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.
So much expression can be put in to your performance by using the aftertouch system wich is superbly implemented on this analog.
Its sounds are atmospherical, dark and even though it is a "preset" many timbres can be produced by tweaking its parameters.
Beware though, the touch sensor is the weak point and the CV signal coming from the keyboard aftertouch can be weak or your aftertouch can show "wear" or dead spots.
Complicated machine on the inside due to funny digital control of VCO, must have expert around for fixing this oldy!!!..definitly not a easy fixer.