DSI Prophet '08 Synthesizer

active · Joined: Jan 21, 2011 Posts: 23 Location: Brooklyn, NY

Mine is in the mail from canada! i have enjoyed playing with this in stores and elsewhere, so i am super excited to get down and dirty with this fella. a great tie over until my modular is up and running!

anyone have some fun patches to share?

psychepoppet · Joined: Jul 06, 2010 Posts: 16 Location: Washington DC

Sort of. When you get your modular, try doing what I did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsrNtus2yHM

Set the tone on your modular as you wish

On the Prophet, I've turned the oscillators off, set the filter to self resonate , cranked the VCA level up and use the step sequencer to control the filter settings. The left out of the prophet is sent to the modular and the right is sent to the mixer for reference. You could use the right channel to control something else maybe. Follow the instructions in the description.

Patching an LFO set to an audible frequency to the Filter is always fun.

This is another patch on the Prophet that makes use of the VCA level and the A/B layers. One patch, one take, a little reverb on top.

http://soundcloud.com/psychepoppet/solice-falling-apart

Mefistophelees · Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 1:54 pm Post subject:

I've just got a Prophet'08 and I've heard it criticised because it's not analogue enough or it's DCO based and those sorts of things.

I've been going through the presets and I came to a similar conclusion. There's a lot of good interesting sounds in there but a lot of them do seem a bit too perfect. There are a few patches that have some promise but there isn't much in the way of analogue randomness.

I began wondering if this was because of the DCOs, or maybe the tuning accuracy is too good. Perhaps the better digital controls available these days have removed too much of the analogueness.

However... I was wrong.

I started fiddling and a rather different story emerged.
All the analogue madness is there, you just have to fiddle a little to get it. By a little I meant I started with the basic sound, detuned the oscillators a little more and opened up the filter, the result was reminiscent of the CS80 strings at the beginning of Blade runner. You can't get much more analogue that that! A bit more fiddling and even with slop at 0 it'll give very "analogue" sounds.

The Prophet'08 appears to suffers a bit from JX10 syndrome.
The JX10 has presets that are very nice but sound remarkably digital. This isn't that surprising, at the time of it's launch the DX7 was riding high and Roland made presets that made it sound like the DX.

The JX10 can do all the analogue bass, lead and resonant sweeps you want but that's not the impression the presets give and this has given it a certain reputation. They go for surprisingly low prices on eBay.

I'm wondering if the presets were done by someone used to working with soft synths. That'd would explain why they sound so "perfect". (I'm not saying they're bad sounds BTW, they do show what the machine is capable of).

So, next time you hear people saying the Prophet'08 is "sterile" or even like a soft synth, they're wrong, and now you know why.

dalekay · Joined: Nov 16, 2003 Posts: 145 Location: Lancaster CA

Never judge a synth on presets alone ... get in there and turn those knobs ...

gd · Joined: Jul 02, 2009 Posts: 16 Location: Canada

And therein lies the problem the synth mfgs and initial patch programmers have. Most patches are designed to show what the synth is capable of doing, not necessarily reproducing the famous analogue sounds. Just from me watching ppl. demo synths like the PO8 they surf the presets very little knob twisting and here all these weird bizarre sounds, then some pads that are faintly reminiscent of songs they've heard on the radio. I wonder how many know synthesis, maybe there should be old fashioned patch sheets included and readilly available to achieve those "famous analogue" sounds. Pay ppl. To program these patches so that they use the synth to it's full potential and explain what each twist of the knob does to the sound. Many of us who grew up on subtractive synthesis would likely noy use these sheets but newbies to this may learn faster and appreciate the synth more instead of writing on certain forms that synth x sounds like crap 'cause it doesn't really sound like jump or bladerunner or ...