It was my very first synth, Tim. I was earning about $2.00/hr while working as a projectionist in college. Took me forever to pay it off because I bought a Rhodes with it!
This what I love about vsts. Making a famous monosynth into a polysynth. This synth ok it is that banks thingy that everybody loves. That nobody ever tires of hearing. I don't. Shame it isn't the original notes.😉 Cherry are now number one in the charts. I can't believe how quick they are releasing them. Tim is number one presenter in the charts too. Presentation, sound, clarity and enthusiasm. Cherry did well to get you on stream. There is some great synths now in the world.
I'm just one of many, many people who have been waiting for a decent Pro Soloist VST. THANK YOU Cherry Audio! Finally. And thanks to Tim for a great introduction as only he can do.
I discovered the ARP Pro Soloist about 10 years ago, when I learned Anthony Phillips (Genesis founder member) used one on his 1977 debut “The Geese And The Ghost” (and I believe he still owns his PS even today). I loved the sound, and still do - I found a basic software “clone”, AM Pro SoloVST, and used it quite a bit on my 2015 album “Book Of Small Hours”, but Pro SoloVST “died” when macOS went 64-bit and PVST was never updated. I’ve hoped for someone else to recreate this synth, but it’s more than I could’ve hoped for, that it ended up being resurrected - and souped-up - by one of my fave software instrument houses… many thanks Cherry Audio!
LOVE Seconds Out, one of my favorite Genesis albums (although they buried Hackett in the mix on some of it). And "trying to avoid the copyright strike", lol. No kidding. Great explanation.
Excellent demonstration of the Cherry Audio Pro Soloist! Cherry Audio did a great job recreating this iconic synth in their plug-in. Tim played beautifully. Thanks for all this.
My two most favourite producers, Tim for TH-cam music review videos and making electronic music and Cherry Audio for producing fantastic VST synths. What a great combination.
I waited for years for someone to do it ! I have one and I can say it's a very faithful recreation of the original one, 100% I dare say. The Cello and Fuzz Guitar presets are almost impossible to produce on any other synth and this one nails it .. very well done indeed.Thank you Cherry Audio
Awesome. The original Arp Pro Soloist was my dad's project when he was at Arp, back in the 70's. One of these days I'll get to try your version and show him.
A great intro for Cherry Audio’s Pro Soloist. Cherry Audio’s new emulations are coming out with such frequency anymore. I love the Edit mode. Another add to my Cherry Audio collection which I tend to use more than a competitors high price virtual synths. Nice job!
I watched your entire video prior to purchasing this today. I wasn't sure I was going to like it. Upon installing it and trying out the presets, the quality and variations of sound is outstanding!! I am glad I got it now I love it.
This is really fantastic! Incredible ARP vibes w all the extras .. love how you can see the original but then the extras are on another page .. love that !!
So lovely... Now my very old project of a Genesis cover band with friends is very easy. I got everything in my computer: mellotron, Hammond (no Leslie, only chorus...) and ProSoloist. EMI piano is possible with some efforts. I am only missing Tony's skills but I will work on that. Thanks Cherry guys and thanks Tim.
Wow...me too. 1978 was the first time I heard progressive rock music Sunday nights on KOME 98.5 rock radio ... a show called Stonetrek with Greg Stone. It ALL started there........
"Growl" sounds like a fast lfo modulation of the filter frequency. Presumably there's a trombone preset somewhere for "Growl" to bring to life! 1970s Lounge in a box!
The TROMBONE and TUBA stock presets incorporate growl, but you can add it to anything you like by using the GROWL touch paddle. You can also dial (slide) it in the VCF on the EDIT page. Have fun.
A must-have for a huge Tony Banks fan like me. I have tried his solos on so many synths, hardware and software, but it never sounded like the original.
9:52 The volatile effects settings, in my opinion, actually make the experience *less* authentic. In the 1970s your effects would have been outboard and you'd be able to leave them running and try different presets. An odd choice to switch them off, I think - although I may have misunderstood?
