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E12- Cars "Let's Go" Sync
I remember the day I bought my Hammond B3. Or more to the
point, I remember the day after, when I walked into a music store and
saw the Prophet 5 for the first time. Sleek, wooden casing, knobs and
switches, a lot like the Minimoog, only better looking. Fantastic, sexy
looking, actually, as Julian Colbeck points out in his book
Keyfax:Omnibus Collection.
And it had an organ sound, which made me question my
Hammond purchase. Weighed a lot less - hmm, what had I been
thinking. Of course, nowadays I wish I had both. At the time though, a
polyphonic synthesizer with sounds that were memorized - absolutely
stunning.
On the whole, the Prophet's sound tends to be on the brassy side.
Even strings sound like they're half-brassed (pardon the pun). It does
have a feature called hard sync which made possible the signature
sound used by the Cars' Greg Hawkes on their hit "Let's Go" (from
Candy-O). More recently this sound has shown up on songs like No
Doubt's "Just A Girl". That's the sound this voice models. While it
doesn't behave exactly like true hard sync does (because the Motif
XS is a sample-playback synth, not a true analog synth), this voice
does recall the signature hard sync sound. Assgn. Function Switch 1
brightens things up and gives the sound more edge.
The Sequential Prophet 5 – more than a synth, a gorgeous work of art.
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