The mixer then fed into the VCF, via a mixer section, which was fixed as a four-pole Low Pass affair. To be fair, it was a pretty comprehensive VCO section. They were syncable and VCO 2 could also operate in Low Frequency mode, although there was also a dedicated LFO, so VCO 2 did not have to be removed from tonal duties to add vibrato. The VCO offered the usual timbral suspects, namely Saw and Pulse (with width control), with an additional Triangle being available on VCO 2. In terms of signal flow, the Pro-One was based around two VCOs, which could also be mixed with either an external signal, or white noise. Like the Prophet-5, the Pro-One made use of Curtis chips in the oscillator section, which were pretty reliable although with age, these could develop faults, in common with other synths from this period.
I realise that at this point I’m not exactly selling the Pro-One, so now’s the time to change tack.
Strange that the J-wire is thought to be the preferred option as, thanks to its simplicity, it is at least easy to fix, and fix you will need to if you have one that you use regularly. Well it could, I’m afraid, and Pro-One keyboards have gone down in history as being pretty unreliable and liable to degrade with time. “Surely it can’t be that crude and simple?” I asked myself. When I discovered this design, I had to stop and scratch my head for a while. There it stayed for about 10 years, until the owner decided to sell it on to me: at which point, I began to fully understand the build quality as it required a little maintenance to get it going.Įssentially, by pressing a key down, the wire under the key makes contact with another wire that runs along the length of the keybed, hence completing the circuit.
Some years ago, I was working with a friend of mine, from a well known and successful indie band, and while assisting in some studio maintenance-style duties, noticed a lowly Pro-One in the store, looking unused and up-ended. Given the affordability of the Pro-One, something had to give, and it’s no surprise that the build quality of the Pro-One came in for a lot of criticism, and was nowhere near the polished finish of the Prophet-5. Produced from 1980 onwards, the Pro-One is thought to be the first professional-grade synthesiser that hit the ‘below $1,000’ price point – which it did by quite some margin, initially selling for $645, but rising swiftly to $745. So you could question the decision to make a monophonic version of the Prophet-5, which is the over-simplified description of what the Pro-One represents.
SEQUENTIAL CIRCUITS TOM PATCH
This company saw the rise of synth legend Dave Smith – the SCI name emanated from the first run of products, which largely focused on sequencer or drum-machine designs, but the groundbreaking SCI synth came in 1978, in the shape of the Prophet-5.Ī five-voice analogue synthesiser which had patch memory allocations, it was the answer to many keyboard player’s dreams in fact, a friend of mine who was a gigging session muso from that time cites the Prophet-5 as being the only machine that was needed back then, as it pretty much did everything that was required.
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