Sequential Prophet VS was one of the first digital synthesisers and it played a huge role in music production of the 1980s. This device had so much to offer to musicians and this article will help you to explore its immense possibilities.
Sequential Prophet VS and its advanced joystick
This outstanding beast could produce sounds via four oscillators per voice with whooping 127 waveforms. This itself was a great feature of the synthesiser, however, it had a lot more to offer. For instance, its waveforms could be controlled via a joystick that would certainly trigger waves of 127 wave curiosity, excuse the pun, and would generate a wide range of sounds. The joystick could go in any 360 degree and was marked by A, B, C, D to marks its set position of sound that you could set to. You would be surprised by how it creates and adds a wide range of harmony to your sounds by the position of the joystick. This is one of the iconic features implemented by Dave Smith and the Sequential Circuit team.
The oscillators of Sequential Prophet VS
Inside the VS, you are exposed to four various oscillators labeled A, B, C and D. On each different oscillator, you could assign various sound waves from that “Holy Hell” massive 127 wave forms. Each of these oscillators also have the detuneable or tuneable waveforms. A sleek lush sounding effect can be achieved by putting in the same waveform on all of the oscillators and slightly detuning each of them. If you put the joystick in the center, it gives you that sweet spot of the sound of desire.
Mixing oscillators
When we are talking about Sequential Circuit synthesisers, we can hardly talk about it without using the term ‘iconic’ with it. Sequential Circuit defined the 80s and brought a completely new horizon of synthesisers. Another most noticeable “iconic feature” is the ability to mix between oscillators by means of a patch. For example, using a lfo (low frequency oscillator) on A and C oscillators. To keep a track of these changes visually, there is small LED display on the top left corner of this synthesiser. You could navigate your way around with the press of button and help of the patch matrix diagram on the body, on the far top right corner.
These source and destination can be changed and be patched to created some fascinating sounds. Lfos comes with the waveforms of Square, Saw, Sine and Triangle. This is highly configurable. The things that can be achieved via these patches are lying beyond the scope of this dormant text. Another fantastic iconic feature of this synthesiser is the ability to draw and create your fully custom wave forms. With the help of the button ‘Edit Waveform’, you get into the edit wave table mode. From there, you can move the joystick to play around and make your own new wave form. You could play around with this losing a track of time. You set the value based on the percentage and define the sound wave. You can then store the sound in the memory.
The envelope of Sequential Prophet VS
This beautiful piece of synthesiser comes with the envelope with five stages and five level interactions with six loop points. The envelope affects the amplifier and the filter section of course.
What is new is the stages of envelope, to be precise, the ability to control the envelope points and stage with the joystick. You can set the points of the envelope by the combination of tapping the button and controlling the joystick.
This way, you can easily control different stages of the envelope when you are playing the notes. To spice things up, you can set the loop point of the envelope, and set to various numbers of repetition to get those stage going upon the press of the key.
From the heavy buzzing and resonating low sounds for lows such as bass to high the cutting edge lead sound to moody melancholic pads to space FX, the limit of this masterpiece is too vast to reach!