The Award Winning Oddity
he Oddity is modeled on the classic ARP Odyssey which was used by artists as diverse as Gary Numan, Herbie Hancock, Kraftwerk and Portishead. In much the same way as the M-Tron turned a whole new generation on to those sounds, we're certain the Oddity will do the same in terms of monophonic/duophonic synths.
The Oddity is the result of a lengthy collaboration between ourselves and Ohm Force with both parties bringing unique skills to the project. As a result we have been able to extensively model the original instrument's components and have achieved a stunning degree of authenticity in terms of functionality, character and tonal textures. We look at it as the first plug-in synth with serious 'balls', particularly when using the duophonic mode with some ring modulation.
Much scientific analysis has been carried out to achieve this inspirational emulation of the classic mono/duophonic ARP Odyssey. Samples of the various Odyssey outputs were taken, with different settings, in order to understand the influence of each parameter on things like, the shape of the envelopes and filter responses etc. Also conducted were detailed analysis of the control paths (keyboard, LFO, etc) until finally there was enough information to model and code both the oscillators and filters. One of the most difficult tasks were things like the control signals which are quite strange. For example, each time a key is pressed, the envelopes and LFO are re-triggered. However if more than four keys are held, they aren't. Whether these things were a deliberate part of the original design is debatable, but in much the same way as the Mellotron's maximum note duration of eight seconds, it's this oddness that gives the original instrument bags of character, and it was vital to include these idiosyncrasies in The Oddity.
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. Monophonic or duophonic modes. Host syncable LFO. Ring modulator, Resonant lowpass filter, highpass filter. Sample & hold, portamento, two envelope generators and a wealth of modulation routing options.
It would have been easy to to take the cynical approach to building this synth and simply bolt an Odyssey looking GUI to a bog standard set of oscillator and filter code - but that was exactly what we set out to avoid, we think the effort and attention to detail have certainly been worth it, we hope you do too.