Fifty Oscillators Of Cinematic Goodness

Synthesist Dexba shared this cinematic live performance on the Elta Music Solar 50 synthesizer.

The SOLAR 50 is a 50-oscillator/10 voice synthesizer that the developers say is tailored to making atmospheric sounds, background music, microtonal music, ‘super polyphonic electro symphonies’ and more.

“This yellow beast is more resembling, to me, to an orgy of Sequential OB-6, with its brassiness and the 12dB Polivoks filter,” notes Dexba. “This was a first encounter, much more to come: I still have to receive all the other cartridges, I need to try it in stereo with some pedals, and a comparison with the Lyra-8 is almost mandatory!”

20 thoughts on “Fifty Oscillators Of Cinematic Goodness

  1. Lush.

    When 49 oscillators just isn’t enough!

    Klaus Schulze album Cyborg 1973 ambient organ recital particularly Synphara track that inspired Eno 1975 to make Discreet Music.
    Cyborg as a whole influenced Eno’s ambient style : Neuronengesang organ choral would find its way into Eno’s Apollo 1983.
    Eno’s New Space Music album in 1993 is a homage to Cyborg.

    Even before this 1957 Jean Jaques Perrey : Prelude Au Sommeil album the father of Electronic ambient.
    Was made to be played in the background to be sleep inducing hence the title.
    Electron Ondioline a kind of Electronic synth organ  was played by Jean real name Jean Marcel Leroy.

    Eno is mistakenly named by many musos, journos, musicians as birthing electronic ambient because eno named it ambient in his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports
    after Eric Saties description Musique d’ameublement.

  2. Wow. The Solar 50 sounds like something I could spent a lot of time playing, especially hooked up to a Strymon Big Sky.

    1. It would be a great companion, especially connected directly via the DRY, stereo output, even if that means losing the filter.
      The onboard shimmer FX is regardless quite usable 🙂

    1. If you want, I have another recording on my channel with less reverb, or at least with less intrusive ones.
      The general sound quality is leaning towards a more brassy OB6, btw 🙂

  3. That is an absolutely beautiful sounding synth. Incredible.

    This synth has sparked in me to write down my long wished-for mega synth. It goes something like this:

    1) Conceptually, it would be a massively polyphonic synth with complete freedom of routing audio and CV voltages in a per-oscillator basis. Basically a MatrixBrute that routs the inputs and outputs of each oscillator via a 48×48 grid.

    2) It would have a very large front panel. You start with 48 total oscillators, each one being freely routable to a mixer channel. CV from the keyboard and/or a sequencer (or two or three) would be routed to single or groups of oscillators (6×8=voices giving you an 8-voice, six oscillators, or, 3×16 for 16-voice x 3 oscillators, or 12×4 for for 12-voice, 4-oscilator synth. Reverse the pattern to increase the oscillator per voice count while sacrificing polyphony. You could even go further and split off groups of oscillators completely for different timbres or key splits. The point is, you would have total freedom as to how you allocated each oscillator.

    3) This synth would come with at least three analog filters and amps, five envelopes and LFOs (ASM Hydrasynth, thank you guys for that).

    4) Add a robust very high bit rate and bit depth FX section complete with distortions, reverbs, and good gawd whatever else a clever DSP coder could come up with. (Yes, in order to make this thing even remotely approachable cost-wise, it would have to be a very powerful DSP engine running on a very fast computer platform (Linux, of course).)

    5) But being a digital/analog beast, there would be a huge library of wave forms for V/A, Additive, FM, Wavetable, sampling, and many other kinds of synthesis that can be thought of.
    5a) The sample rate and bit depth of the waveforms would be very high and deep, no aliasing at all.

    6) It would be very knobby, buttony, and switchy with a large, bright, iPad-quality touch screen (maybe the touch screen is the main interface to the oscillator patch bay?).

    7) Multi-channel connections to a DAW through Ethernet and optical to be able to pass very high bit-rate and bit-depth audio to a multi-channel, high-end audio interface with the similar connections, USB3 audio and, for good measure, several channels of balanced, analogue audio out connected to very high-end pre-amps.

    8) Finally, a DAW plugin for managing patches on the machine and saving and loading patches to and from the DAW on a project-basis, much like how a VST/AU plug-in works for software synths plus, a beautiful GUI interface that mimics the synth’s UI.

    I know, I’m not asking for much, just an analog/digital hybrid super-synth with digital oscillators that sound indistinguishable from analogue ones with the rest of the analog signal path being analog (until the FX section, which would be totally bypassable if wanted).

    In the meantime, I would REALLY like to see a software synth like this one I outlined.

  4. Are those really little black space balls on the front panels? They used to be a knob and CV patch points instead?

    Uh, why isn’t he wearing a shirt? And the vendor has nude manikin boobies on the front page. Lost marketing ideas…

    1. The space balls are light sensors, hard-wired to the modulation of the oscillators, one for each group of 5 (but you can still choose the amount for each osc). There are also the knobs and CVs 🙂

      As for my nakedness, if you look closely my head, you’ll see I am sweating like crazy 😀
      I remember it was 39 (celsius) that day, and I don’t have AC in my apartment, so…

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