EL3503 Valve (Philips) 1960'S

This Philips came in two different styles, a recorder going though the changeover between valve and transistor, on this site you will see another EL3505 but with transistorized electronics, the similarities to each other is so close, the wooden case which houses the transistor units will house the valve as if it was meant to be. These recorders were not too known about in the UK however, the BBC brought up 8 of these recorders which were synchronized together to perform the duties of a multitask recorder, before the days of synthesizers, the Radiophonic workshop would experiment with found sounds and create theme tunes such as the famous Dr. Who theme there are many bits of documentation featuring Delia Derbyshire working over consol mono versions of this recorder editing with fragments of tape of found sounds recorded at different pitches, this style of music was called "Music con cretz", French which roughly translates onto found music. The unusual thing is the BBC did own a 8 track recorder, the Leevers Rich, one of the very first multi track recorders in Europe however the loops of tape would still be placed together on the Philips machines.
Using one of these recorders it is easy to see why they were popular in the Radiophonic workshop, they are easy to edit with, have a fast start and stop time, easy to mark the tape on the heads with chinagraph pencil and generally low maintenance, the opposition machines would be the EMI TR-90 or the series E Leevers Rich, both were in the workshop, the Leevers Rich was used for creating the different pitches (As it had varispeed control) and the TR-90 I do not know.

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