I spend a lot of my time restoring and revamping old studio gear and it’s often nice to celebrate the return of an old faithful with a sample or two. This 1985 Crumar Bit One was somewhat distressed when it arrived with several broken keys and had a habit of crashing until numerous contacts were cleaned. The Bit One was designed by Mario Maggi, the same creator as the mighty Elka Synthex. Although the Bit One was significantly less feature rich, it was still an interesting offering with its dual free-running master oscillators featuring a variable detune control and Curtis filters. One area this slightly odd beasty excels at are plucked instruments thanks in part to the phasey/edgy results of setting the detune control to just off zero. The shifting phase effect between each bank of oscillators on each key-on is often cited as a shortcoming… I really rather like it!  Although the Bit One is not everyone’s cup of tea I have found its qwerks quite endearing.

Heavenly One comes in two parts… Heavenly Harp is a large multi-sample playing on the effects of the Bit One’s shifting phase and Heavenly Pad is a cyclic phaser pad using a blend of eight instruments which have been processed with the Dual Pentode Buffer and I think the two work nicely together as a multi.

HS-4KL-BZ11 (21/04/13)