John Bowen Solaris – a life’s work
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John Bowen Solaris Synthesizer
“Yes, the power supply is outside of the synth. This avoids noise in the audio, and makes things simpler in the
production.” (John Bowen in his Solaris User Guide p. 9)
Well, that’s true.
Let’s stay with the hardware and some of the finer things in life. The Solaris keyboard is – how else could it be –
excellent. The feel is good. Also excellent the joystick, the display, the buttons and knobs. Or maybe “satifactory” is
more accurate here, for two reasons. First, we all know that the hardware of the noble 70s and early 80s cannot be
matched today. Second, Solaris production (currently in Germany) has not yet banned minor weaknesses. Pitch
wheels without properly closing zero points and other such irritations are an indication that the production still has
potential for improvement. As John Bowen and his team are on their toes, such shortcomings should be remedied
soon.
Let’s continue with the hardware. There’s a huge choice of rear panel connections: 8 individual outputs, four
independent inputs (although only monophonic) and USB, S/PDIF, MIDI plus two pedal inputs and a Compact Flash
card slot.
Due to what John Bowen calls “old school” layout and control (the Oberheim Matrix-12 and Xpander probably served
as models), quick and precise programming is innate to the instrument. As with the Oberheims, the Solaris
programming is divided into “Pages”. The MAIN page is all about oscillators, waveforms, pitch (> oscillator section)
and filters, filter types, frequencies and resonance settings (> filter section), etc. Pressing the MODulation button
brings up the associated MOD page. This principle is the same throughout the signal path (OSCs, LFOs, Filters,
VCAs, ENVs …) – everything very precise and extremely user friendly …!