I love my ProSoloist... even though I have an ARP2600, ARP Odyssey there is something about the ProSoloist... I always wondered if anyone had ever opened the synth up to full editing as it has a killer sound that deserved more tweaks. The sound I'm hearing here i very very close... probably as good as anyone will ever get.... the extra features make it a must buy for me.... My background for the ProSoloist is definitely jazz funk (Johnny Hammond Smith albums from 74-78 are full of amazing PS solos and Les McCann also!) but I was always quite keen on Tangerine Dream and Edgar Froese though...
Thanks for saying that this recreation is close to sounding like your PS. That's as good as we'll ever do because no two Pro Soloists sound the same. This one sounds like the one I had.
@@mrbmodules2938 I think so too... it's very close... maybe some of those touch modulations aren't quite 100% right but they're close enough... I think having it as a polyphonic is a whole other level!
When I saw the title my jaw felled on the floor... If you only knew how much I wanted this. I have the free version of something similar and no it is not that good, but it was better than nothing. I always wondered if I was alone in the world who wanted to have Tony Banks sound (I need the Hammond T-102 too btw). Seriously you guys nailed it. I just wonder if it is possible to replace the after touch with my mod wheel. Really don't have the cash right now to buy another MIDI controller. I would use one of the foot switch I have to do what the after touch can do.
It's called a Walsh-Hadamard transform. As you probably know, any wave can be made by a summation of sine waves. The same can be done by using square waves as basis functions. Believe it or not, you can even sum square waves to make a sine wave! Math.
@mrbmodules2938 And for this ARP, we don't even need to go to Walsh functions. The "saw" is just a discrete resistor DAC on some divide-down counters. (The nice thing about clocked systems (like the Roland SH3A too) is that you can get perfect octave switching: the VCO doesn't need to have a large range where it is accurate.)
Thanks for building this...bought the whole synth stack 4. I never knew about the resonator banks so I always wondered why I could never get an Odyssey to make some of the sounds of the Pro Soloist presets no matter what the pulse width and filter resonance etc were set at. Being that the Pro Soloist resonator bank was not something that can be toggled in the actual hardware synth, how did you folks determine the impact of each of those resonator banks on a given preset?
Those who as me love the incredible sounds of the Pro Soloist in all the Genesis albums from 1971 to 1978 should have an ear to Unifaun, incredible "recreation" of these albums while being entirely new compositions made from scratch. This album can be qualified as "the album Genesis never made". It is this album (provided by Unifaun themselves on TH-cam) : th-cam.com/play/OLAK5uy_nvwFl3q8oX3cY2Qino-G57wB3z1bKM4gs.html Listen especially to the tracks "Quest For The Last Virtue" and "End-Or-Fin" where the ARP Pro Soloist is particularly represented. But absolutely ALL the album is to enjoy! With a lot of "Hackett's guitar", a lot of AP Pro soloist, and a lot of Mellotron. And... no there isn't anybody from Genesis in the staff, even the singer is not Phil Collins despite what you could think. Nad Sylvan, Swedish, is currently Steve Hackett's vocalist. The keyboardist is Christian 'Bonamici' Thordin. And all the other instruments are played by Nad Sylvan himself.
Anyone know if the solo sound at at he end of entangled, and similar sound playing the melody in unquiet slumbers is a pro soloist? I love that sound...
I had a pro DGX I think it was similar or later model it had a preset on it called space base I was told that was the sound used in the 70s tune called popcorn 🍿. May not be true
I don't understand one thing: the ARP Pro-Soloist featured a very complex waveshaper made with divide down signals combined by various gates: over half the presets used these pulse trains. But it looks like, from the panel controls, this thing only provides square wave and sawtooth: like an ARP Explorer not a Pro-Soloist. Maybe I missed it. Also, the sounds in this demo, except for two, didn't really sound like a Pro-Soloist, to my ears: it sounds more like an Odyssey with a parametric EQ. Please tell me I am wrong (which would be great), and they do support the authentic complex waves? [UPDATE: I need to check my simulation results again. The phase issue would only impact the few presets that use both the derived saw plus the pulses, which is not the majority of presets, and I apologize for giving a different impression. See below.]
