Yesterday whilst working on a remix I started experimenting by trying out a few sounds on my Prophet 12.
So shortcut latch & hold to basic program and away I went.
10 minutes later there I am saving a new sound, copying it to layer B on which I change the delay settings add a little glide tweak the cutoff and voila...a super cool bass and lead split!
I then realised I've done this a lot.
I don't mean created a lot of bass & Leads, I mean I've saved a lot of my own sounds.
In fact I've probably programmed more of my own sounds from scratch on the Prophet 12 now than I have on any other synth I've owned.
Back in the day my first 'proper' synth was a Korg Poly 800. I had it for more than a decade and wrote tons of sounds for it (at one point I owned THREE of them) and I'll always love it, but I'm pretty sure i'm even more prolific for sound creation on the P12 now than I was on the Poly 800 then.Certainly for sounds from scratch. On the Poly 800 all sounds were edits of existing presets to some degree as there was no default patch from which to start.Dave Smith have to be given enormous credit for this, not just for making a lovely sounding synth, but for how they seem to have so perfectly struck the balance between having a user friendly synth yet having enough depth for longevity.
I've had my P12 just over two years now and I still find myself discovering cool little things about it.
The shortcut to a Basic Program is brilliant IMO. Without this I wouldn't have been anywhere near as creative from a sound design point of view as I have been and I really wish more synths had it.
I think all Dave Smith synths offer shortcuts like this - it's on my Rev2 too (which is great), but despite this I still find myself writing more sounds on my P12 rather than the REV2 - I think the bigger LED screen just makes it less fiddly somehow and I always find navigating the UI of the REV2 frustrating compared to the P12.
So yes, the mighty have fallen and my Poly 800 now has the runner up spot.
It'll be interesting to see whether I get to the point of catching it with the Rev2 too, but though it sounds great I don't see that being likely - it's just too much fun doing it on the P12.