It's Christmas! Don't forget the pancakes. Let's have a look at the Korg ARP Odyssey, an analogue synthesiser from the super-funky-fragilistic 2010s. Specifically 2015. What a year that was.
I've always wanted a proper analogue synthesiser. They fell out of fashion in the early 1980s, when I was young. For a very brief period they were available cheaply on the second-hand market, but analogue synthesisers are inherently awesome, so prices slowly crept up.
Furthermore owning an analogue synthesiser was awkward. A lot of musicians
used them as sample sources, recording bass notes and sound effects into a
sampler, but if you wanted to sequence an analogue synthesiser with MIDI you
needed a special adapter, because analogue synthesisers generally predated
MIDI. Part of the appeal of analogue synthesisers was their array of knobs and
sliders, which allowed for real-time control of the sound, but after years of
being gigged it was hard to find a used synthesiser that didn't have crackly
pots. And if a voice card went pop, or a key fell out, getting hold of spares was
a difficult undertaking.
Which is where the Korg ARP Odyssey steps in. It's a modern recreation of
the 1970s ARP Odyssey made by Korg, but with MIDI, even USB. It mimics the
sound of an Odyssey but the internal components are all new, although they're still analogue. And it doesn't
smell of dust, or at least mine doesn't smell of dust.
The original Odyssey came into the world in 1972 and remained on sale until ARP Instruments went bust in 1981. In its day it was very popular, but the synthesiser market was very small in the 1970s, so even though it sold well it was hard to find on the used market in the 1980s and 1990s.
What was the ARP Odyssey? It was a two-oscillator monophonic analogue synthesiser. Technically duophonic, but I'll get to that later. Made by ARP Instruments of Lexington, Massachusetts. The company was named after Alan R Pearlman, the founder.
ARP's first product was the ARP 2500, a large semi-modular system that resembled the engineering panel of an old airliner. It was aimed at universities and other research institutions, because in 1969 very few rock musicians used synthesisers. One of them pops up at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind:
The humans use it to communicate with the aliens. Do you remember when airliners had a flight engineer? The flight engineer sat behind the pilots and monitored the engines, trimmed the fuel, deiced the wings etc. If something went wrong with the engines it was the flight engineer's job to climb onto the wing with an ice axe and a tether.
Fortunately advances in technology made the role superfluous in the 1970s and ever since then airliners have only had a pilot and co-pilot, and there are constant rumours that the co-pilot will eventually be eliminated as well. The last airliner with a flight engineer was Concorde, because things happened quickly on Concorde and the pilots needed a third pair of hands.
But enough of this banter. ARP followed the 2500 with the 2600, launched in 1971, which slimmed the 2500 down into a suitcase-sized panel that was complex enough to make weird sounds but simple enough that rock musicians could understand it. The 2600 was expensive but looked the business. Nowadays it's a valuable classic. Jean-Michel Jarre used it throughout his career, and I know this because his albums list the kit he used:
The Odyssey was essentially an ARP 2600 simplified even more, into a keyboard unit that could be taken on gigs. The Odyssey eliminated the 2600's patch cables, replaced the third oscillator with a dedicated LFO, and packed everything into a relatively compact but hideously ugly metal case.
During its life the Odyssey was the arch-rival of Moog Music's MiniMoog, which had one more oscillator and a simpler interface, against which the Odyssey's synthesiser engine was more flexible, adding ring modulation, sample and hold, oscillator sync, pulse width modulation, and independent frequency modulation for the two oscillators.
There were several different versions of the Odyssey; cosmetically the early ones had a white panel, mid-period Odysseys had a black panel, and late-period Odysseys had a black panel with bold orange letters. The later ones look best. Early Odysseys had a pitch bend knob, later Odysseys had three pressure-sensitive pitch and modulation pads:
The pads aren't very good. You have to push them really hard. It's easier to twiddle the oscillator tuning sliders.
The biggest internal change between different models was the filter. The original filter was terrific but infringed on Moog's patents, so ARP modified it. Unfortunately the second filter wasn't as good. It was duller and tended to lose all of the bottom end when it resonated. Later models had a third filter design which was better than the second but still not as good as the first.
In a neat touch the Korg ARP Odyssey has all three filters. I use the first one most often, the third occasionally because it sounds like acid house, the second one not at all.
