The newest in its growing stable of properly vintage synth emulations, Cherry Audio reveals Pro Soloist…
Cherry Audio is riding high after a year of solid classic synth-resurrecting releases: its latest release, Pro Soloist, continues to re-love those oft-forgotten early innovators. The ARP Pro Soloist was a much beloved synthesiser.
A player’s machine, its early aftertouch capability attracted solo noodlers such as Tony Banks, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, among many others… yet next to today’s wonder synths, it’s, well, just a 30-preset monosynth.
If you are Cherry Audio, what are you going to do? Go original, or go 2023? Why not both?
Yes, in the new Cherry Audio Pro Soloist, the best of old and new is merged, vastly bumping up the original’s specs so the software version has full programmability, polyphony, a duallayer engine, an arpeggiator, a mod matrix, and effects. The danger is, of course, that these extras could take it well away from the 1970s machine, but Cherry Audio has made sure that the core of the new instrument is faithful to the original. The developer worked with collaborator Mark Barton, who created an authentic reproduction of the machine’s signal path and the 30 original presets. Then Cherry Audio used that as the engine and ladled the extras on top. There’s a dual-layer voicing architecture so you can mix and match two sounds at once, each with 16 polyphonic voices per layer and independent panning. With this feature alone you can create more complex tones which you can now save (again, unlike the original). There’s also a split keyboard mode and what Cherry Audio calls the ‘Last Note’ option that simulates polyphonic aftertouch using monophonic aftertouch controllers.
The Pro Soloist has a three-panel interface which expands the original’s abilities massively. You get access to the original sounds in Performance mode, while in Edit mode, you get the keys to the analogue synthesis room including the Resonator Bank, which was behind the original’s realistic orchestral sounds. The LFO and envelopes from the original machine have been ‘revealed’, and a Super Wave oscillator and six-slot modulation matrix have been added. To finish, the third panel reveals an arpeggiator and effects that include distortion, phaser, flanger/chorus, echo and reverb.
As always with Cherry Audio, it’s a bargain. Just $69 gets you an emulation of a machine that you could expect to pay $2,500 for if you bought an original!
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