You are correct regarding the method that the pulse waves are derived, but incorrect regarding the result. The divide down and gate logic produces one pulse at a specific width. It was done this way so that the widths could be precisely the same from unit to unit. In recreating the stock presets, I noticed that the tiniest error in pulse width produced a completely different sound. For example, the difference between 73% and 73.5% was plainly discernable. If pulse widths were derived in the traditional analog way, every PS would sound different (they do anyway). Fortunately, a software synth can effortlessly produce the desired widths. The presets were painstakingly recreated to sound exactly like the hardware, so unless you have a Pro Soloist there with you to compare it to, you'll have to take our word for it. The Soloist shares very little in common with an Odyssey, and the Odyssey, 2600, Quadra, etc. is incapable of reproducing PS sounds. Enjoy the free download and hear for yourself.
@@celebutante I will go back and re-run the logic simulation. The effect I am mainly talking about is the phase delay by the logic pulses, which will give interesting phase cancellations on those presets that use the derived saw. B.t.w: Actually, I do have a pro-soloist circuit board here, which I used to verify that the schematics were accurate. Certainly I can be wrong, but I don't see it: I entered the actual circuit into a logic simulator a few years ago: you presumably did the same thing. (Google "fricko propulse backstory" for details and the simulation.) If they just wanted to get reliable simple phase-aligned pulses, they could have used a far simpler circuit such as a couple of Arithmetic Logic Units (like LS381A) to get the same reliability of resolution, couldn't they? And as for the Pro-Soloist sharing little with the other ARP boxes, certainly true for the control, oscillator, waveshaper and resonators, but not really so for the VCF/VCA/EG, yes?
this is great but i got the quadra vst , i will wait for the next vst from cherry audio ,if i see an old man with a long beard in the promo video , i hope it will be a prophet 5 vst
The Quadra is incapable of producing Pro Soloist sounds. No synth-in-a-box keyboard can do it. It takes a modular with a very specific set of modules to duplicate it.
Absolutely. ARP Pro Soloist has come up a lot in conversations about what plugins people would like to see released by developers. It was on SO many classic records, so people are interested.
I did! As almost all the prog-rock lovers. This synth, beyond its simple preset architecture, was the instrument giving the sound of many, many, many lead solos.
It was my very first synth, Tim. I was earning about $2.00/hr while working as a projectionist in college. Took me forever to pay it off because I bought a Rhodes with it!
Outstanding job, taking a preset based synth and making it into a deep and versatile synth!
This what I love about vsts. Making a famous monosynth into a polysynth. This synth ok it is that banks thingy that everybody loves. That nobody ever tires of hearing. I don't. Shame it isn't the original notes.😉
Cherry are now number one in the charts. I can't believe how quick they are releasing them.
Tim is number one presenter in the charts too. Presentation, sound, clarity and enthusiasm. Cherry did well to get you on stream.
There is some great synths now in the world.
I'm just one of many, many people who have been waiting for a decent Pro Soloist VST. THANK YOU Cherry Audio! Finally. And thanks to Tim for a great introduction as only he can do.
My dream has come true. Thank you Cherry Audio
I discovered the ARP Pro Soloist about 10 years ago, when I learned Anthony Phillips (Genesis founder member) used one on his 1977 debut “The Geese And The Ghost” (and I believe he still owns his PS even today). I loved the sound, and still do - I found a basic software “clone”, AM Pro SoloVST, and used it quite a bit on my 2015 album “Book Of Small Hours”, but Pro SoloVST “died” when macOS went 64-bit and PVST was never updated. I’ve hoped for someone else to recreate this synth, but it’s more than I could’ve hoped for, that it ended up being resurrected - and souped-up - by one of my fave software instrument houses… many thanks Cherry Audio!
LOVE Seconds Out, one of my favorite Genesis albums (although they buried Hackett in the mix on some of it). And "trying to avoid the copyright strike", lol. No kidding. Great explanation.
