OVERVIEW
When it comes to keyboards, the phrase “best of both worlds” is tossed around haphazardly. In the case of the Prophet ’08, it’s dead-on. Here’s why:
The world the audio signal inhabits is purely analog. The oscillators rely on voltage, not samples or number-crunching, to generate their waveforms. The filters use analog Curtis chips, just like the Prophet-5. However, the Prophet ’08’s matrix modulation, tempo-synced LFOs, and the four-track step sequencer are from the digital world. Unlike Dave’s Evolver line, the ’08 has no digital conversion in the audio signal path, which the Evolvers require because they have digital oscillators alongside their analog ones, not to mention digital effects. The Prophet’s oscillators are digitally controlled, meaning that a microprocessor oversees their settings for stability, but that’s it. If a computer tells your front porch light to go on at 8 p.m., that doesn’t make light from the bulb “computer-generated” either.
The ’08’s sound engine consists of two oscillators, a fully resonant filter (with FM input from the oscillator section), voltage controlled amplifier, four LFOs, three envelopes, and a four-way matrix modulation section for additional routing. Now, take the above voice architecture and double it, because you can do splits and layers within a single preset. So, every sound can have up to four oscillators, two filters, and so forth, right out of the gate. Tranceheads can (and will) take this to extremes, whipping up 16-oscillator mega-leads by simply pressing the Unison button.
You access the second sound by pressing the Edit Layer B button. If neither splitting nor layering is active, this button simply switches between two sounds, turning one patch into two. When both layers are active, you only get four notes of polyphony, and with splits, voices are not dynamically allocated; you simply get four voices for each part. It’s doubtful you’ll need more — when dealing with analog sound that’s this fat, the rules are different. Heck, some modern analog synths have one voice, and nobody complains.
To top it all off, you can route layer B to the Prophet’s secondary stereo outputs, letting you run a preset’s two sounds through different outboard mixer channels and effects. In fact, you’ll need outboard gear to add effects such as delay or reverb. While this seems stingy if you’re used to the extensive effects menus in today’s digital keyboards, it’s a purist design choice here: Building in these effects would have meant converting the sound to digital, then back to analog as it hit the outputs.
OSCILLATORS
Each oscillator has four waveforms: sawtooth, triangle, saw/triangle hybrid, and adjustable pulse width, which can be used for everything from reedy sounds to bold square waves. The saw/triangle is a nice touch, as it has more body and less fizz than a regular saw, making it good for blending low end beef into a sound when the filter’s cutoff is wide open. If you want more highs, the regular saw packs enough sizzle to fry a steak. There’s also a noise knob for adding percussive and breathy effects.
To recapture the sonic imperfections of the original Prophet, a parameter called Oscillator Slop introduces a bit of pitch drift between the oscillators. You may find you’d rather turn off Slop entirely. If you’ve used a two-oscillator vintage synth at length, you may have noticed that phase issues can cause “thinness” in bass patches, unless you limit yourself to one oscillator, or separate two oscillators by an octave. When both oscillators are locked in tune, you can create sounds that retain their low end, yet stay punchy and consistent. You really can have the best of both worlds with this system.
It wouldn’t be a Prophet without hard sync, the source of those swept leads in ’80s tracks such as the Cars’ “Let’s Go” and Parliament’s “Atomic Dog.” True to form, you can sync oscillator 2 to oscillator 1 and have at it. The results can vary from subtle harmonic motion to full-on squawk.
A really neat innovation Dave carried over to the ’08 from his Poly Evolver line is independent glide rates for each oscillator. When the rates are similar to each other, the result is a detuned swoop. Setting them further apart gives gliding notes a super-thick texture. Dialing in a really big difference sounds amazing, especially with hard sync active.
FILTER
If you’ve never enjoyed the sound of an analog filter up close, it’s light years better than any soft synth. At low cutoff frequencies, it has a velvety caress. Wide open, it sizzles with high frequencies that you feel more than actually hear. Real analog filters have a presence that makes them pop in a track like nothing else, and the filters in the ’08 are as real as it gets.
In addition to cutoff frequency, resonance, and envelope amount, the filter section has knobs for keyboard tracking, velocity amount, and audio modulation. The Audio Mod knob controls the amount of filter FM, derived from the output of oscillator 1. This is a nod to the original Prophet-5’s Poly-Mod section, and is a rich source of metallic and bell-like textures.
While these filters are strictly a lowpass affair, they can operate in either two-pole or four-pole mode. The two-pole mode has a more Oberheim-like character, while four-pole brings the thick Prophet sound we’ve come to know and adore. In both modes, the filter is resonant. On a two-pole analog filter, resonance is subtler, almost imparting a highpass-type thinning at higher settings. In four-pole mode, if you crank the resonance high enough, the filter will self-oscillate — it’ll generate an analog sine wave that you can hear. Many synth players today have only heard this imitated by software. When it’s coming out of analog hardware, it can blow speakers, sterilize animals at 50 yards, and open wormholes into parallel universes. When you use different filter modes for each sound in a split, it’s like having a Prophet in one hand and an Oberheim in the other.
