AnalogSuicide.com

Dan Wilson of Hideaway Studios in the UK is the proud new 'parent' of the lovely Novachord that once belonged to Marc Doty ( you will  know him from these fabulous synth tutorials and his band, Automatic Gainsay). 

First, let's indulge in a tiny Novachord crash course courtesy of SonicState.com 's "20 Weirdest Instruments" Series in which this particular Novachord is featured:

The ownership has since changed hands from Marc to Dan, and Dan has kindly kept me updated as to the progress and state of his Novachord. Dan has started a great temprary blog HERE about the status of the Novachord...here's a bit more about what he had to say, from that thread:

"...The good news is that generally the sands of time have been very kind to this beast. Parts of her are in amazing condition - the front panel controls, and top wooden casing are in very good condition and the Bakelite & Plaskon keys (see note below) are practically mint and have not yellowed, chipped or cracked at all.

The bad news is that towards the end of the evening we identified the reason why the beast filled AG's house with smoke! It turns out that it's suffered an absolutely typical Novachord failure mode but was sadly not caught quick enough. There are two capacitor pairs potted in metal cans located in the pre-amp "channel" within the generator chassis. These caps decouple the HT supply and are potted in bitumen. They fail S/C and the bitumen melts and pours through the chassis holes. Unfortunately, in this case, the lack of functionality was not noticed until it was too late, as sadly Marc was away from the instrument at the time. This has led to much more serious secondary damage in the PSU chassis where, on first inspection, a prolonged dead short of the HT rail has caused at least one of the mains transformers, the supression choke, probably the valve rectifier and several resistors to fry. In short it's looking like the entire power supply, including transformers, will have to be completely rebuilt. "

Scroll further down in that thread, and you'll see more progress for what Dan described to me as being a "163 tube beast" ! 

Here are a few photos from Dan, aren't they lovely? Let's keep our hopes high that this beauty will be singing full force again soon!

 Again, stay updated by visiting Dan & his Novachord here.