It really sounds authentic compared to Seconds Out!
❤ Cherry Audio!
Great demo. Just snatched it up. Good price too. My Cherry Audio products are growing Thanks to your demos. Thank you.
Excellent demonstration of the Cherry Audio Pro Soloist! Cherry Audio did a great job recreating this iconic synth in their plug-in. Tim played beautifully. Thanks for all this.
My two most favourite producers, Tim for TH-cam music review videos and making electronic music and Cherry Audio for producing fantastic VST synths. What a great combination.
Oh wow!!! Awesome synth guys, this looks sooo much fun! And fantastic demo by Tim, as ever. 👏👏👏
Ah, purrrr, that riff you played! A classic Tony Banks moment.
I waited for years for someone to do it ! I have one and I can say it's a very faithful recreation of the original one, 100% I dare say. The Cello and Fuzz Guitar presets are almost impossible to produce on any other synth and this one nails it .. very well done indeed.Thank you Cherry Audio
Awesome. The original Arp Pro Soloist was my dad's project when he was at Arp, back in the 70's. One of these days I'll get to try your version and show him.
Cool! Drop us a line and we'd be happy to set both you and David up with Pro Soloist, Octave Cat, and anything else he worked on!
A great intro for Cherry Audio’s Pro Soloist. Cherry Audio’s new emulations are coming out with such frequency anymore. I love the Edit mode. Another add to my Cherry Audio collection which I tend to use more than a competitors high price virtual synths. Nice job!
I watched your entire video prior to purchasing this today. I wasn't sure I was going to like it. Upon installing it and trying out the presets, the quality and variations of sound is outstanding!! I am glad I got it now I love it.
Genesis lives FOREVER!
I have an original Pro Soloist and sure buy this polyphonic version!! Great!
Thanks Tim for another informative and entertaining tutorial on another wonderful Cherry Audio recreation.👏👏👏👏
"wink wink" indeed. great demo. i just purchased this and i'm blown away.
now, i'm off to wallow in my youth with my new toy ;-)
It's Banks in a Box! I will start saving up my pennies for this.
This is really fantastic! Incredible ARP vibes w all the extras .. love how you can see the original but then the extras are on another page .. love that !!
Shoebridge has come a long way, from his little-big days 😎
So lovely... Now my very old project of a Genesis cover band with friends is very easy. I got everything in my computer: mellotron, Hammond (no Leslie, only chorus...) and ProSoloist. EMI piano is possible with some efforts. I am only missing Tony's skills but I will work on that. Thanks Cherry guys and thanks Tim.
Great synth and clever demo
brilliant reimagined classic keyboard - looking forward playing it in my setup
Wow...me too. 1978 was the first time I heard progressive rock music Sunday nights on KOME 98.5 rock radio ... a show called Stonetrek with Greg Stone. It ALL started there........
Such beauty in the simplicity of the sound! Love it!
I love Cherry Audio. Tony Banks probably sold his ARP a long time ago .Who knows? Another great job, guys.
"Growl" sounds like a fast lfo modulation of the filter frequency. Presumably there's a trombone preset somewhere for "Growl" to bring to life! 1970s Lounge in a box!
The TROMBONE and TUBA stock presets incorporate growl, but you can add it to anything you like by using the GROWL touch paddle. You can also dial (slide) it in the VCF on the EDIT page. Have fun.
A must-have for a huge Tony Banks fan like me. I have tried his solos on so many synths, hardware and software, but it never sounded like the original.
Takes me back. 👍
Wow that sounds sooooo goooood !!!
9:52 The volatile effects settings, in my opinion, actually make the experience *less* authentic. In the 1970s your effects would have been outboard and you'd be able to leave them running and try different presets. An odd choice to switch them off, I think - although I may have misunderstood?
I love my ProSoloist... even though I have an ARP2600, ARP Odyssey there is something about the ProSoloist... I always wondered if anyone had ever opened the synth up to full editing as it has a killer sound that deserved more tweaks. The sound I'm hearing here i very very close... probably as good as anyone will ever get.... the extra features make it a must buy for me....