ENVELOPES
The original Prophet-5 had two dedicated envelopes: one for the filter and one for the amplifier (volume). You could also assign the P5’s filter envelope to oscillator pitch. Here, there are three DADSR envelopes — that first “D” refers to a delay segment at the beginning of each envelope. While this may seem mystifying at first, being able to delay the onset of the attack phase makes a ton of sense in a layered patch.
As with the P5, the filter and amp envelopes are dedicated to their respective sections, though they can control other destinations via the modulation matrix (see “Modulation” at top right). The third envelope can affect almost any parameter in this Prophet. Cool possibilities include noise amount, pulse width, oscillator mix, or filter FM amount. You can also set the third envelope to loop its delay, attack, and decay segments, turning it into a customizable LFO of sorts.
The envelopes sounded really punchy, much more so than on the Prophet-5, so I asked Dave Smith what was up under the hood. As it turns out, he hand-tweaked the digital envelope behavior to get maximum snap, with custom non-linear curves and other engineering voodoo. The musical result is that these envelopes cover everything from thwips to smooth swells, with all of the snap and immediacy that serious analog fans crave. Again, this doesn’t mean the sound is digital — the envelopes are just telling the analog oscillators and filter how to behave over time.
MODULATION
The Prophet-5 had a single LFO for modulation, although its second oscillator could also be set to low-frequency operation (or used as an FM source). The ’08 is a bigger, badder beastie. You get four LFOs per voice, each with an assignable destination. This can be almost any parameter you please, but it’s the range of rates that’s noteworthy: In addition to offering speeds for the usual musical effects such as vibrato, tremolo, or varying the filter cutoff, every LFO goes up into the audio frequency range — all the way to middle C. This lets you create percussive, bell-like, or clangorous FM sounds, without using up one oscillator to modulate the other. Beyond middle C, the rate knob switches to tempo-based options for rhythmic effects.
While each LFO has an assignable destination, power users may want a single source to affect several targets. This is done via the Modulators section, which is separate from the LFO section. Here, you can weave a spiderweb of interaction between up to four sources and four destinations. This is also where you assign jobs to the “big five” MIDI controllers: modulation wheel, aftertouch, breath control, velocity, and control pedal — each have destination and amounts you can program per patch.
SEQUENCER AND ARPEGGIATOR
Thanks to soft synths, sound designers have more rhythmic modulation options than ever. Many plug-ins have either multi-stage synced looping envelopes, step sequencers, or both. These have their roots in analog sequencers, which you could patch into your synthesizer to play notes or change sound parameters — they’re really the analog ancestors of plug-in automation!
While a single step sequencer in the ’08 would have been welcome, four is downright magnanimous. As with the LFOs and envelopes, you can make each of the four “tracks” control virtually any setting, with one major exception: This sequencer doesn’t record MIDI notes, so you don’t play in phrases on the keyboard. To play notes, you assign a sequencer track to an oscillator’s pitch and dial in the value you want for each step. Because you can set the Prophet’s envelopes to retrigger at each step, you can get the sonic equivalent of notes played from the keyboard. Each sequence has up to 16 steps, and in sequencer mode, the filter and amplifier sections’ knobs double as value controls.
The last two values are “rest” and “reset.” If you want a sequence to be shorter than 16 steps, setting the knob just after the final step to “reset” makes it go back to the beginning. This makes tempo-synced rhythmic figures painless, and each of the four tracks can have a different overall length and control a different voice, allowing some very sophisticated counterpoint.
There’s also a basic arpeggiator, independent of the sequencer. Its four modes are up, down, up/down, and assign, which plays the arpeggio in the order that you pressed the keys. Oddly, range is not programmable, and there’s no random mode for Duran Duran-style effects. If you want more involved arpeggios, that’s what the sequencer is for.
IN USE
I’m all over the tech-house and electro sound these days, so I started my experiments by making exotic rhythmic swoops and burbles. The ’08’s combination of tempo-synced LFOs and step sequencers made light work of this, and thanks to having a knob for every commonly-tweaked function, the process was truly a right-brained delight.
Though you get lots of knobs on virtual analog synths, I haven’t found one that’s as incapable as the Prophet ’08 of ever sounding bad or even awkward. This inspired me to turn my attention to crazy modulation schemes. I started by creating a Roland TB-303-esque bass sequence, but was dismayed by the absence of a slide function for pitch swoops. After a little head-scratching, I created a sequence that controlled the amount of tempo-synced LFO I’d assigned to pitch. Bingo. Better still, this approach provided a lot more fine control of the slides than a real TB-303. Alternately, I could have used a pitch envelope.
Next, I came up with a patch with step sequencers that created one rhythm at low filter cutoff values, morphing into a more complex rhythm as the cutoff increased. Using the modulation matrix, I attached pulse width and sync sweeps to the mod wheel. The outcome was perfect for long, slow builds.
