Vintage Synth Explorer

Sequential Circuits • Pro One

The Sequential Pro One is a wicked little monosynth! It comes from the same period and genre as the Roland SH-101 and Moog Prodigy. The Pro One was basically Sequential's attempt at taking their legendary Prophet 5 poly-synth and packing it into a compact, inexpensive, monophonic analog synth! It has two VCOs, a great 4-pole lowpass filter, two ADSR envelopes (one for filter), and a compact three-octave keyboard. With a Pro-One, you can easily create punchy analog bass-lines and leads or quirky analog synth effects.

The Pro One is an extremely flexible synth with lots of modulation possibilities (ie: the filter, VCO B and LFO can modulate VCO A or B frequencies or pulse widths, or the VCF). There's also an onboard sequencer, something common on many Sequential synths but not often found on other monosynths of the time. It is very basic, however, storing only two patterns and up to 40 notes max. Also, only pitch info is recorded (and in step time only); you can not assign a note duration to any notes. So it's basically a short melodic sketch-pad...but useful. Also onboard is an arpeggiator which has UP and UP/DOWN patterns.

The Pro One is relatively simple and intuitive to use, fun, educational and responsible for some of the coolest and hardest basslines in electronic music today! It is used by Hardfloor, Überzone, the Prodigy, Cirrus, Fluke, Depeche Mode, Download, Banco De Gaia, Vince Clarke, New Order, Freddy Fresh, Mouse on Mars, Prince, Soft Cell, Richard Barbieri and Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

But since you can't always find one (about 10,000 were produced), or one that works properly... Wine Country Sequential has come up with a solution! WCS has been servicing old Sequential gear for years, as well as selling repair parts, etc. They have developed the Pro One Software Synthesizer Plug-In, an awesome replica of the original Pro One, both in look and sound! It has some added features and is an incredible way to easily add the sound of the Pro One to your music!

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Posting Rules: Please keep your comments relevant! Do not post requests for help, do not use for sales, do not post unless you have something interesting to say about this instrument, or we may delete your post.

 

zayne

Posted 9 days ago

I'm so glad Metric is getting recognized by a wider audience, especially within the synthesizer community! Emily is a great player too. I think she would be the Vince Clarke of the modern day. If there's anything a pro one could do that most people don't, she would. All that said, I love my Pro One (which I've named Olivia) and am so thankful for the inspiration I get from listening to Metric and thinking "I can get that sound".

al

Posted 14 days ago

Interesting synth. Emily Haines of Canadian band Metric uses a Pro One. You can hear this synth on almost every Metric song (and see it on their music videos and live perf.)

Luis

Posted 40 days ago

This keyboard appears in the Coma White Music Video (Marilyn Manson)

Randall K Harp

Posted 108 days ago

This was my first synth ever - back in 1983. Pretty cool sounds when run through some guitar FX pedals. :) I got real good at taking it apart to clean the J-wires.

Nick Esposito

Posted 133 days ago

So . . . this thing got used by Depeche Mode, Soft Cell (!), Banco de Gaia and even Mouse on Mars (?!). Cool.

Spacetime Continuum used one too.

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