I've owned and sold a lot of synthesisers over the years, from the crappy to the sublime. Occasionally I come across one that I really connect with, and those are the ones that get a permanent place in the studio. Here are my views on the more interesting amongst them:
Yamaha CS-80
Sequential Circuits Prophet-T8
Sequential Circuits Prophet VS
Synthtech MOTM modular
Roland Jupiter 8
Roland Juno 6
PPG Wave 2.3
Oberheim Xpander
The Rest
The CS-80 is the big daddy; the largest, heaviest, most expressive and most expensive analog polyphonic synthesizer ever made. It's also one of the rarest, and since the people who own them now are unlikely to sell, you'll be very lucky to find one, even if you can afford it!
The CS-80 is really two mostly-independent eight voice synths layered on top of each other. Each voice has a single oscillator feeding a pair of 12dB/octave filters (high-pass then low-pass in series). Whilst a single oscillator per voice might sound a bit on the light side, remember that you have two voices stacked on every note, so you can still get some hefty thickness out of it. Unfortunately, the voices can't modulate each other, so usual two-oscillator synth tricks like cross-modulation are out.
I said that the two layers are mostly independent. That is because the LFO, ring modulator and performance controls are shared. The single LFO is a slight shortcoming, but isn't as severe as you might think, since each layer has its own LFO dedicated to PWM.
Finally we have the effect section; all still firmly analog, these comprise of a chorus, a vibrato and a band-pass filter (controllable from a foot pedal). I can't really comment on the sound of the chorus/vibrato on a stock unit, since my own was heavily modified by a previous owner (and sounds unbelievably good as a result!).
The sum of all these parts is something very special indeed. The CS-80 has a very organic character - at times, not so much like a synth as like some strange instrument that's been miked up and recorded. The velocity and poly-afterouch sensitive keyboard is magnificent, and leads to playing with real emotion, and all of this results in an instrument that excels at playing lead lines. Listen to Vangelis' soundtrack to Blade Runner and you'll hear what I mean!
It does have its limitations though: it's delicate, and will go out of calibration if moved roughly. It takes a long time to warm up, though it does stay nicely in tune when it gets there. It doesn't cover that much sonic territory either, but what it does, it does so well that complaining about limitations is just pointless. If I could only keep two synthesisers, they'd be the CS-80 and my modular. If I could only keep one, it'd be the CS-80, if only because I'd probably never come across one again.
The T8 has the best keyboard I've ever played; nothing else even comes close for touch and expressivity. It is one of the few keyboards ever built with polyphonic aftertouch and release velocity, and if you've never played one, you have no idea what you're missing. To top it all, even though the T8 was one of the first synths designed to handle MIDI, it transmits and recieves all of that lot. It makes a wonderful master keyboard.
Aside from its magical keyboard, the T8 is also a damn fine synth; it features two seperate four-voice synthesisers which can be split or layered with four voice polyphony, or used together to get eight voices. Each synth section has it's own output.
The basic voice architecture is extremely close to that of the Prophet 5, but there are a few changes: it has an extra modulation section for attack and release velocity and another for the polyphonic aftertouch. The other big difference between the T8 and the Prophet 5 is that the T8's LFOs and envelopes are generated in software. I've read posts on synth sites where people complain that the T8s envelopes aren't fast enough, and that anything digital is crap, but I reckon that those people were either smoking crack or had never actually played a T8; the envelopes are easily fast enough. My guess is that these people had played a Prophet 600, which also had digital envelopes but which had a much slower processor, and extrapolated their experiences with that beast to the T8.
So what does it sound like? Rich and thick at one extreme, achingly thin and haunting when it wants to be. If you stack all eight voices in unison mode, you can get the gut-rumbling Bass Of Doom. It's difficult to give the right impression about the sounds, however, because they react so intimately with the keyboard; it feels like playing a real instrument in a way that only the CS80 can better. You find yourself playing more expressively, with greater dynamics and more attention to your playing.
