For things in life I have ended up building a new home in Italy. That's why the little free time I have left between putting together this new home and work I've taken to rest above all and I haven't spent any time writing on HIVE 😅. But today I decided that I was going to write, well, more exactly, I decided yesterday in a second-hand market when I found this rare piano.
The GEM S 80 with Musicoder included.
And I speak as if I already knew a lot about this piano but the truth is that I didn't even know that the company that made them existed.
The acronym GEM is derived from Generalmusic, the name of an Italian musical instrument company, which specialized in acoustic and digital pianos and was founded in 1987.
From what I have read, the company went bankrupt in 2011 and was bought in 2014 by the Finnish financial group Soundion Oy Ltd. Generalmusic still exists as a company specializing in digital pianos but now based in Finland.
Well, this piano caught my attention since I saw it, especially because of the number of buttons and pedals it had and of course the typical appearance of the decade of the 80s that it had. I don't know why, but things, especially electronic equipment, from the 80's, really catch my attention.
From what could be seen, on some of the buttons, it was possible to imitate different musical percussion instruments and store them in an internal memory, like in a sequencer, and play over that pre-recorded music.
Thanks to several comments in forums where I looked for a little information about this piano, I discovered that they are widely used in churches as an organ to play music at masses and different events that take place in them.
Another thing that caught my attention was this attachment that was attached to the side of the piano called the Musicoder.
I could try to write what Musicoder is but I think it's better to see it in a video. It will be easier to understand and even more fun. In the video they use a GEM model quite similar to this one that I found.
Going to second-hand markets is something that really amuses me, especially when I find things as interesting and rare as this one I found yesterday.
Did you know about the Musicoder?