One of the cool things about getting these magazines back in the day was that some of them had printouts of synth patches to try - this was loooong before the internet, sysex downloads and samples of every synth known to man were easily available. We were lucky to maybe buy the occasional synthesizer patchbook, let alone spending £30 - £80 on a cartridge full of new sounds.

So it was always something to look forward to, turning to the patchwork pages to see whether there was a new patch or two for the synth you owned - or mild dissapointment if they were all for bits of gear you didn't have.

These patch articles were always of particular interest to me to archive, and even more so now that more and more of those instruments have software versions - so we can go back and try out those Jupiter-8/DX7/JX8P/M1 patches that we couldn't try before.

I had left these Patchwork articles un-OCR'd until now, but they are finally available for all active issues that included them (and will be done as normal for new issue uploads going forward) - and as a result you can go on a patch hunt through the growing archive of 20th century music tech magazines.

There are a number of ways to find them, other than just browsing by issue:

Feature Search

Select Topic: "Synth Patches"
You can optionally enter a search term, eg, "cz101", or "dx7" to bring back patchwork articles that had sounds for that synthesiser.

However, if you are after sounds for a particular synth, or group, of gear, a better way is to use the Gear search on the synth in question:

Gear Search

Type "patchwork" in the search field
Chose "Synth" -> "Casio" -> "CZ101" in the gear menus

This will display all patchwork articles with CZ101 sounds.

Or, as all CZ instruments are basically compatible, you could just choose:

"Synth" -> "Casio"

...and leave the model blank. This would bring back patch articles that included any Casio CZ synth (CZ101, CZ1000/3000/5000, CZ1 etc.)

Sysex files
I'd always planned to let people upload the sysex files of the patches for each article and offer these as an optional download, but in some ways, there's something nice about going to the effort of typing in all the values, to hear the resultant patch, and hoping it was going to be a great one, like we did back then.

Enjoy!