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WNAMM09: John Bowen's Solaris Nears Production

Hardware tweaks, new colour 26-Jan-09

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John Bowen at NAMM 09 4:38 mins
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We've had a keen interest in the new Solaris hardware polysynth from synth designer John Bowen since we first saw it at ladt years MESSE. His pedigree goes way back to working with Dave Smith at SCI amongst others.

In more recent years, he worked on designing synthesizers on the Scope and Pulsar platforms from CreamWare, which he now has ported over to his new hardware synth whilst making many drastic improvements.

Scheduled for production in March of this year, we should start seeing them in the stores later this year. We caught up with him at his stand.




7 Comments...  Post a comment    original story
fizmo    Said...

when it's finally released i'll find it hard to keep my polar. i love the displays and rotary encoders, much smarter than most manufacturers.

26-Jan-09 06:55 PM


selercs    Said...

not bad at all...every time i see these videos by individual designers, i think of 2 camps: 1) the 'small' camp consisting of roger linn, dave smith, stephen kay, bob moog (rip) and john bowen; 2) the 'big' camp consisting of ikutaro kakehashi, tsutomu katoh, toshi kunitomo (correct spellings?)...

26-Jan-09 09:50 PM


selercs    Said...

ahhh...why did i forget raymond kurzweil for the big camp???

26-Jan-09 09:51 PM


zkmee    Said...

sounds ok from the short demo, though i am sure the real thing will sound very nice based on bowen's experience designing creamware stuff.

i also like the multi-LCD display even if it doesn't have the raw graphics power of a roland fantom-g...but heck, nothing compares to fantom-g graphics yet, not even vst plugins.

the thing is absolutely huge owing to menu reduction resulting in more displays, so some may prefer the virus or other smaller VAs...

26-Jan-09 09:57 PM


S R Dhain    Said...

now this looks like something really special. Bowen wrote a lot of the presets on the original P5's, which you heard on everything for a decade. It sounds delicioux..price?

28-Jan-09 08:25 AM


expensive&timeconsuming    Said...

Guys, this is to huge to be intuitive...even John Bowen seems to have lost his way around it..(now where do I change the sound hmmm..)

29-Jan-09 12:02 PM


selercs    Said...

good synth and respect to mr. john bowen for his innovation and contribution to synthesizer industry since the early days: HOWEVER, i would prefer buying a REAL analog anyday over VAs (except Virus).

my next synth is probably going to be a prophet 08 or alesis andromeda (andromeda has more polyphony and multitimbrality and effects than prophet 08, put p-08 has its own great characteristic sound).

30-Jan-09 05:16 PM


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More John Bowen news  All John Bowen news

  • MESSE11: John Bowen Solaris In Production -07-Apr-11
  • MESSE11: Solaris Is Coming -06-Apr-11
  • MESSE10: John Bowen's Solaris On Video -25-Mar-10
  • Solaris Prototype Demo Sounds -22-Feb-09
  • WNAMM08: Solaris Shines -20-Jan-08
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