What does the Korg ARP Odyssey sound like? Have a listen to "Tar" by Visage. The very first sound is an Arp Odyssey oscillator sync patch:
Analogue synthesisers from the 1960s and 1970s tended to suffer from pitch drift, whereby the oscillators changed pitch as they warmed up. The original Odyssey was apparently more stable than the competition, and Korg's re-release is more stable again. I find that it generally doesn't need retuning. This does raise one issue, though. Most analogue synthesisers had clicky knobs that allowed you to switch from one octave to the other. The Odyssey however has fine and course pitch knobs, which means that it's hard to switch octaves quickly. There's a global +/- two-octave switch, but what if you want to set one oscillator an octave lower than the other? You have to fiddle with one of the sliders.
Korg's decision to re-release the Odyssey is slightly strange. Korg and ARP have no historical connection. The Odyssey is a classic, but it's not nearly as hip as the 2600. Functionally it overlaps with Korg's own MS-20, which was released a few years after the Odyssey (and re-released in 2013).
On a historical level it was used by a wide range of prog rock, jazz-funk, and latterly new wave acts during the 1970s, none of which are particularly fashionable nowadays. I've always associated it with Ultravox, Gary Numan, Visage, that generation of synthpop artists. However the big synth stars of the period mostly avoided it; Jean-Michel Jarre didn't need an Odyssey, Vangelis had a polyphonic Yamaha CS-80, Tangerine Dream and so forth used Odysseys only in passing, the Human League had a Roland modular system etc. About the only fashionable synthesiser act of the 1970s that used the instrument was Kraftwerk.
Perhaps it was a labour of love. There are several different versions of Korg's Odyssey. The original had miniature keys. A re-issue had full-sized keys. It's also available as a keyboard-less desktop module, pictured passim. Both keyboard and desktop models are available with cream ("Rev 1") or black/orange ("Rev 3") colour schemes, although internally the re-releases are identical.
I bought a cream Rev 1 desktop module because it was cheap and I already have a keyboard. Physically the Odyssey is made of bent pieces of metal. It feels hollow, but very tough. The body is smaller than the original, about 4/5ths the size in all dimensions.
If you want the Odyssey sound, GForce's Oddity VST is apparently very close to the original, and it's also polyphonic, and it only costs £120 vs much more for the hardware. Former Ultravox keyboardist Billy Currie apparently now uses Oddity instead of an actual ARP Odyssey because it's a lot easier to carry a laptop to gigs than a bunch of discrete hardware. On the other hand the Korg ARP Odyssey is a thing, a physical thing of metal and circuits, that will exist and continue to work no matter how you tinker with Windows.
The original Odyssey came into the world in 1972 and remained on sale until ARP Instruments went bust in 1981. In its day it was very popular, but the synthesiser market was very small in the 1970s, so even though it sold well it was hard to find on the used market in the 1980s and 1990s.
What was the ARP Odyssey? It was a two-oscillator monophonic analogue synthesiser. Technically duophonic, but I'll get to that later. Made by ARP Instruments of Lexington, Massachusetts. The company was named after Alan R Pearlman, the founder.
ARP's first product was the ARP 2500, a large semi-modular system that resembled the engineering panel of an old airliner. It was aimed at universities and other research institutions, because in 1969 very few rock musicians used synthesisers. One of them pops up at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind:
The humans use it to communicate with the aliens. Do you remember when airliners had a flight engineer? The flight engineer sat behind the pilots and monitored the engines, trimmed the fuel, deiced the wings etc. If something went wrong with the engines it was the flight engineer's job to climb onto the wing with an ice axe and a tether.
Fortunately advances in technology made the role superfluous in the 1970s and ever since then airliners have only had a pilot and co-pilot, and there are constant rumours that the co-pilot will eventually be eliminated as well. The last airliner with a flight engineer was Concorde, because things happened quickly on Concorde and the pilots needed a third pair of hands.
But enough of this banter. ARP followed the 2500 with the 2600, launched in 1971, which slimmed the 2500 down into a suitcase-sized panel that was complex enough to make weird sounds but simple enough that rock musicians could understand it. The 2600 was expensive but looked the business. Nowadays it's a valuable classic. Jean-Michel Jarre used it throughout his career, and I know this because his albums list the kit he used:
At the top Equinoxe, at the bottom Equinoxe
The Odyssey was essentially an ARP 2600 simplified even more, into a keyboard unit that could be taken on gigs. The Odyssey eliminated the 2600's patch cables, replaced the third oscillator with a dedicated LFO, and packed everything into a relatively compact but hideously ugly metal case.
During its life the Odyssey was the arch-rival of Moog Music's MiniMoog, which had one more oscillator and a simpler interface, against which the Odyssey's synthesiser engine was more flexible, adding ring modulation, sample and hold, oscillator sync, pulse width modulation, and independent frequency modulation for the two oscillators.
