jimmarchi1's Music Gear Setup

whoa. i was just looking up Prophet 600s on Reverb, etc. I read about them awhile ago. always confused by it because its supposed to be almost as good and i hear they can do prophet5 patches. guess the adsr and filter behaves pretty close from the prophet5 but i read it was gear towards more affordable? seems to sound pretty niiice to me and the price is right.

@traumaad stock the controls step in real time. The envelopes are sluggish, linear only. But the GliGli mod (mine has it) replaces the old Z80 processor with a modern alternative that's all preprogrammed to improve the whole thing to modern standards and work with the final 600 firmware revision chip... it also adds different envelope curves, digital noise, more LFO shapes(saw is a godsend) and MIDI clock sync of LFOs and arpeggiator... oh and it makes the glide control a menu item while the glide knob controls oscillator 2 level so that the oscillator mix is just level for osc1 allowing awesome filter drive at high settings ;-) It gets it closer to prophet5 turf. Rev3 of course as they share the same curtis VCO and VCF versus the SSM chips of rev 1&2 of the 5. Its also lighter.... has MIDI of course... and is relatively inexpensive. I feel the keyboard is a real achiles heel, not very fun to play and the contacts aren't so hot. The Plastic pot shafts are very delicate too, but in general its like 90% of a 5 after modding and sonically 95%. To your point, the ADSRs were where this synth fell down as well as a steppy filter but the ADSRs are capable of 5ish exponential attack with snappy decay times with the mod or the stock feel (without stepping) or ultra slow times for long pads and drones. The fitler also only sounds steppy with the fastest and most extreme tweaks and has the sound of the 5 filter although I feel that the mixer for the 2 oscillators holds them back just a hair. It sounds like some corners were cut but it definitely is one of those things that's not apparent ina mix. All n all its worthy synth now that microprocessor technology has caught up to Dave's dream of a an analog digital hybrid. It has less options than my mopho but a much better sound. Its one of those 'no bad patches possible' synths.

@traumaad furthermore this is another vintage synth where resonance can be cranked without getting annoying regardless of cutoff setting... this is true of some curtis filter synths way abck, but not all (there's gainstaging and amp design playing into it... its very true of my juno6 and polysix which are real fitler champs and defiitely are worthy of their reputations.

duude! you are the man. you broke it down in the exact areas i was curious about. -- i see what you mean with the envelopes. i was hoping it would be able to get as snappy as the Pro-One.. well, you know.. close to it. lol. -- yes, i have the polysix and i love it for the fast snappy envelopes. ---- im sure you've ventured into making a brass'esque patch on it. Can you get creamy brass sounds on it?

@ traumaad yu have to do the gligli mod and then it gets CLOSE to the pro one, otherwise it sounds just like a pro one which is one voice of cost cutting prophet 5... But its a poly, that extreme level of snap sounds silly ona poly. My juno6 is the snappiest motherfucker ever but unless I'm playing the arpeggiator or mono lines I never turn the decay down that low. Its usually goofy for actually poly use.

@traumaad they are brass sounds of the bright american variety, if you really tweak they get creamy but fitler and envelope balance is KEY. You defintiely wanna turn those oscillators up for the dirtier american type brass... keep in mind the prophet 5 is a pretty bright synth too. You're not going to do blade runner though, its too american, those sounds are cleaner and yet less in tune. The 600 is decently tuning stable. A whole voice or the whole synth will drift in extreme temperatures, but hit the tune button and you're pretty well tuned. The oscillators are pretty close, it has better tuning than any of the original 5s, but its less stable than the new 6. Had 'em side by side. It generally sounds dirtier, thicker and more 'washy' than the new proph6 but they're close cousins.

@traumaad there's a ton of prophet 600 in this piece, the opening drone, the arpeggiations, string pads, some brass layers, laser guided missile sync sweep, some warm analog electric paino/celeste accents... but the punchy low brass was better on my mopho x4...

https://youtu.be/jfTShWk6emI

@JIMMARCHI1 thanks for giving me the skinny on this. super appreciated.

@traumaad I've been giving serious thought to getting a behri pro1 despite my loathing of their business model. My thought was I could get an extra voice that's a bit snappier and set it up for low note priority to add a little extra bottom oomph to the old girl here. And by the way, thanks for writing your review of the polysix, it got me to give it another chance and now I have on and love it.