The only drawback to the T8, at least to modern eyes, is that those wonderful knobs don't transmit and recieve MIDI. This is actually a software issue - the hardware is perfectly capable of doing it, but the operating system ROMs didn't have the room in them for the code to handle it. I'm currently investigating whether there will be enough room in the ROM for me to add this in if I first remove the section of code that handles loading and saving programs to tape (which is a feature that I'm sure hasn't been used by anyone in ten years, since the T8 can also use MIDI program dumps). I'll post more here if I get the ROM hacks working.
If the Prophet T8 has my favourite keyboard of all time, the Prophet VS has to be right up there as one of the top synthesisers. Like the T8 it comprises two four-voice synthesisers which can be stacked, split or used for a single program, but the voice architecture is quite unlike the T8...
The voice starts with four oscillators which are mixed together, fed into a Prophet-style filter, put into an amplifier and finally into a ensemble chorus effect. There are two envelopes, two LFOs and a pretty decent matrix modulation system for control (which is good, but not as complete as the one on the Oberheim Xpander). What makes the VS stand out, however, it is the way that the mixing takes place between the oscillators: you define five different mixes of the oscillators and a third, dedicated envelope sweeps smoothly between them. The envelope can loop over a variable range of the mix points. On top of that, you can bias the mix at any point by twiddling the joystick. All of this gives a huge degree of movement to the sound.
The other major part of the VS sound is the oscillators themselves which are digital, each playing one of 128 single-cycle waveforms (actually 127, since one is a noise source). The waveforms include all the usual analog stalwarts, but there are also a lot of very glassy sounding additive-sounding waves. If that wasn't enough, the first 32 are user-programmable and can even be transmitted to the VS by MIDI sample-dump standard.
A lot of the magic of the VS oscillators is in the fact that they're not very good - at least from a digital design point. Only 12 bit, they don't interpolate and the 'mixer' doesn't use four VCAs per voice, which would have been prohibitively expensive, but uses a custom sample-and-hold circuit that approximates a mixer. All of this results in large sideband frequencies being generated which can sound harsh and gritty, but which provide excellent, harmonically rich fodder to the VCF. Magic stuff this, and very much in the same vein as the PPG Wave.
The only other synths that have anything in common with it in terms of voice architecture are the Korg WaveStation and the Yamaha SY-22 and -33. The WaveStation is a wonderful synth in its own right (indeed, it used to be one of my favourites), but the WaveStation's filter just isn't any good for taming the type of huge timbral shifts that are so much a part of the VS, and all the best WaveStation sounds revolve around wave sequencing, which in my opinion is what the synth was really designed around. The SY-22 and -33 were okay, but not in the same class as the others.
Whilst the VS can do an excellent Prophet imitation, it can't do PWM or sync, and anyway, using a VS to imitate conventional analogs would miss the point of the beast which is breath-takingly complex, evolving sounds that can be dark, harsh or shimmering as you choose.
The PPG Wave has to be the least reliable synth ever made (with the possible exception of the MemoryMoog). Everyone I've met who owns one has had to have it repaired at least once. The LFO timing is all over the place. The keyboard is the worst on any serious synth I've ever tried - the whole keyboard assembly bends if you try to use aftertouch. Oh, and programming it - at least in depth - involves remembering large numbers of acronyms and cryptic mode settings. ("Ah, Setting BD to 4 will make the pitch wheel modulate the suboscillator. Of course it does...").
With so much to dislike about the synth, what makes it worth owning? That's easy; it sounds fantastic and most of all, it sounds completely different from anything else. The only other synth that sounds remotely like a Wave is the Prophet VS, but that's only in the raw wave material. Once both synths are playing to their strengths, there's very little in common.
The Wave has a pair of oscillators that play back samples, but unlike the VS where the waves are static for each of the oscillators and the movement comes from the mixing, the PPG's samples come out of a table of waves that can be swept through by an envelope (or the LFO, or keyboard position...). Both oscillators in a program share the same table of waves, chosen from a set of 32. Some of the wave tables sweep smoothly, others jump around in their harmonic content - and there's enough variation in them to keep you happy for a very long time.
