Quite some time back, I found a scanned copy of the ARP 2600 User’s manual. I’ve always had a soft spot for the 2600, though I could never quite afford one; it’s always seemed like a great balance as far as analog synths go.In a recent fit of “my disk is too full”, I unzipped the file of scans and started reading. It’s really a very good introduction to the machine and how it works; I’ve actually started feeling like if I had one in front of me, that I’d be able to use it effectively.An idle thought crossed my mind that it would be amusing to figure out how much an equivalent synth (from analog modules) would cost to put together nowadays; Richard Wentk was kind enough to point out that the Macbeth M5N is pretty much a modern 2600. Quite a drool-worthy box, but still quite pricey at about $6k - although that’s roughly $1200 in 1970 dollars; I seem to vaguely recall from the time that the originals sold new for about twice that, so hey, prices have gone down. Up. Sideways.One-scan-per-page was getting hard to read, so I started transcribing it (copying the illustrations inline). At the same time, inspired by the really lovely design choices in this synth, I decided to poke around and see what emulations of the 2600 were out there - I had remembered seeing them before, but I wasn’t in an analog place at the time. I found two: Arturia’s Arp 2600V, and WayOutWare’s TimewARP 2600. Perusing the docs (which are really quite good for both products), I found out that the TimewARP 2600 manual is a pretty faithful version of sections 4 and 5 - the real meat - of the manual (it’s even written by the original author!), so my transcription has halted for the moment. I did find it interesting that just the act of transcribing did a lot to put the concepts into my head, even though I wasn’t particularly studying them.I’ve played with both some now, and I’m liking the TimewARP 2600 better than the Arturia one: it seems to run better for me, and doesn’t make weird user interface decisions (I was convinced for quite some time that the Arturia guys had never heard of a scroll bar, until I was told that there’s a +/- control at the top of the window that expands and contracts it. Note to anyone contemplating their own softsynth: never just make up your own UI conventions. It makes long-time users of Macs really irritable). It feels like a 2600, so much so that I remembered vividly the hour or so I was lucky enough to spend with one when I was fifteen, making silly noises. And it’s certainly cheaper than a real 2600 at less than $200.I had this dream the other night, of a custom MIDI controller that mapped real physical sliders to every slider on the face of the 2600 emulator, and which would look just like a real 2600. Definitely a pipe dream, but hey, those are the best kind.
The ARP 2600 manual
January 19th, 2008 · No Comments
Tags: gear · resources · software · speculation
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