Playing the Osmose (+ video)

[marino]

It's been four years since I started the original Osmose thread (now buried in the most remote pages), but only in recent times I have had the chance to play one, after an aborted attempt that I'm going to describe later.

 

Thanks to my friends at Your Music, one of the oldest (and surviving) Musical Instrument stores in Rome, I had the thing at home for a couple of days, so I could spend an afternoon acquiring some familiarity with it. They are the same guys who lent me the Uno Synth Pro last year; in that occasion, I made a bank of patches for it, but this time, no particular programming was involved. The Osmose that I played was a demo unit, with editing 'locked' at the company, except for some minor tweaking. I guess that it could be unlocked through some software registration.

...which was a good thing after all; trying to learn the Egan Matrix in a few hours would have gained me free membership to the kamikaze club.

 

So this is not a review, not even a "non-review" like my previous ones; just my impressions of the performance techniques and general feel of the Osmose. This is the reason I'm not posting it in the GearLab section.

 

Keyboard feel: Let's try to forget for a moment all the wonderful features like the two levels of aftertouch etc.; how does this action feel as a pure keybed, under the fingers of a piano/keyboard player? To my fingers, it feels fantastic. After a few moments of adjustment, I could fly on it, playing with great speed and precision, and with accurate dynamic control. I would love to have this action in all my electronic instruments, except of course for piano-style playing.

 

Left hand controllers: I absolutely dislike those two slider-like things. They don't feel even remotely as ergonomic or comfortable as the traditional wheels. If you want to re-invent the... wheel, be sure to bring something innovative to the table. To me, left-hand sliders on a keyboard are somewhat archaic. Thumbs down.

 

The two levels of aftertouch: Of course, it takes some practice. But I don't think it's too difficult to master, once you understand what it does on each particular patch. On the sounds that I have played (and I've played them all), it was assigned to the most diverse parameters, from simple 'animation' to triggering totally different sounds - and I had a whole lot of fun with it. You have to play by the rules: You can only trigger the bottom level once the first is at its maximum, and not before. But you can program your patches to take advantage of it; after all, most keboards have just one aftertouch level. And this one is polyphonic!

 

The pitch wiggle: In my opinion, this is at the same time the strongest *and* weakest point of the instrument. For the past 40 years or so, I've been hoping that someone would bring back this wonderful way to achieve vibrato and small pitch inflections in a keyboard. The Ondes Martenot and the Ondioline had it. Problem is, they were monophonic instruments, so the mechanism could be much simpler: just place the entire keybed on some kind of rail, to allow for lateral movement. To implement it in a polyphonic way was a very generous concept, and I can imagine the technical difficulties in designing it... but I find it really too easy to trigger in certain situations. In monophonic patches, I had a lot of fun, and not many problems with unintentional triggering; but when playing fast-moving chords with polyphonic sounds, it was too easy to have one note awfully out of tune. It's in the nature of keyboard playing, really: When playing lots of simultaneous notes fast, you can't have a perfect vertical motion for every one of them. At least I can't.
I'm afraid that the solution could only be a slightly different mechanism... for the time being, I would engage this function only for monophonic sounds, or when you expect to play only a couple of notes at a time.

 

The sounds: What can I say, some of them I found gorgeous, some (especially the analog emulations) a bit unconvincing, but they were just the presets... and I'd say that for being the initial presets of a new synthesizer, they are damn good - and of course, the real-time features is what is bringing them to life.
A different problem can reside in the complexity of the Egan Matrix. I can be wrong, but so far I have only heard of one or two third-party banks for the Osmose. I haven't looked at the programming software, but the descriptions of its structure sound a bit scary...

 

In a nutshell: Given the limits of my experience, here's my little list of pros and cons:

Pros: Keybed feels fantastic. Great, innovative expressive controls. Powerful synth engine.

Cons: Mediocre left-hand controls, when compared with the other features. Key-triggered pitch bending too easy to activate. And on such a class instrument, EXTERNAL POWER SUPPLY?!? Urghhh.

 

Of course, I think that the positive traits overwhelm the negatives. I strongly hope that the Osmose will be remember as the turning point of a new renaissance in keyboard instruments.

 

The video. As I said, in the video I only play slightly tweaked presets this time. But before getting there, let me vent a little bit with some back story, as I mentioned in the beginning: several months ago, I had scheduled a video/recording session at that same store, about the Sequential Trigon. Once I got there, I saw the Osmose in display, and asked to do a video on that instead. We ended up making two separate videos - almost a whole day of work. But when the next day they tried to send the audio files to me, they realized that there was no audio file. Something went wrong, and five hours of work were gone!
So, this video represents a sort of partial payoff for that debacle. Enjoy.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[David Emm]

That's an excellent demo and a perfect balance to your review. You addressed my last couple of concerns well. Its a unique beauty.

 

I once thought it might be my ideal central controller, but no, its a thing unto itself. I'm sure someone will eventually layer it with another synth and extend its reach some. It feels somewhat like the Mellotron moments that appeared before even string synths, where the otherworldliness made your jaw drop. This will take center stage in a similar manner. It won't displace other instruments to excess, but I think there's a good chance that it will finally put MPE on the map for a broader audience. The all-important AHA! moment approacheth. 

[marino]

21 hours ago, David Emm said:

It feels somewhat like the Mellotron moments that appeared before even string synths, where the otherworldliness made your jaw drop.

 

Haha, that's a good analogy.

 

Btw, I almost forgot the usual [disclaimer]: Like for the Uno Synth Pro, there's no sponsorship or any other commercial agreement involved in these videos; it's an informal collaboration, about instruments that I'm interested to try out. And of course, assuming that they have a unity available to lend me, they're happy to have additional exposure for the instruments that they have in stock. So it's a win-win thing. [/disclaimer/]