One of the most useful features of this approach is that you can set up a sound that has roughly the right attack and release, suitable filter settings and so forth so that it sits in a track the way you want it to, and then start changing the wavetable selection - pretty much all of the selections will still sit nicely in the piece, but each will have a completely different harmonic content. I've found this to be a very quick way to dial in a sound when I have a riff in my head that I just want to record as quickly as possible.
The Big Blue Meany is a versatile beast. It can sound glassy and ethereal or it can deliver the most aggressive ear-splitting noises I've heard coming off any synth, bar none. It's perfect for ambient as well as for techno/industrial, not to mention all that 80's synth pop that it was famous for, back in the day. If you want to hear some PPG evilness, a lot of the evil sounds in the second half of this track are from my Wave.
Steinberg released a plugin based on the Wave that went to great lengths to emulate the original. I've played with it a bit and it sounds pretty damn good except for the filters. The real thing has filters that can shriek at you whilst the plugin sounded rather tame. If you're after that PPG sound, though, the plugin is a cheap and reliable way to approximate it. And that might not be a bad idea, since of all the synths on this page, this is the one that needs the most dedicated owner.
I finally sold my PPG after it had been a mainstay of my music for around eight years. It finally died one time too many, and it took all my programs with it. I bought a Waldorf Microwave I to replace it. Unfortunately, the Microwave's CEM filters just aren't a substitute for the SSMs of the PPG. It's still a great little synth, but it doesn't cut through the mix like the Big Blue Meany. Worse still from my point of view, the filters are the same as those in my VS, and in consequence, the two synths overlap in the territory that they cover. I'd definitely recommend a Microwave to people looking for a nice little rack synth, but I have a feeling that mine will be moving on soon...
The Xpander was the most disappointing synth I have owned. That's not meant as disparagement; in fact it's a sort of compliment, because the reason I found it disappointing was that it came so close to being my candidate for the best synth ever, but had one fatal flaw that I couldn't live with.
The good points of the Obie are legion: it had the most flexible modulation system of any non-modular analog up until the Andromeda was released. It had a wonderful user interface. It had incredibly intersting filter modes. It had a MIDI spec that makes other vintage analogs look like they were built in the steam age. It had five envelopes, five LFOs, per voice. It had tracking generators, lag units, multimbrality... The feature set on these things remains impressive, and back in its day, it was unbelievable.
So why don't I like it? Simple - I hate the sound of the filters. I know this will get me into a lot of trouble with the Xpander fan club, but to me, the filters sound harsh and unmusical. Now clearly this is just a matter of personal taste. If you get a chance to play with one of these and you do like the sound of the filters, then I can't recommend highly enough that you buy one, because everything else about it is absolutely first class.
Just so that you know where I'm coming from, I've owned all of these at one time or another:
MemoryMoog Plus
Waldorf Microwave I
Korg Wavestation
Korg MS2000R
Kawai K5000S
Kawai SX-240
Kawai K1-R
Sequential Circuits Pro-One
Yamaha CS-50
Yamaha TX-802
I've also spent a lot of time with following, though they've belonged to friends and not to me:
Moog Prodigy
Korg Prophecy
Korg M1
Roland D10
Roland MC-303
Quasmidi Technox
Yamaha DX-11
Yamaha SY-22
I've played with a lot of software synths and virtual analogs. Some of them are quite interesting and a few do some really imaginative stuff, but none of them sound as good. In a mix, you might not be able to tell, but when you're in the room with a real analog beast, they sound completely different. Richer, fatter, more involving. In short they're a hell of a lot more inspiring for a musician, so even if software has got pretty good, it's still not a subsitute for the real thing.
Perhaps the best analogy would be that of vintage cars; these synths are like a 1960's Ferrari or Aston-Martin compared to a modern Honda. They're vastly expensive, out-performed in just about every way by their modern replacements, you need to have your own mechanic to keep them running, you have to live with their limitations and learn how to perform obscure operations like the double-declutch. But to the guy who really loves cars, there's something special about driving them that makes it all worth it - a feeling that somehow the machine has a soul and it just reaches out and grabs you. Pure magic...
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