Vintage Synth Explorer

GForce Software • Oddity

GMEDIA Music and Ohm Force (now GForce Software) worked together to faithfully recreate the look and sound of the classic Arp Odyssey and they came up with The Oddity. Together, they modeled every nuance of the original instrument's circuitry and design in this software synth plug-in available as a VST instrument for Mac and Windows/PC as well as an Audio Unit version for Mac OS X. While capturing the character of the original it adds some necessary enhancements that make the sounds of the Odyssey fully accessible and useable to any of today's computer-based musicians!

Like it's precursor, it offers dual oscillators with mono or duophonic modes. The Oddity features two syncable oscillators - fully tunable across a six octave range, with sawtooth, sine, square and variable pulse width waveforms. White and pink noise, a built-in A440 tone generator for tuning the oscillators, host syncable LFO, ring modulator, resonant lowpass filter, highpass filter, sample & hold, portamento, two envelope generators and a wealth of modulation routing options are all plainly laid out just as on the original.

Further enhancements include velocity sensitivity, the ability to 'Morph' between Presets and a unique flying slider feature which allows you to throw sliders around at different speeds, recording these changes within your host application. The GUI also features a glissando keyboard and all on-screen parameters can easily be mapped to external MIDI controllers. There are also user definable VCA and VCF velocity parameters. The original had no patch memory, but the Oddity ships with 5 banks of 64 presets and has virtually unlimited patch storage.

They went for the look of the common black-face Odyssey which was produced before Arp switched over to the orange/black color scheme of their later Odyssey models. Could the model copied here be the one with the famous illegal Moog filter design with the beefier sound than other Odyssey models? Any way you cut it, the Oddity is the real thing! It is an excellent, affordable and sensible way to get your hands on a maintenance-free Arp Odyssey of your own. The original Odysseys have been used by ABBA, Bomb The Bass, Ultravox, Gary Numan, LTJ Bukem, Air, Tangerine Dream, 808 State, Apollo 440, Astral Projection, Chick Corea, George Duke, Josef Zawinul, Elton John, Jethro Tull, R.E.M. and Herbie Hancock.

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AndyPandy

Posted 59 days ago

Seriously, I A/B tested this vs my Odyssey MK II, and I can't for my life understand how anyone was raving about something that sounded utterly crap. However, my test was shortly after the launch of Oddity. Maybe the problems have been solved with software updates and faster CPU:s?

I'll advice anyone to go for one of the incarnations of Prodyssey (former creamware, now Sonic Core and Use Audio's Plugiator). This emulates the original fairly well.

Arpnutt

Posted 370 days ago

This software does sound very much like the real thing. I still have my Odyssey and I am very impressed with the quality of the Oddity. It's a lot of fun using the morphing.

planetplayer

Posted 423 days ago

I tried this and love it.

lf0

Posted 545 days ago

I honestly don't know how gmedia make these synths so small in file size yet so brilliant in sound. I don't use this one often, to be honest I can't say why...I'm a fan of pads and the oddity doesn't really have any, but this vst makes up for it in leads, basses and sound effects, the sound quality is absolutely superb. Well done gmedia!!

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