Vintage Synth Explorer Forums

Just listened to this Christmas highlight by Chris De Burgh, and I started wondering what was used for that warm pad sound. Not many polys were available back then. I did a search and found some info about the album where it was presented on. What I found interesting was:

Tony Hymas – Keyboards
Tony Reeves – Bass, String Bass on A Spaceman Came Travelling
Chris Laurence – String Bass
Ken Freeman – String Synthesizer
and:
David Hentschel arranged and performed Synthesizer on A Spaceman Came Travelling

So it was probably a stringsynth. It sounds like a simple squarepad but im still pretty lost.

It's most likely an ARP 2500 (or possibly ARP 2600) plus prototype #2 of Ken Freeman's string synthesizer (not to be confused with the commercial version of the Freeman String Symphonizer which was manufactured by Lowrey).

Keyboardist/producer David Hentschel used the ARP 2500 on numerous recordings/albums by artists such as Elton John (eg "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", 1973) Peter Hammill ("In Camera", 1974) and others.

In 1975 (ie the same year as De Burgh's album was recorded) Hentschel released a solo album called "Startling Music", and in 1976 he scored his first (?) soundtrack to a movie by the name "The Squeeze", both of which feature lots of ARP 2500.

Synthprophet, I recommend you to have a listen to the intro to "Funeral For A Friend" from "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" if you wanna hear the ARP 2500 in BIG action. The solemn intro was entirely done on the 2500.

Thanks for the answer Micke. Yes I did see something about that Hentschel was a great ARP user. I think I need to check out some of his other stuff

You're welcome, synthprophet


David Hentschel with ARP 2600 & ARP 2500, 1976.

ARP2500 intro (Funeral For A Friend)

Hentschel: "Although the 2500 could play up to 3 notes at a time at a pinch, the tuning was a bit iffy
and I figured I'd get better dynamics within the parts if I played each voice monophonically - so I wrote
all the parts out and did just that. This left me with my left hand to control the filter cutoff freq manually
for each voice as marked on the score."

Interesting sounds So he did use layers to use monophonic synths for chordsounds. Thanks again, very nice info.