Roland Promars Compuphonic | The Red Planet

A musical demo of the Roland Promars Compuphonic from 1978. This guy accompanied the release of the Jupiter-4 and is basically its monophonic sibling, although it has some differences. The Promars has a “dual VCO” and it works as follows: The master VCO has sawtooth, square, variable pulse, sub oscillator and separate white noise. There is a second VCO (which also has its own sub oscillator) which is slaved to the waveshape and modulation of the master VCO, but can be tuned independently. There’s a switch to the bottom right of the instrument that flicks between “A-Tune, off and B-Tune” for VCO 2. These are two manual tuning settings for the second oscillator and a mute in case you just want one VCO. An example would be tuning the second oscillator up an octave and turning on the sub oscillator which would give you three octaves of a note with the middle note being duplicated. You can also create some very cool detuned sounds that really reminded me of the Prodigy (listen the pitch-bent lead line in the verse sections of my track). There’s the usual Roland resonant low-pass / basic high-pass combination and then two envelopes (one is invertible), which makes the Promars more flexible than the Roland SH synths of the era. You can overload the VCA for drive too, which is a welcome feature. The LFO is excellent on the Promars with a very wide frequency range. There’s four waveshapes available: sine, square, sawtooth and inverted sawtooth. There’s also the familiar...