Finding OSCar
The Secrets of a Classic British Synth
The OSCar synthesiser, designed by Chris Huggett in 1982, made an important contribution to decades of music. As a hybrid monosynth, it also arrived just as Roland and Yamaha were releasing affordable polyphonic digital synths running on custom chips. Consequently, it sold modestly. But its architecture and versatility afforded it a unique palette of sounds that has seldom been imitated. Today, OSCar is a classic instrument. It features heavily in music by Stevie Wonder, Ultravox, Jean-Michel Jarre, Orbital, Underworld, and many others. Several hundred units are still around, preserved in working order. They change hands for about five times their inflation-corrected original retail price.
This talk is about how I'm working with PWM, with the blessing of Chris Huggett's estate, to continue the legacy of OSCar. To resurrect this name requires us to understand, technically and aesthetically, what made the original instrument so appealing. Little of its original design work remains apart from what is already online: a schematic drawn in pencil; firmware in an 8 kilobyte EPROM; photocopies of the original user manual. We also have Chris's own OSCar synth, good modern software disassembly tools, and a terror of messing up.
Much of the appeal of OSCar lies in the ingenious workarounds Chris found to push the limits of 1980s technology. It enabled him to create, at the scale of a small business, a synthesiser of enduring quality and versatility from a Z80 processor, a single 8-bit DAC, and a handful of voltage-controlled amplifiers. This talk will reveal some of these tricks while considering the bigger picture:
- How did we go about reverse-engineering OSCar, and what did we learn?
- What defines the instrument and its sound?
- How do we continue a brand that saw its only product released four decades ago, recently lost its creator, and has fans from several eras of music?
Ben Supper
Prioprietor
Supperware Ltd
Since 2018, Ben has been a freelance developer, helping other people to deliver music technology. PWM borrowed him to complete the hardware and firmware design for their first two synths. This, and an on-off history of working with Chris Huggett that extended over more than a decade, is why he's speaking about OSCar this year. Ben also developed and sells the Supperware head tracker, which adds motion capture to headphones. This small product became the standard way for immersive audio producers to work and share their music away from large loudspeaker arrays.
Before 2018, Ben was responsible for the electronic and firmware designs of several products, including Novation Impulse, Launchpad, the sensor DSP for the ROLI Seaboard, and large chunks of the Novation Mininova firmware. As Head of R&D at ROLI for three years, he was responsible for making sure that its team shipped their first few products.
Ben enjoys working in areas that bridge specialisms, which is why he's a hardware person at a software conference. His background incorporates acoustic design (he has a PhD in spatial psychoacoustics), hardware and firmware development, DSP, and writing apps when he must.
He has been involved with ADC since it started in 2015, and has talked about all of these subjects.