On most other synthesizers the pitch bend wheel was on the left, and the modulation wheel to the right of it on the OB-X Oberheim placed them in the opposite relative positions. Though these controls were never as popular as the standard pitch and modulation wheels, the philosophy was to mimic the motion of a guitar player bending the strings on their guitar. The entire range used "paddle" levers for pitch and modulation, Oberheim's answer to the "wheel" controls of the Prophet-5. Even the 4-voice model was expensive at US$4,595. It came in four, six, and eight-voice models with polyphonic portamento, and sample and hold. The "X" in OB-X originally stood for the number of voice-cards (notes of polyphony) installed. This made the OB-X less laborious to program, more functional for live performance, and more portable than its ancestors. The synthesizer's built-in Z-80 microprocessor also automated the tuning process. The OB-X's memory held 32 user-programmable presets. The OB-X was the first Oberheim synthesizer based on a single printed circuit board called a "voice card" (still using mostly discrete components) rather than the earlier SEM (Synthesizer Expander Module) used in Oberheim semi-modular systems, which had required multiple modules to achieve polyphony. The OB-X was used in popular music by Rush (on Moving Pictures and Signals), Nena, Styx member Dennis DeYoung (used frequently from late 1979 to 1984), Queen (their first synthesizer on an album), Madonna for her debut album, Prince, and Jean-Michel Jarre who used it for its "brass" sounds. The OB line developed and evolved after that with the OB-8 before being replaced by the Matrix series. About 800 units were produced before the OB-X was discontinued and replaced by the updated and streamlined OB-Xa in 1981. įirst commercially available in June 1979, the OB-X was introduced to compete with the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, which had been successfully introduced the year before. The Oberheim OB-X was the first of Oberheim's OB-series polyphonic analog subtractive synthesizers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |