John Bowen has been involved with some of the most influential synthesizers ever: the development of the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 & Prophet VS. After Sequential was bought by Yamaha at the end of the 80s, John Bowen moved over to Korg where he helped design the Korg Wavestation series and also the Korg OASYS system.
At the end of the 90s John Bowen started to develop for the Creamware Scope dsp platform and among other projects, he recreated the Prophet 5 and a totally new synthesizer called Solaris. After many years of planning, John Bowen decided to create a hardware version of the Solaris and the first preview was made at the Frankfurt Messe 2007.

After some unforseen delays, we were able to restart the project in December. I made a list of points that needed to be done for v1.0 software release at that point, and now almost all of these are finished, and we are proceeding with testing. There may also be some extra time to consider adding a few more functions that I had previously put off for later.

As for the hardware: it requires five custom text displays that match the color of the central graphic display. Getting these are going to take about a month longer than I expected. We've also had a number of ideas concerning how we should handle the ribbon controller, and last week we made yet another change.

The first units to ship will be to those pre-order customers, and I expect these to be shipped by May/June. Units available in stores won't be until maybe August/September, but during this time we will be working with several other third party preset designers to create more banks of presets.

With more than 30 years experience of making synthesizers, what ideas would you say that you are particularly proud over?

Well, the main thing for me was getting Dave Smith to add my idea of the Poly Mod section for the Prophet 5, so that I could use do audio rate modulation of the filter cutoff, oscillator A, and pulse width, as well as have the filter envelope sweep pulse width or frequency of Osc A, especially in Hard Sync mode. The other nice thing was to have asynchronous LFO effects, because with the Prophet 5's single LFO, all modulation was the same for all 5 voices, and some of the sounds I had in mind were based on having multiple LFOs, which we accomplished by adding the No Track button for Osc B, so that it could act as an LFO, and could provide this effect via the Poly Mod section.

When I was working on the Prophet VS presets, I got this idea one night that it would be nice to completely 'fade out' from an oscillator (using the vector mixer/joystick), and when you returned to that oscillator (by moving the joystick back to the osc's mix position), it would have changed while it was 'silent' to a different waveshape. If you could do this for each 'corner' of the joystick mix, then you could have a continually evolving sound, with each wave continuously changing, smoothly crossfading to the next. This idea didn't work, however, because the custom chip we used in the VS generated all oscillators at the same time, and if you changed the waveshape on Osc 1, you would hear an interruption on all the other oscillators as well. But I kept thinking about this idea when we came to develop the F8 (which was our predecessor project to the Wavestation, when we were part of Yamaha for 1 year). So, I had this basic idea of a continuous chain of different waveshapes with an overall crossfade for each (which I intented to call 'wave sequencing'), but I didn't have the idea to offer different tunings or levels or crossfades for each step (those ideas came from Stanley Junglieb), plus we weren't using samples at that point. Later, when I first got to play with a functional wave sequence in the lab, without any crossfade yet, it immediately struck me that the more rhythmic pattern-type effect that automatically happened was going to be the bigger characteristic to identify the Wavestation sound.

The Solaris originates from the Creamware/Sonicore family of dsp-cards so you're not unfamiliar with creating software synthesizers. What are the pros and cons regarding software plugins, and when are we going to see the first John Bowen designed VST-plugin?

Pros Regarding software plugins - obviously, you can freely design front panel surfaces (the User Interface) as you like, and also, add functionality as you wish, without causing too much headache. With hardware, you have to figure out a way to handle your UI so that it can best accomplish the goals, but inevitably you have to make some compromises within given hard limits, which you don't have with a software UI.

Cons re: software plugins - maybe it's more a problem for those of us 'older generation' guys, who like to be "hands on" with our dedicated knobs, sliders, and so on, versus using a mouse to control everything. Although, as we have recently seen, there have been many attempts to produce a satisfactory solution to this with all of the MIDI controller products out, and I suppose these work well enough, providing a number of sliders, knobs, and switches, but it's always up to the current plugin you are running, what each knob/slider/button does (although you definitely tried to assign similar functions to the same controllers for consistency, I'm sure). For me, there's a certain amount of interaction with a dedicated UI system, where you can instinctively reach for a controller that belongs to a fixed parameter, even with your eyes closed, and have a more satisfying experience. But this is an impossibility when you have hundreds of parameters, as most of the sophisticated systems have now.

re: a John Bowen VST plug-in - easy answer - as soon as someone comes up with a fail-safe way to prevent piracy of VST plug-ins! The software piracy (that seems unavoidable) makes such a horrible feeling in my stomach, that I am just not interested. Besides, there are thousands of VSTi now (several really wonderful ones, too!), but I think overall, the value of the work is diluted to such an extent that it really doesn't mean as much when a new plugin is introduced. It's much harder to get the user's attention.

The biggest changes in music production the last 10-15 years is without a doubt the computer which now enables anyone to create professional sounding music. Which in turn make the noise level high and makes it hard to grab attention. I would assume this is the same situation when it comes to synthesizer design.
Today, practically anyone can draw up a synthesizer model that on paper beats the Minimoog. But the amount of oscillators, modulators, envelopes and filters are just one part of the success of a synthesizer. What advice would you give to anybody who is interested about synthesizer design and would like to get their hands (physical or virtual) dirty?

I disagree that the high 'noise' level exists to the same extent for hardware as it does for software synths, as I said in the previous question re: VSTs. This is one of the main reasons why I went the hardware route with Solaris, actually. I've gotten a lot more visibility now than I ever did with the Scope plug-ins, because now I am not platform-specific, and can provide a product that anyone can use without having to depend on a computer, plus the design path I've taken has a pretty high profile, with such a complex device.

But what you asked is, besides the basic structure of the thing, what else goes into the design approach to make a 'good instrument', besides the fact that you want it to 'sound good' (which is usually subjective anyway)? Well, obviously, I've spent a lot of time thinking about and designing user interfaces, and have wanted to try other ways to interface with the high number of parameters that exist in modern synthesizers. Ultimately, the objective is to make a tool that helps the person on the creative end get what's in his or her head out into the real world. To this end, you need to understand the musical use of the functions, how to make the main groups of functions accessible, and so on. The better you can do that....if I can accomplish that, then I feel really satisfied. And, oh, yeah....it's got to sound really good!

Re: getting your 'hands dirty' with synth design now - for hardware, I see the various Modular systems as quite an active (and growing) community. It seems like you can get into production for less cost, and if you have some unique ideas, you can gain a good reputation quickly, since it is such a tight-knit community.

For virtual design work, if you are interesting in coding at the DSP level, you are going to be in demand. Good coders are very hard to find - I know, I searched for several years! (We are always on the lookout for people who are interested in digital signal processing, specifically for the Analog Devices SHARC processor.) If you are coming more from a music or sound designer background, then I think the best approach is to use one of the many software module kits out there to start learning how things connect together, and then go with your ears as your guide. Outside of the dedicated dsp hardware Scope system, which is really fast, flexible, and produces high quality sound, one of the best native programs out there, in my opinion, is SynthMaker. This provides you with a very nice graphical interface that's easy to use, with very flexible and good-sounding modules. Less satisfying to me in terms of sound quality is SynthEdit or Reaktor, but they all basically will provide you the kind of fertile ground for experimentation and learning which you will need to get started.

Your friends are throwing their annual music gear masquerade. What piece of equipment would go dressed as this year?

I would most likely go as a drum set. Always fun to play, drums connect with everyone on a very primal level - probably one of the best User Interfaces ever invented!

More about the Solaris - John Bowen Synth Design
More about John Bowens synthesizers for the Scope dsp cards.