The Millioniser 2000 was launched on the market by Suzuki in 1983. In 1979, musician Walter Müller and technicians Harald Blobel and Urs-Peter Studer built a prototype that could control a Roland Promars analog synthesizer. The two records “XMas and You” and “Perfidia” were recorded with it. In 1982, Ronald Schlimme joined the team with SM Elektronik to further develop the project. A Roland 100M modular system, a Moog Prodigy and various additional devices such as equalizers, exiter, reverb, chorus and phaser were used for the sound studies.
The Millioniser essentially consists of a harmonica-shaped mouthpiece connected to a programmable analog monosynthesizer. The handset is a mouthpiece with programming and performance controls. The synthesizer module is triggered by the pressure of the breath on a pressure-sensitive circuit in the receiver. The mouthpiece transmits the pitch information to the synthesizer module via light-sensitive cells. When switched on, the Millioniser plays the same chromatic scale as a conventional harmonica. The same blow-and-draw technique is used in conjunction with a semitone at the end of the device to play a scale. The sounds are similar to those of a conventional monosynthesizer. Features include three DCOs with sawtooth and square wave, high, low and two bandpass filters, ADSR envelope generator, triangle/sine LFO and a noise source with separate filtering. In addition to pressure sensitivity, the controls include buttons for semitone, tone and octave up/down, a volume control, a filter control, a portamento control and a pitch bender. The instrument has 64 preset voices and a twelve-octave range.
