John Bowen Solaris – a life’s work
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John Bowen Solaris Synthesizer
Interestingly enough, the great John Bowen himself doesn’t seem to be fully aware of the usefulness of the octave
buttons.
“These buttons should be self explanatory. They change the range of the keyboard, but must be pressed before you
play to get the transposed values. They will not transpose keys currently held.” (Solaris User Guide, page 15)
In my opinion, the uniqueness of these buttons lies in what happens if you don’t press before playing. Play first,
press “Hold” (or the sustain pedal), then shift the keyboard range up (or down) and add more notes. The sonic
results are marvellous.
The tone-chameleon
Lists are not very attractive, but they put things into orderly perspective. The following is a detailed list (with some
explanations …) of components of the Solaris sound architecture:
4 Oscillators
For each oscillator, there is a choice between:
MultiMode Oscillator (sine, triangle, ascending sawtooth, descending sawtooth, pulse, noise, sample & hold,
morphing sawtooth, morphing pulse, “jaws” – 7 stacked sawtooth waves)
Wavetable Oscillator (the 63 sets of Waldorf Microwave wavetables)
CEM – Curtis Electromusic Oscillator (sawtooth, triangle, pulse, saw + triangle, tr pulse, saw +
tr pulse)
Wav – Sample Playback Oscillator (Solaris loads samples from the CompactFlash card into the RAM.
There’s a total of 32MB of sample RAM)
Vector Synthesis Oscillator (94 waveform sets in the style of the Prophet VS)
Mini Oscillator – Minimoog Emulation (triangle, sa triangle, sawtooth, pulse 1, pulse 2, pulse 3)
