Right now I have a Sequential Circuits Prophet VS which needs a little bit of care. Let's go over what the VS is. I'm going to assume that you know the basics about subtractive synths (basically generate some sound and then filter it - with various ways to alter the parameters in an automated way). Well the Prophet VS is a synth which has four digital oscillators (which are picked from 96 different waveforms) which then goes into an analogue low pass filter. What makes this synth special is that it not only allows you to mix the four oscillators together, but also move this mix over time which can create more complex sounds than a standard analog-style synth. Finally this sound is split into left and right and sent through seperate choruses (which can be turned on or off independently - though the two choruses use the same overall settings).
Overall it's a really nice synth which has a lot of things technically wrong with it (like a huge amount of aliasing going on), but it's wrong in a way that sounds fantastic. You can easily get FM style sounds (think 80s to mid 90s sitcom intros) from it, as well as nice vocal choir pad sounds. Abuse it a little more, and you get some really whacked out aggressiveness. The only real issue is that it's not that bassy, but team up with a basic analogue synth and boom - you're in that zone. Needless to say, it's all over the early NiN recordings.
Enough of the gushing -- what is up with it? Well when I got it on eBay a few years ago, it quickly stopped working, with it randomly resetting and eventually not booting up. It turned out to be a couple of issues which got fixed. But then just as it was due to come back, the sounds all droned and got stuck. Turned out the sample and hold custom chips (5530) in it was dead (the main cause of failure for VS's) and the chip is unobtainium. I won't go into full tech details, but basically this chip is used to get the values of everything in the VS from the cpu and into the actual sound making electronics. These chips got replaced with a circuit made from Straylight engineering, which works fits into the socket and works perfectly.
However, when getting it back, I found some issues:
- The data controller was logarithmic when it should be linear;
- The right hand chorus had very little effect
- The pitch wheel has almost no effect when you bend the pitch up, until you get to the top when it steps massively
The data controller was fixed a few months back when I got hold of a replacement linear slider made by ALTS. So that leaves the pitch and chorus.
The next post will go onto these two issues and hopefully they may be fixed (the parts for the chorus are arriving today). I'll also put up some sounds and pictures so it's not all wall of text. I may also do a video, but that will mainly be so I can screw around with Final Cut...
After I get these fixed, the next thing on the agenda is writing a small Python program so I can send samples to my Akai S900 sampler that comes in via SDS (which the Akai can't handle since it's that old). This isn't hugely useful in the long term, but makes it easier for me to screw around with sounds. So stay around for some interesting projects!
