The Pro 1 is capable of earth‑shaking bass and ear‑splitting shrieks with the best of them, but throughout it retains its own identity. To expect to hear the exact tones of a Minimoog or a TB303 from anything other than the actual machines themselves is to miss the point entirely. It was seen very much as a poor man's MiniMoog, and undoubtedly owed much of its architecture to the Moog - hardly surprising, since the brief for the Prophet 5 had apparently been to produce a polyphonic MiniMoog.īut SCI's little monosynth is very much its own man. The Pro 1 was essentially one voice of a Prophet 5, with near‑identical sound creation abilities. But the demand for monosynths was still alive, and we of a fiscally‑challenged persuasion could now afford a piece of the 'Prophet sound' without selling the drummer's car. To introduce a monosynth with no memories in 1981 might have been seen as a step backwards. The Prophet 5 went a long way towards making that ideal a reality, and other manufacturers were keen to follow the success of the Prophet 5 with their own programmable polysynths. ![]() ![]() Having been confined to chord work on electric pianos, organs and weedy string synths for what seemed an eternity, keyboard players were demanding affordable polyphonic synthesizers. Ironically, this probably had more to do with the success of SCI's excellent Prophet 5 than the Pro 1. On its launch, they had the bold effrontery to ask "Why would anyone make another monosynth?" And, indeed, very few companies from that time onwards did make another monosynth. Having already taken the world by storm with the Prophet 5, Sequential Circuits introduced the Pro 1 in the early '80s. In fact, Vince made nearly all the backing for Yazoo's 'Only You' on the Pro 1, including the bass drum (I used to have a copy of some of Vince's patch sheets, which made fascinating reading!) ![]() Rather than being in the honeymoon period, my synth and I are a well‑established partnership - we know each other's faults, but we stay together anyway! If you want some 'star quality' assurance for the Pro 1, look no further than Mark Kelly of Marillion or Vince Clarke of Erasure. SCI's Pro 1 is one of the classiest little monosynths on the second‑hand market, as Paul Ward explains.īefore anyone starts thinking "here's a starry‑eyed dude who's just done a bit of retro‑buying," I'll point out that I bought my SCl Pro 1 when they were still rolling off the production line.
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