There were several different versions of the Odyssey; cosmetically the early ones had a white panel, mid-period Odysseys had a black panel, and late-period Odysseys had a black panel with bold orange letters. The later ones look best. Early Odysseys had a pitch bend knob, later Odysseys had three pressure-sensitive pitch and modulation pads:
The pads aren't very good. You have to push them really hard. It's easier to twiddle the oscillator tuning sliders.
The biggest internal change between different models was the filter. The original filter was terrific but infringed on Moog's patents, so ARP modified it. Unfortunately the second filter wasn't as good. It was duller and tended to lose all of the bottom end when it resonated. Later models had a third filter design which was better than the second but still not as good as the first.
In a neat touch the Korg ARP Odyssey has all three filters. I use the first one most often, the third occasionally because it sounds like acid house, the second one not at all.
The Odyssey is a class-compliant USB device, e.g. you don't have
to install drivers to get it working. It accepts note on, note
off, pitch bend (on the module only), but nothing else. If you
want to store patches, you have to remember them in your head! The
mode switches change the MIDI channel. By default it's set to
channel one.
I can't find enough images of Odyssey back panels to conclude anything from the serial number.
I can't find enough images of Odyssey back panels to conclude anything from the serial number.
The TRIG IN connector lets you hook up the Odyssey to a drum
machine (for example) so that notes trigger in time with the drum
machine's clock. Unfortunately the Odyssey doesn't have an
arpeggiator or sequencer, so this is less useful than it sounds,
although it would tighten up your keyboard timing.
The main output is a balanced XLR mono jack. The audio input is
unbalanced mono.
What does the Korg ARP Odyssey sound like? Have a listen to "Tar" by Visage. The very first sound is an Arp Odyssey oscillator sync patch:
Here's a little demo in which I show off some of the synthesiser's
features. The first thing is external audio - you can feed an external
signal through the filters. If you send a signal to the Gate In port, or
use the LFO to trigger the gate, you get a wub-wub-wub gated effect:
That's right. Wub-wub-wub. Mid-way through the video I demonstrate how duophony works. If you hold two keys the Odyssey assigns the lowest note to one key and the highest note to the other. If you play duophonically with the ring modulator turned on the results are not pretty.
Throughout the video I've used a light reverb but no other effects. Sonically the general stereotype in the 1970s was that the MiniMoog was "smooth" and the Odyssey was "aggressive", and I can understand that. The Odyssey's filters aren't as powerful, so it has a brighter sound than the MiniMoog, and its special effects - oscillator sync, ring modulation, pulse width modulation - all lend themselves to spiky aggressive sounds. Put through a chorus and tight echo it sounds massive. The resonant filter will do acid house squelchy sequences, and with the right settings - especially sample and hold filter modulation - it's surprisingly easy to emulate a Roland SH-101.
That's right. Wub-wub-wub. Mid-way through the video I demonstrate how duophony works. If you hold two keys the Odyssey assigns the lowest note to one key and the highest note to the other. If you play duophonically with the ring modulator turned on the results are not pretty.
Throughout the video I've used a light reverb but no other effects. Sonically the general stereotype in the 1970s was that the MiniMoog was "smooth" and the Odyssey was "aggressive", and I can understand that. The Odyssey's filters aren't as powerful, so it has a brighter sound than the MiniMoog, and its special effects - oscillator sync, ring modulation, pulse width modulation - all lend themselves to spiky aggressive sounds. Put through a chorus and tight echo it sounds massive. The resonant filter will do acid house squelchy sequences, and with the right settings - especially sample and hold filter modulation - it's surprisingly easy to emulate a Roland SH-101.
Analogue synthesisers from the 1960s and 1970s tended to suffer from pitch drift, whereby the oscillators changed pitch as they warmed up. The original Odyssey was apparently more stable than the competition, and Korg's re-release is more stable again. I find that it generally doesn't need retuning. This does raise one issue, though. Most analogue synthesisers had clicky knobs that allowed you to switch from one octave to the other. The Odyssey however has fine and course pitch knobs, which means that it's hard to switch octaves quickly. There's a global +/- two-octave switch, but what if you want to set one oscillator an octave lower than the other? You have to fiddle with one of the sliders.
The Odyssey can be driven by USB, MIDI, or CV/Gate, using a 1v/octave
system, as per the original ARP Odyssey. In the following two videos I decided to make some music that uses the Odyssey exclusively, albeit fed through masses of effects:
The package includes a reprint of the original instruction
manual.
