We are very pleased to announce the release of The Oddity, a synth that has been long in development and one that has become an inspirational tool for us during this period. It's unique characteristics have provided hours and hours of fresh and exciting musical possibilities and a tonal quality missing amongst today's instruments. The Oddity is a programmers delight, a synth with so many tonal subtleties that it can't fail to inspire.
Much scientific analysis has been carried out to achieve this inspirational emulation of the classic mono/duophonic ARP Odyssey. Samples of the various Odyssey outputs were taken, with different settings, in order to understand the influence of each parameter on things like, the shape of the envelopes and filter responses etc. Also conducted were detailed analysis of the control paths (keyboard, LFO, etc) until finally there was enough information to model and code both the oscillators and filters.
One of the most difficult tasks were things like the control signals which are quite strange. For example, each time a key is pressed, the envelopes and LFO are re-triggered. However if more than four keys are held, they aren’t. Whether these things were a deliberate part of the original design is debatable, but in much the same way as the Mellotron's maximum note duration of eight seconds, it’s this oddness that gives the original instrument bags of character, and it was vital to include these idiosyncrasies in The Oddity.
The Oddity features two syncable oscillators - fully tunable across a six octave range, with sawtooth,sine, square and variable pulse width waveforms. White and pink noise. Monophonic or duophonic modes. Host syncable LFO. Ring modulator, Resonant lowpass filter, highpass filter. Sample & hold, portamento, two envelope generators and a wealth of modulation routing options.
Further enhancements include velocity sensitivity, plus the famous Ohm Force patch-morphing and a unique “flying slider” feature whereby it’s possible to grab faders with the mouse and throw them at varying speeds recording these changes within your host application.
The GUI also features a glissandi keyboard and all on-screen parameters can be simply mapped to external MIDI control.It would have been easy to to take the cynical approach to building this synth and simply bolt an Odyssey looking GUI to a bog standard set of oscillator and filter code - but that was exactly what we set out to avoid, we think the effort and attention to detail have certainly been worth it, we hope you do too.
Minimum System Requirements
Power Mac G4
64Mb of RAM (128Mb from Mac OS 9)
Mac OS 8.6 or higher
VST Instrument-compatible application such as Logic Audio or Cubase VST
Microsoft Windows OS:
Pentium III or better.
64Mb of RAM.
