John Bowen Solaris – a life’s work
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John Bowen Solaris Synthesizer
The entire sound material — oscillators, rotors and much more — is now fed into the …
4 Mixers
Each mixer has four inputs. The oscillators, the two rotors, the four insert effects, even the mixers themselves, the
VCAs, the filters – well, actually anything that emits a sound – can be merged with anything else. And there’s noise
as an extra sound source, if you don’t want to sacrifice any of the oscillators for it. The volume of each sound source
is adjustable individually. I emphasize: 4 mixers, each with 4 audio sources. That makes a total of 16 sound sources
at your disposal, the level of which can be individually determined or modulated.
So, obviously the Solaris is an “open system” … the exploration of which would easily carry you far into the time of
retirement (should that impress you) and beyond. We’re thinking in terms of perfect health for the next 100 years …
4 Filters
Solaris has four filters routable in parallel or series. Each of these filters can be set to one of the following filter
types:
MultiMode Filter: 23 (!) filter variations … LP4, LP3, LP2, LP1, HP4, HP3, HP2, HP1, BP4, BP2, BP2+LP1,
BP2+LP2, BP2+HP1, BP2+HP2, BR4, BR2, BR2+LP1, BR2+LP2, BR2+HP1, BR2+HP2, AP3, AP3+LP1,
AP3+HP1
SSM Filter: A filter emulation of those SSM chips used in the Rev.1 and Rev.2 Prophets
MINI Filter: emulation of the famous Minimoog 24dB lowpass filter
OBIE Filter: Oberheim emulation, inspired by the SEM filter, it’s a 2-pole 12dB filter with LowPass,
HighPass, BandPass and BandReject (Notch)
COMB Filter: This adds a delayed copy of a signal to itself, in either a feed-forward or feed-back loop. It
creates distortions, resulting in a frequency response that looks much like a comb.
VOCAL Filter: A formant filter, which definitely sounds very excellent. A great asset, especially in
