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Native Instruments' Pro-52

Ian Waugh goes all retro and synthetic reviewing one of the latest soft-synths

There can be few musicians of a, er, certain age who have not hankered after a Prophet 5. It was one of the first "affordable" polyphonic synthesisers developed by Sequential Circuits way back in 1978. However, affordable is a relative term and it cost £2845 back then, probably around six month's wages for most folks - or two year's wages for a muso! It continued through to 1985 and there is still a thriving second-hand market for it today.

But now you can buy one which does lot more for lots less, albeit without a keyboard and twiddly bits, in the form of the Pro-52. It works as a stand-alone soft synth and also as a VST Virtual Instrument plug-in for which you need Cubase VST, Emagic's Logic or other software which supports VST plug-ins.

For your money you get a souped-up Prophet 5. Features include polyphony limited only by available CPU power (the original Prophet was five-voice polyphonic), it can store 512 voices (the original could only store 40 although it was later upgraded to 120), it's velocity sensitive (the Prophet wasn't), and there's a delay section (the original had no effects at all).

However, the basic synthesis architecture is the same. It's based around two oscillators with standard analogue pulse, triangle, sawtooth and noise waveforms. There's an envelope generator for the volume plus a low pass filter with cutoff and resonance controls with its own envelope generator. There's also a LFO for creating filter sweeps, vibrato and warbles, and a Glide control which glides the pitch between notes - ideal for Dance lines.

This is pretty standard fare and very easy to use. however, there is also an interesting and slightly more complex Poly Mod section. This can use both the filter envelope and one of the oscillators to control the frequency of the other oscillator, its pulse width and the filter cutoff point.

Typically Analogue

The sound is typically analogue and the Delay section can really beef it up by adding effects such as chorus, flanging and echo. This adds another dimension to the sound and if you run the Pro-52 as a plug-in it saves you having to use the sequencer's effects with it - although you can do that, too, if you wish.

When running as a plug-in, you can run audio signals through the Pro-52. One other interesting feature is the ability to read System Exclusive data from the original Prophet 5 so if you had or still have the original you can load all your favourite sounds into the Pro-52. There may also be Prophet 5 data on the Web.

The main niggle is that although the programmers have considerably enhanced - and improved upon - the original Prophet design, they have kept the cumbersome file, bank and program buttons for selecting sounds. although at least they are named. Secondary niggle is the price which, while par for the course, would be much nicer around the £100 mark. We continue our campaign for low-cost synths!

But don't let that put you off. The Pro-52 is a solid piece of kit, extremely well designed by Native Instruments, masters of the soft synth. A must for Prophet aficionados.

Ian Waugh