This is a rough rendering of a short piece of sound that is part of a larger dance piece that is being produced by Annichia Arts. I’ll explain more about the piece at a later date. A shorter, less processed version of the piece was posted here.
Culled and Shifted
The Oberheim OB-8 and Roland MKS-80 are two massive vintage polys, each sporting dual oscillator, eight note polyphony provided by sixteen VCOs. There’s a lot of similar functionality between these machines. The switchable two or four pole filter and modulation routing is a little more flexible on the OB-8 but the MKS-80 makes up for it with cross modulation, velocity sensitivity, and after-touch. The technology used in the MKS-80 seems much more advanced even though it was made only one year later than the OB-8. The MKS-80 is a compact rack-mountable device, while the OB-8 is a massive behemoth that currently dominates my studio space. Ultimately comparing these two machines is not really a productive thing to do. They both sound fantastic. The MKS-80 is better for me because my musical style generally requires the expression possible through velocity and after-touch, but the OB-8 is easy and fast to program with lots of luxurious feeling knobs.
I recorded a little freeform jam session with Unearthed Music‘s graphic designer, Ben Montag, experimenting on the OB-8 while I twisted knobs on the Bitstream 3X driving the MKS-80. See if you can identify which sound is coming from which synth.
OB-8 Versus MKS-80
I often find myself producing similes of classic video game sounds on my vintage analog gear like the Pro-One, Casio CZ-1000, Juno-106, MKS-80, or in this case on the Oberheim OB-8 that I am borrowing. Usually this involves pulse wave oscillators, LFO modulation, or high-speed arpeggiation. Aside from being nostalgic it is a good exercise for learning the synthesizer’s controls. Here’s some Pacman-esque sounds done on the OB-8. I converted it to mono and left it unprocessed to exemplify it’s vintage sound.
Classic Video-Game-Like Sound
Here’s one of the first recordings I made with the Oberheim OB-8 Once I started experimenting with it in my studio. This recording was made without any external sequencing or arpeggiation. I used the on-board arpeggiator, held down a chord, and then started turning knobs. Here’s a small segment of what came out. You will notice the hard panning on the voices. This was also done on the OB-8.
Standalone OB-8 Demo
This is a sound programmed on the Oberheim OB-8 using the oscillator sync mode. I set each oscillator to the pulse wave, enabled sync, then modulated the frequency of the synched oscillator. This made a very rich sound and when I viewed it on the oscilloscope I saw these crazy animated castle walls going by. I used my Nexus One to shoot the screen then added in the recorded audio so you can properly hear how it sounded.