I had to recreate a few classic sounds as well. The infamous “Jump” brass stab took about two minutes from scratch. Since the sound of the original came from an Oberheim OB-8, which had a two-pole filter, I used the Prophet’s two-pole mode, and the result was identical. [You didn’t actually play the riff, did you? It’s the keyboard equivalent of “No Stairway!” —Ed.] The lead from Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s “Lucky Man” was a simple matter of layering two detuned square waves with wide-open filters and lots of glide.
If you add the ’08 to a soft synth-based composition, it declares, “I . . . am . . . here!” It layers beautifully with itself in a multitrack mix, and I’d have no reservations using it for every synth sound in an entire production. In fact, that’s what I did (except for a few drum samples) in order to enlist the ears of chart-topping electronica artist and remixer Josh Gabriel. Josh has a huge collection of vintage gear, and after listening to my tracks, he commented, “This thing is way punchier than my Prophet-600 or Prophet-5. It has a really thick sound that’s somehow very modern without being digital in any way.”
Almost every knob on the ’08 (the two parameter knobs to the right of the LCD) can transmit MIDI control messages. With a total of 52 knobs, I’ve become addicted to recording these moves as part of my sequences. The Prophet plays them back with no problem. The one feature I miss on the ’08 is a keypad for random access to sounds. The Poly Evolver Keyboard (reviewed Aug. ’05) had one; for that matter, so did the Prophet-5. Here, you need to step through presets using the data knobs or up/down buttons, or trigger them by sending the ’08 MIDI program change commands.
CONCLUSIONS
The Prophet ’08 has a soul that even the most sophisticated soft synths and virtual analog hardware simply can’t touch. Comparisons to other current analog synths are inevitable, but only one is really fair: The Alesis Andromeda (reviewed May ’01) is the only other machine that’s polyphonic, analog, and anywhere near the Prophet in price. Well, “anywhere near” means $3,499, but for that, you get twice the polyphony, separate two- and four-pole filters instead of one filter with dual modes, inputs to route audio through the filters, onboard effects and reverb, and a graphic LCD to aid in editing envelopes, sequencer steps, and other settings. On the Prophet, I find that simply turning knobs and playing provides such immediate and gratifying feedback that I don’t need to look at a display.
Comparing on sound instead of specs, Dave Smith’s synths have a comfortable edge. Tech editor Stephen Fortner, who had an Andromeda at Keyboard Central, commented, “Even the Poly and Mono Evolver keyboards, both of which I reviewed, have creamier oscillators and filters and snappier envelopes than the Andromeda, to my ears. And unlike the Prophet, they use digital conversion in the audio path. The Andromeda is more ‘lush’ and less ‘thick’ — a good analogy is how a Roland Jupiter-8 would have sounded next to a Prophet-5 in 1985.”
At a time when the expense was a stretch for me, I bought the Prophet ’08 review unit — and I’m a soft synth die-hard. I’ve learned my lesson: I simply cannot live without a real analog synth, and without a doubt, the ’08 is that synth. It’s awakened the creative joy that I felt as a teenager, playing with my Korg Polysix and Roland SH-101 (and wishing I could afford a Prophet-5). They say you can’t buy inspiration. Now that I have a Prophet ’08, I beg to differ. In my opinion, it’s quite possibly the best-sounding, most fun-to-play analog polysynth in the history of keyboards, and absolutely a Key Buy winner. Bravo!
SOUND HOUND
The ’08’s factory sounds are in two banks of 128 presets each, and cover a massive range of styles, with an emphasis on the rich, warm, wide sounds that are the reason so many soft synths focus on imitating analog hardware. Fat basses, silky pads, snappy percussive sounds, and a boatload of sassy leads are the order of the day here, though there are enough exotic sequenced and rhythmic patches to whet the appetite of dance music creators.
JARGON JOCKEY
LFO: Low Frequency Oscillator. This is the part of a synth that’s usually used to add vibrato, tremolo, or other regular variations to a sound. “Low” means that the oscillations are below the range of human hearing, but the Prophet ’08’s LFOs can actually be sped up well into the audible range.
CLAIM CHECK
Dave Smith says, “The Prophet ’08 was designed to fill a big void in the synth world. An eight-voice synth for about $2K, with a 100% analog signal path, stands alone. There are monophonic analog synths that cost more, and of course a zillion ‘virtual analog’ hard and soft synths, but there is nothing close to this instrument.
“It was time to rescue the Prophet name from the simulations, and let players hear and appreciate the real thing. The ’08 also re-introduces the easy-to-use, knob-per-function interface that’s been missing for too many years. While retaining the basic voice structure (and Curtis filters!) of the original Prophet-5, the ’08 goes well beyond it in terms of features, sound capability, and bang-for-buck. It’s already being appreciated by beginners who had always heard about the Prophets and now get to experience the sound. Pro musicians, on the other hand, feel like they’re being reunited with an old friend.”