My background for the ProSoloist is definitely jazz funk (Johnny Hammond Smith albums from 74-78 are full of amazing PS solos and Les McCann also!) but I was always quite keen on Tangerine Dream and Edgar Froese though...
Thanks for saying that this recreation is close to sounding like your PS. That's as good as we'll ever do because no two Pro Soloists sound the same. This one sounds like the one I had.
@@mrbmodules2938 I think so too... it's very close... maybe some of those touch modulations aren't quite 100% right but they're close enough... I think having it as a polyphonic is a whole other level!
When I saw the title my jaw felled on the floor... If you only knew how much I wanted this. I have the free version of something similar and no it is not that good, but it was better than nothing. I always wondered if I was alone in the world who wanted to have Tony Banks sound (I need the Hammond T-102 too btw). Seriously you guys nailed it. I just wonder if it is possible to replace the after touch with my mod wheel. Really don't have the cash right now to buy another MIDI controller. I would use one of the foot switch I have to do what the after touch can do.
The extensive MIDI routing and Mod Matrix should give you all the choices for expression that you need!
@@CherryAudiovst Great, thank you!
15:20 The divide-down-and-sum approach with the square wave to make a sawtooth is a new one on me, but I understood what was going on. Very clever!
It's called a Walsh-Hadamard transform. As you probably know, any wave can be made by a summation of sine waves. The same can be done by using square waves as basis functions. Believe it or not, you can even sum square waves to make a sine wave! Math.
@mrbmodules2938 And for this ARP, we don't even need to go to Walsh functions. The "saw" is just a discrete resistor DAC on some divide-down counters. (The nice thing about clocked systems (like the Roland SH3A too) is that you can get perfect octave switching: the VCO doesn't need to have a large range where it is accurate.)
@@rickjelliffe1580 Doesn't that implement a Walsh function?
Some string machines do this too - Korg Delta, for example. And if I remember correctly, that's how Jupiter-4 does saw wave as well.
@@mrbmodules2938 Many thanks for the info. I have a mathematics background but I've not heard of that transform. I'm going to look it up!
That was excellent.
Maybe an ARP Chroma is in the works?? That would be phenomenal.
I always wanted one of these. It sounds like an ARP to me.
Thanks for building this...bought the whole synth stack 4. I never knew about the resonator banks so I always wondered why I could never get an Odyssey to make some of the sounds of the Pro Soloist presets no matter what the pulse width and filter resonance etc were set at. Being that the Pro Soloist resonator bank was not something that can be toggled in the actual hardware synth, how did you folks determine the impact of each of those resonator banks on a given preset?
Hey all - synth stack 4 is only $299 rn and has the soloist and more! $13 per synth
Hope someone plays the full solo of "Genesis - The Cinema Show" with it.
Genesis was a very English band, who used very American instruments. Strange eh? Remember that double neck Rickenbacker? Made in California, USA.
Those who as me love the incredible sounds of the Pro Soloist in all the Genesis albums from 1971 to 1978 should have an ear to Unifaun, incredible "recreation" of these albums while being entirely new compositions made from scratch. This album can be qualified as "the album Genesis never made". It is this album (provided by Unifaun themselves on TH-cam) :
th-cam.com/play/OLAK5uy_nvwFl3q8oX3cY2Qino-G57wB3z1bKM4gs.html
Listen especially to the tracks "Quest For The Last Virtue" and "End-Or-Fin" where the ARP Pro Soloist is particularly represented. But absolutely ALL the album is to enjoy! With a lot of "Hackett's guitar", a lot of AP Pro soloist, and a lot of Mellotron. And... no there isn't anybody from Genesis in the staff, even the singer is not Phil Collins despite what you could think. Nad Sylvan, Swedish, is currently Steve Hackett's vocalist. The keyboardist is Christian 'Bonamici' Thordin. And all the other instruments are played by Nad Sylvan himself.
Anyone know if the solo sound at at he end of entangled, and similar sound playing the melody in unquiet slumbers is a pro soloist? I love that sound...
