General
Fans of Dave Smith's creations greatly value the man's boundless passion for hardware and synths. He also had a great feel for vintage synthesizers - his modern synths simply exude a '70s and '80s feel, while featuring a more modern-day build quality. The Dave Smith Instruments Pro 2 monophonic synthesizer fits that bill perfectly, and it offers an impressive amount of possibilities that will be music to the ears of many DJs, producers and synth fans. The Pro 2 is comparable to the Prophet 12, but it's monophonic and has a sound all it's own. It might be the most elaborate mono-synth there ever was!
Dave Smith Instruments Pro 2: oscillators
This machine has so much to offer that the specs provide the best overview, however, we do feel the need to highlight a few features. The Pro 2 has four digital DSP oscillators and a sine wave sub oscillator. It has all the classic waveforms - saw, square, triangle and sine - in addition to 12 complex waveforms and 13 super waveforms. Those super waveforms are ideal for creating an impressive sound with a just single oscillator - imagine what you could do with four! Furthermore, the Pro 2 features noise (three kinds per oscillator), frequency modulation, amplitude modulation and oscillator sync. Clearly, it provides a veritable plethora of timbres, so be prepared to invest quite a bit of time to learn all of this instrument's ins and outs.
Chords and filters
Although the Pro 2 is technically a monophonic synth, as it features four oscillators it still offers you the option of creating chords. In the paraphonic mode, you play each oscillator separately, with each oscillator using its own envelope. The Pro 2 also offers an extensive filter section: an analogue 24 dB LPF (inspired by the Prophet 5) and an analogue 12 dB multi-filter (LPF, HPF, BPF, Notch), based on the Oberheim. You can use them in serial or parallel, and you can even send external signals through the filters.
Other features
The multi-tap delays from the Prophet 12 are also featured on the Pro 2 (each with its own LPF, HPF and panning controls), but with another special twist added. The fourth delay effect is in reality an emulated Bucket Brigade Device - we won't go into the specifics here, but you can be sure that it provides you with a truly vintage sound. The Pro 2 has four CV inputs and four CV outputs, just like large modular synthesizers both young and old, so integrating the Pro 2 with these synths is no problem. Finally, a comprehensive MIDI-synchronous step sequencer with 32 steps and 16 tracks complete the picture, especially as it even allows you to control the parameters in the modulation matrix.
