Description | The Soloist is a thirty preset monophonic analog synth from 1970, originally designed to sit on-top of, and accompany a large Organ. It had its preset sound selection switches located under the keyboard in the same tradition as the Roland SH-1000/2000 and Elka Soloist synths. It had 30 preset sounds to choose from, including Flute, Bassoon, Brass, Fuzz Guitar etc. Other features included pitch, portamento, vibrato, growl and wow effects. The keyboard has 37 keys with aftertouch sensitivity for volume, brilliance, vibrato, wow, and even bend effects. A few basic filter (brilliance), envelope and LFO controls allow some tweaking of the preset sounds, however there is no memory to store your settings.
The Soloist is a compact and basic monosynth best suited to leads. Because of its aftertouch feature, it's simply one of the most playable and expressive solo instruments Arp ever made. It was later followed up by the Pro-Soloist.
The Soloist features a single oscillator, which generates simultaneously available pulse and sawtooth waveforms. The sawtooth wave is not a separate oscillator circuit, but instead is derived from the sum of 5 pulse waves, generating a 64-step "staircase" waveform to emulate a sawtooth pattern. |