Nice!
I had a pro DGX I think it was similar or later model it had a preset on it called space base I was told that was the sound used in the 70s tune called popcorn 🍿. May not be true
What are the system requirements and does it only run on PC?
I don't understand one thing: the ARP Pro-Soloist featured a very complex waveshaper made with divide down signals combined by various gates: over half the presets used these pulse trains. But it looks like, from the panel controls, this thing only provides square wave and sawtooth: like an ARP Explorer not a Pro-Soloist. Maybe I missed it. Also, the sounds in this demo, except for two, didn't really sound like a Pro-Soloist, to my ears: it sounds more like an Odyssey with a parametric EQ. Please tell me I am wrong (which would be great), and they do support the authentic complex waves?
[UPDATE: I need to check my simulation results again. The phase issue would only impact the few presets that use both the derived saw plus the pulses, which is not the majority of presets, and I apologize for giving a different impression. See below.]
You are correct regarding the method that the pulse waves are derived, but incorrect regarding the result. The divide down and gate logic produces one pulse at a specific width. It was done this way so that the widths could be precisely the same from unit to unit. In recreating the stock presets, I noticed that the tiniest error in pulse width produced a completely different sound. For example, the difference between 73% and 73.5% was plainly discernable. If pulse widths were derived in the traditional analog way, every PS would sound different (they do anyway). Fortunately, a software synth can effortlessly produce the desired widths. The presets were painstakingly recreated to sound exactly like the hardware, so unless you have a Pro Soloist there with you to compare it to, you'll have to take our word for it. The Soloist shares very little in common with an Odyssey, and the Odyssey, 2600, Quadra, etc. is incapable of reproducing PS sounds. Enjoy the free download and hear for yourself.
Check out the replies from our DSP programmer Mark Barton below. The pulse/divide waveshaping is in fact properly emulated.
@@celebutante I will go back and re-run the logic simulation. The effect I am mainly talking about is the phase delay by the logic pulses, which will give interesting phase cancellations on those presets that use the derived saw.
B.t.w: Actually, I do have a pro-soloist circuit board here, which I used to verify that the schematics were accurate. Certainly I can be wrong, but I don't see it: I entered the actual circuit into a logic simulator a few years ago: you presumably did the same thing. (Google "fricko propulse backstory" for details and the simulation.)
If they just wanted to get reliable simple phase-aligned pulses, they could have used a far simpler circuit such as a couple of Arithmetic Logic Units (like LS381A) to get the same reliability of resolution, couldn't they?
And as for the Pro-Soloist sharing little with the other ARP boxes, certainly true for the control, oscillator, waveshaper and resonators, but not really so for the VCF/VCA/EG, yes?
The Wow is a WahWah /LFO repeated Tim. (modulating cut off)
WOW is a pressure controlled, high resonance direct filter cutoff, and WAHWAH is under pressure + LFO control and does not alter the resonance.
I had the vst demo. It had the intermittent beeping noise. 😂😂😂
this is great but i got the quadra vst , i will wait for the next vst from cherry audio ,if i see an old man with a long beard in the promo video , i hope it will be a prophet 5 vst
The Quadra is incapable of producing Pro Soloist sounds. No synth-in-a-box keyboard can do it. It takes a modular with a very specific set of modules to duplicate it.
@@mrbmodules2938 Totally agree - it's really hard to nail the exact Pro Soloist tone. This plugin definitely does nail it, though.
@@budgetkeyboardist Thanks so much. We all tried really hard to make that happen.
Love Genesis - And then there were three
What, where, when and why? Did anyone ask for this?
huh? I hate when people say "did anyone ask for this?". Of course they did, doesn't matter if you didn't, mate.
Absolutely. ARP Pro Soloist has come up a lot in conversations about what plugins people would like to see released by developers. It was on SO many classic records, so people are interested.
I did!
I did! As almost all the prog-rock lovers. This synth, beyond its simple preset architecture, was the instrument giving the sound of many, many, many lead solos.
It has been one of our most highly requested instruments for years!