mojohey wrote: ↑Tue Nov 24, 2020 11:27 am
So he wants an ARP PRO SOLOIST for his christmas...
hahaha i hear you laugh. As i'm not in the position to invest in a great piece of vintage kit...
Yeah, that's probably wise. Aside from the upfront expense, a 40+ year old piece of gear like that is very likely to require some non-trivial repair work to get up to scratch, and (depending somewhat on your location), synth techs are rare and the work does not come cheap. Frankly I wouldn't dare unless I were prepared to drop several thousand dollars/pounds/euros between purchase and maintenance/restoration just for the sake of having a particular classic synthesizer.
Is the MS-20 anywhere near capable? I don't have any idea about synths and would really appreciate some advice.
Eh, yes and no. There's not a lot to the Pro Soloist, but it has some unusual features both under the hood and for performance. The basic monophonic, single oscillator, lowpass filter, 2 envelope, single LFO thing is
very simple and practically any synth under the sun, MS-20 included, will get you in the ballpark as far as that goes. There's also a somewhat less common highpass filter (although the MS-20 has one of those, and it's a great one); and a resonator bank, which is a very unusual feature for synthesizers which you can pretty much forget about finding elsewhere (but that's not something I'd lose
too much sleep over).
In my view, what really made the Pro Soloist special was that it had aftertouch by which to modulate pitch, timbre, and/or volume, and that it had (non-programmable) presets--not much in the early 70's gave players that kind of expressive control and the ability to change sounds instantaneously, and Tony Banks used that to its fullest--listen to the solo on the Cinema Show for an example. An MS-20 is not going to fulfil either of those (although you could reasonably repurpose some of the ARP's touch modulation stuff to the wheel); and a further consideration is that the MS-20, mainly due to the character of its filters, has a
very distinct sound--it is a great sound and one which I really appreciate, but it's not very Pro Soloist-y and tends toward the aggressive. I'd give it a miss for old school Genesis.
I'm not really sure what to recommend you (I haven't been playing much recently and haven't been too involved with hardware synths of any description for quite a while), although I'd urge you to maybe look at virtual analogs, as any analog synthesizer featuring presets, aftertouch, and separate low- and highpass filters is probably going to cost more than you want to spend, and a decent VA will likely have a considerably wider timbral palette than the ARP as well (although for such a simple synth, the Pro Soloist does sound exceptionally nice). Alternatively, you might consider a KARP Odyssey, which, while not providing presets or aftertouch either, sounds a heck of a lot closer to a Pro Soloist than an MS-20 (why, it's even an ARP*...
) and is in fact a much more sophisticated synthesizer than the Pro Soloist ever was, performance functions notwithstanding, and could also get your son into some of the weirder stuff Tony Banks was doing on the 2600. Food for thought anyway. Happy hunting!
I'd still like to know how you set the range though?
