I gave a couple of talks last year: one to the AES that (unfortunately and mistakenly) wasn’t recorded, and one a couple of months later to ADC which was, but hasn’t officially made its way to YouTube.
If you follow my work (meaning: you’re one of my more tolerant personal friends or a fan of the OSC OSCar or PWM synths), you’ll know that I accepted the mission to bring a classic 1980s synthesiser back into current production.
OSCar is a beautiful instrument, rooted in the centre of a very interesting time and culture. Released in 1983 and remaining in production for four years, it’s a hybrid of 8-bit digital trickery and old analogue electronics that sounds and behaves like almost nothing you can buy today, and evokes the sound and history of music of the 80s and 90s. OSCar found its way into a lot of iconic music, even years after it ceased production. To have such evocative sounds at your fingertips is one of the reasons to remake it faithfully; the second is that the real thing is beset by the same problems as anything else of its age.
Rarity is one such problem: getting hold of an original OSCar is expensive. They’ve all got NiCad batteries in them that eventually dispel their electrolyte, damaging the circuit board and losing the original presets. They were made in England at a time when that was no guarantee of high build quality. They work on knife-edge timings to squeeze all the performance they can out of some very basic tech. Drop one on its end, and you’ll quickly find that some of the parts aren’t trivially replaceable. When modern analogue microchips must replace burnt-out old ones, they don’t often sound quite the same as the originals did. As it ages and its components drift, you get reliability issues that are hard to identify. Plug it into a modern system with modern expectations, and you’ll quickly find out how convenient and versatile a synth which needed a retrofit kit to deal with the arrival of MIDI isn’t. And so on. It’s like running a vintage car: you need to be either a competent mechanic, or the very close friend of one, to keep it running. And you wouldn’t want to let it out of your sight.
A well-executed remake makes sense: we’ve demonstrated a demand for it, as long as we get it right. Aside from the fact that this is a big ‘if’, remakes come with a host of caveats:
- A straight clone would rely on microchips that are no longer in production, so it’d be dependent on finding new-old-stock digital and analogue parts.
- Legally, making a new-old-stock clone is a grey area because there’s absolutely no way that a typical box containing early microprocessors and linear power supplies would pass modern FCC/CE legislation without a lot of work. People who sell modern clones duck such issues by selling direct, in small batches, to customers who understand and tolerate such issues. To do it on a serious commercial scale, with the noise that entails, means doing it legally. Major internal reappraisal and redesign is a requirement, but comes with a duty to preserve the original’s exact characteristics.
- The moment I reappraise such a design, my fingers itch to fix aspects of it that made sense at the time but no longer do. This isn’t about ego: this is about making quieter and more efficient circuitry. It’s about respecting the fact that MIDI and power are more conveniently delivered via USB than DIN connectors and a mains transformer these days. It’s about a user interface that was designed contemporaneously with the timers on video recorders, the awkwardness of which became a cliche for stand-up comedians. And so on.
- I once remade the title music for some 1980s Magnetic Scrolls text adventures for Strand Games: I did three soundtracks, only one of which has yet made it into a released title. The first and most important lesson one learns in a reboot, especially when customers really care about the end result, is that they’re looking for an experience that feels as good as they remember it to be, in the light of their far higher expectations after immersion in half a century of miraculous technological progress. It’s not sufficient to make one as good as the original actually was. For the soundtracks, I needed to rearrange a lot of the music and add or change parts just to make it listenable. Here as well as there I need to be an artist, curator, and critic as much as a technician and engineer, at every stage of the process. The vision also needs time to mature but (to paraphrase Leonard Bernstein) never quite enough time.
OSCar Rebirth (a working title for now) has been announced for preorder. We have Chris Huggett’s personal OSCar but that is something of a holy relic. I made a part-for-part clone (ish) of its original circuitry by sourcing parts on eBay and transcribing his hand-drawn schematics so that we had a playable, abusable, travelling instrument for comparison. It’s not pretty, but it’s been around the country testing demand, and is played in the video in the preceding link. The OSCar Rebirth’s prospective price has been announced too, and I’m quietly completing the electronics and firmware, along with making about ten thousand creative decisions that need to be made to finish such a thing. (With the help of Paul Whittington, obviously).
But one thing is clear about this: it’s going to be a relatively short-run item, involving a hell of a lot of work. This isn’t a Swiss sociopath’s smash-and-grab cash-in. It’s a licensed, official, world-is-watching, mess-it-up-at-your-peril undertaking. Our customers will be paying rather more than a two-voice synth with a similar spec would usually cost these days — albeit a good deal less than the cost of a mint condition used OSCar — so it’s not for everybody. In return, they’ll be getting the most considered product I [immodestly] proclaim anybody could make without escaping the bounds of what an OSCar is and should be. Yet another reason for me to stay awake all night.
It dawned on me that this elevates OSCar to the closest I’ve come to the realm of luxury goods. It involves most of what I’ve spent thirty years getting good at. The story and craft behind the new OSCar, and the demonstration of effort involved, will be just as important as the finished product. It will justify an exclusive price to a sophisticated audience, and will help to satisfy those customers and reviewers who will necessarily be asking if we’re taking the piss. To explain why the answer is ‘no, it’s actually exceptional value’, I’ll be keeping a diary here, diving more deeply into the things I talked about at ADC, and sharing details, images and material as commercial sensitivity permits. I’m about a year into this project (not, fortunately, full-time: the joys of consultancy) so the timeline might jump around a bit.
I’ve created a new page, supperware.net/oscar, to index only OSCar-related entries in the blog.
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