Some people might find the casual use of "master" and "slave"
offensive, in which case I suggest you rip out page 38 of the
manual and burn it.
I live in the UK, where this kind of thing is probably legally
defined as hate speech, so I have destroyed my copy of the manual.
I'm surprised that Korg hasn't been prosecuted yet.
Korg's decision to re-release the Odyssey is slightly strange. Korg and ARP have no historical connection. The Odyssey is a classic, but it's not nearly as hip as the 2600. Functionally it overlaps with Korg's own MS-20, which was released a few years after the Odyssey (and re-released in 2013).
On a historical level it was used by a wide range of prog rock, jazz-funk, and latterly new wave acts during the 1970s, none of which are particularly fashionable nowadays. I've always associated it with Ultravox, Gary Numan, Visage, that generation of synthpop artists. However the big synth stars of the period mostly avoided it; Jean-Michel Jarre didn't need an Odyssey, Vangelis had a polyphonic Yamaha CS-80, Tangerine Dream and so forth used Odysseys only in passing, the Human League had a Roland modular system etc. About the only fashionable synthesiser act of the 1970s that used the instrument was Kraftwerk.
On a purely emotional level I've always associated it with cold, harsh
electronic sounds and screaming lead noises. When I close my eyes I
picture black and white 7" singles with photocopied cover photographs of
oil refineries. I can hear the relentless dunka-dunka basslines of DAF,
although apparently they used a Korg MS-20.
Perhaps it was a labour of love. There are several different versions of Korg's Odyssey. The original had miniature keys. A re-issue had full-sized keys. It's also available as a keyboard-less desktop module, pictured passim. Both keyboard and desktop models are available with cream ("Rev 1") or black/orange ("Rev 3") colour schemes, although internally the re-releases are identical.
I bought a cream Rev 1 desktop module because it was cheap and I already have a keyboard. Physically the Odyssey is made of bent pieces of metal. It feels hollow, but very tough. The body is smaller than the original, about 4/5ths the size in all dimensions.
The keyboard version has metal side plates that protect the sliders from
damage - they act as a roll cage if the Odyssey falls face-down on the
floor. The desktop version doesn't have these side plates, so you have
to be more careful with it. Have you ever tried Purple Drank? It's a
mixture of cough syrup and sweets dissolved in Mountain Dew. I like to
add gin because I have some left over from Christmas. Make sure you
don't spill any! It'll fur up your keyboard and stain your shirt. Don't
drink it at work.
Does it make rational sense? The Korg Odyssey. Does it make rational sense? No, but human beings aren't rational and we don't live in a rational world. Look at the world around you. It's not rational. We are animals. We live, see the sun, then we die.
If you're a professional musician who makes a living from music the Odyssey might make sense if you play in a prog rock tribute band, but otherwise it's a waste of valuable space and money. Something like a Novation Bass Station has most of the functionality in a much smaller package. Sonically it's limited to just sawtooth and square waveforms (possibly sine if you're handy with the resonance slider), which will go a long way, but gets boring after a while. And it's more expensive than one of Korg's own modern analogue synths, such as the Monologue or Minilogue module, or for that matter the Arturia Minibrute or Microfreak. Or even Behringer's very own clone of the Odyssey. On a rational level it makes no more sense than a kitten, but like a kitten it's entertaining.
Does it make rational sense? The Korg Odyssey. Does it make rational sense? No, but human beings aren't rational and we don't live in a rational world. Look at the world around you. It's not rational. We are animals. We live, see the sun, then we die.
If you're a professional musician who makes a living from music the Odyssey might make sense if you play in a prog rock tribute band, but otherwise it's a waste of valuable space and money. Something like a Novation Bass Station has most of the functionality in a much smaller package. Sonically it's limited to just sawtooth and square waveforms (possibly sine if you're handy with the resonance slider), which will go a long way, but gets boring after a while. And it's more expensive than one of Korg's own modern analogue synths, such as the Monologue or Minilogue module, or for that matter the Arturia Minibrute or Microfreak. Or even Behringer's very own clone of the Odyssey. On a rational level it makes no more sense than a kitten, but like a kitten it's entertaining.
If you want the Odyssey sound, GForce's Oddity VST is apparently very close to the original, and it's also polyphonic, and it only costs £120 vs much more for the hardware. Former Ultravox keyboardist Billy Currie apparently now uses Oddity instead of an actual ARP Odyssey because it's a lot easier to carry a laptop to gigs than a bunch of discrete hardware. On the other hand the Korg ARP Odyssey is a thing, a physical thing of metal and circuits, that will exist and continue to work no matter how you tinker with Windows.
