Vintage Synth Explorer

ARP • Pro-Soloist

The Pro-Soloist is a thirty preset monophonic analog synth from the early 1970's, originally designed to sit on-top of, and accompany a large Organ. 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 Pro-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/DGX in 1977. The Pro-Soloist has been used by Tangerine Dream, Tony Banks (Genesis), Coldcut, Gary Numan, Herbie Hancock, Patrick Moraz, Billy Preston, John Entwistle, Billy Preston, and Vangelis.

The Pro-Soloist was based on the original Soloist (pictured just above). The original Soloist - also designed to sit atop an electronic organ - had its preset sound selection switches located under the keyboard in the same tradition as the Roland SH-1000/2000 and Elka Soloist synths.

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Yames

Posted 88 days ago

Tony Bank's Pro Soloist is featured all over "Selling England By the Pound", and in all of the concert recordings from that tour. It was also used extensively on "The Lamb," album (along with a VCS3), as well as during the "The Lamb" tour. It's also used everywhere on "A Trick of the Tail" (check the outro of "Entangled"), and in a few instances on "Wind and Wuthering". You're correct about it being all over "Seconds Out." Tony didn't start using the 2600 until "Wind and Wuthering" recording was underway. He went out on tour for "W&W" using only the Pro-Soloist, but started incorporating the 2600 on the "And Then There Were Three" tour, just as he had used the 2600 and the Polymoog during the recording of both "Wind and Wuthering" and "ATTW3." This is way..way, way too much trivia...however, this is my understanding of what synths were used over this time period.

circlesonic

Posted 89 days ago

Another user of the Pro Soloist is Anthony Phillips (guitarist/composer and Steve Hackett's predecessor in Genesis). You can hear the synth quite a bit on "The Geese And The Ghost" (his 1977 debut solo LP), and according to the sleevenotes of the 2008 CD reissue, the album's title derived from Ant's nicknames for two of the PS sounds on the title track.

Nick Esposito

Posted 234 days ago

WOW. That's a MUCH better picture.

Bonamici

Posted 247 days ago

Here's a great-great vst-plugin of the ARP Pro Soloist which captures the unique sound exactly !

http://www.prosolovst.com/index.htm

Chee rs
Bonamici
//UNIFAUN
http://www.unifaun-mu sic.com

Nick Esposito

Posted 337 days ago

Lots of people like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze used a "string machine" called the Elka Rhapsody. It was supposedly related to its ARP Solina and Omni brethren (and probably wedged in between the two in quality and popularity), but in looks it was actually very similar to the ARP Soloist.

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