years). Mine's a black face with PPC pad retrofit and a switch to turn the

two-voice feature on the keyboard off (thank you Bob Yannes of Ensoniq Corp.!) I have very mixed feelings about the little beast. ARP packed an awfull lot of

stuff into this little box. The hard-sync on the oscillators sounds great, S/H

is fun and the Ring Modulator (actually, it's a NAND gate which is why is only

has rectangular waves as inputs) is good for some off the wall timbres. The

routing scheme (switched sources on VC and audio inputs w/ attenuators) was very

flexible and probably the best compromise at the time between the fully-

patchable 2600 and the fixed-patch Minimoog. (I've often wondered why neither

ARP nor Moog made more use of this arrangement). I like some of the non-typical sounds it can make, unfortunately, I can never

seem to get around it's rather thin (and sometimes, whinny) sound. Good for

more mellow and background sorts of sound rather than "in your face" leads.

However, I find myself almost always reaching for the Minimoog for anything

other than "special effects" sounds. Still love it anyway!

the earlier model, with the pitch and modulation wheels. I thought

the push pads sucked. When my Odessy II's filter broke, I replaced

it with a 4 pole curtis chip, and added VC resonance. That rocked,

though I should have added another ADSR. Review: Great, crisp leads, good string sounds, good pads.

I didn't think the keyboard any better or worse than the Cat.

The Odessy was never quite as Ffat as the Cat. The Oscillators were

cleaner, though. (Side note: You wouldn't believe how fat an Axxe

could be until you through a couple of sub octaves on it.)

it is a damm fine synth.*check the movie close encounters of the third kind for footage of the

"synthesiser man' Phillip Dodds of ARP INC.

(Info for all ARP fans)