Miscellaneous synth thoughts (hope Urs will read)

[aaron aardvark]

I like the new newsletter (though I think the Zebra head logo could use some stripes). Checking out your new studio, looks like you have/share a lot of nice old synths. It looks like Urs owns a Sequential Circuits Pro One. I bought one (my first synth) in 1981, still have it, but it's very noisy now. It only sounds acceptable to me now if I run it through a Line 6 PodXT for distortion & effects, so I almost never use it anymore, but keep it for sentimental reasons. Without effects, the Pro One sounds rather thin to me now. I hear the Yazz used it long ago, I have no idea idea how they got it to sound so huge (I have a Prophet 5 emulation synth plug-in that sounds a lot fatter with multiple virtual oscillators/voices in unison than my Pro One). If anyone has any insight as to how the Yazz made a Pro One sound so huge, I would be curious to know. By the way, I noticed the "Iron Man" poster in Urs' studio. Were any u-he synths used in that movie?

[Urs]

Hi,

Maybe your Pro One needs to be recapped, e.g. have the electrolyte capacitors renewed. I'm pretty sure mine does, as it's got similar problems. It's a great synth IMHO, and maybe the best sounding Prophet, the only that's all analogue. We'll refurbish it soon. Ours also needs new pots and what not.

Iron Man has quite a bit of Zebra in there, as do the other movies we have posters of ( except Blade Runner of course )

Urs

[Howard]

Iron Man has quite a bit of Zebra in there, as do the other movies we have posters of ( except Blade Runner of course )

BTW: Blade Runner was one of several influences in the palette of sounds used in Inception.

[GruvSyco]

from the man himself
I bought a Pro-One for $99 from a local music store back in the day when everyone was dumping their analog gear for digital. Actually got it and a Mono-Poly for $198. When I think of all the cool analog shit I use to have, it makes me want to cry.

Just glad Urs makes his synths, it' like a super-aspirin for the heartache.

I'm kind of jealous I never got a newsletter btw.

[aaron aardvark]

Urs, Howard, GruvSyco,
Thank you for responding! I don't recall hearing the Pro One was the only all analog Prophet-based synth. I would probably use the Pro One more often if it had MIDI. I have never owned a pre-MIDI sequencer other than the Pro One's built-in step sequencer, which was always a bit of a pain to program. I used to sync the Pro One sequencer to my Roland TR-707 drum machine, but I hadn't used my TR-707 in almost 20 years, so I sold the TR-707. That's cool the Zebra was in "Iron Man", that's been my favorite super-hero movie. Here is the main portion of the newsletter for GruvSyco:

http://www.u-he.com/cms/

[Urs]

I'm kind of jealous I never got a newsletter btw.

Well, about half of the customer base did not opt in for that when they bought a license with ShareIt. In order to comply with Mailchimp, we had to only use those who opted in. But as the data was rather ancient in parts, we sent this first newsletter as an opt- out campaign, with the only news being the newsletter itself and the announcement of the new website. We're going to post an article about that soon... oh, or maybe we used the wrong email address. Which then our system might have fixed already (bouncing email's addresses are swapped with other addresses if we have any)

Re. the Prophet and all-analogue... all other Prophets with that voice architecture were polyphonic and had memory. This and economy requires that knob values are digitized and then distributed to the actual parameters. Thus there is a single DAC, a set of demultiplexers (switchable signal branches) and sample & hold units. The cpu would so to speak go round and charge one sample& hold after the other with its actual voltage.

So in the end, a parameter is controlled by a short pulse with a repitition of less than a kilohertz - which is stored by a simple lowpass filter. There have been arguments that this leads to audible artifacts, e.g. some "grainyness" in the sound. I'm not sure I believe that, but I have heard people whispering that the Pro One is the one to get. I do have a friend with a Rev. 2 P5 which he swears by. Will check it out one day.

[aaron aardvark]

Urs,
OK. I have never played a real Prophet 5. I played a Prophet 600 for about 20 minutes in the mid 80's.