On many albums I ended up bouncing hundreds of tracks together but, of course, you can’t do that on stage. That was where the Logan scored.”
The rest of the Logan family
After the String Melody, String Melody II and String Orchestra, Logan released four further ‘live’ instruments under their own brand name. (There was also a small number of domestic organs.) As noted in the main text, the Piano Strings Synthesiser is little more than a footnote in keyboard history, and the same is also true of the Logan Big Band and Logan Vocalist, which sold in tiny quantities and have therefore become collectors’ items over the past few years. Finally, there was the Logan Vocal Synth, which is possibly the rarest of all production synthesisers, and which now commands remarkable prices on the very rare occasions that one appears for sale. If you ever see one... I want it.
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Thu 23 May 2013
Sound On Sound : Est. 1985