The ARP Omni: An Orchestra In A Road Case

In popular music in the 1970s, there was an ongoing demand for some way to simulate, even crudely, the sound of the orchestra that often backed up singers or bands in the recording studio. Synthesizers of the day could do that, but only playing one note at a time: they were monophonic, like a flute or oboe. For one keyboardist to simulate an orchestra, their instrument needed to be polyphonic, capable of playing chords without difficulty.

Theoretically one could do this by building one synthesizer per voice and tying them all together to be played from one keyboard – but that sort of solution would be heavy, complicated, and expensive. Instead, ARP took a hint from the electric organ, which was fully polyphonic. Using a divide-down circuit, the sound of one oscillator running at a very high frequency could be tuned down to an appropriate pitch for any key the musician pressed… including all of them at once.

Other manufacturers were using divide-down designs to make organs, and were already experimenting with tweaking those sounds to simulate strings. ARP would leverage this technology – both borrowed and home-grown – to create instruments that would define the sounds of pop music for a long time to come.

This ad for the Omni featured a soundsheet – a flexible plastic sheet, grooved like a 45 single, that was bound into the magazine. It could be torn out by the reader, placed on a turntable, and played like a record in order to hear a demonstration of the Omni's sounds.

An audio demonstration like this could be quite important for sales – especially when to musicians used to organs, monophonic synths, and simple string machines, the Omni's claims to orchestral glory would seem impossible at first glance.

Building a new symphonic keyboard seemed a good way for ARP Instruments to reach an enthusiastic audience while retooling existing and proven electronics into new roles… and this time around, ARP truly struck gold.

1978's Quadra was a Frankenstein monster of a synthesizer, containing several previous ARP circuits wired together in a consolidated keyboard that allowed for massive simultaneous orchestrations. The Bass, String, and Poly Synthesizers were based on the relevant circuits from the Omni, and the Lead synthesizer was essentially an Odyssey voice with simplified controls. It had a pressure-sensitive keyboard, and settings of the front panel controls could be stored in up to 16 instantly-recallable presets.

The Quadra's relatively high price prevented it from being as all-pervasive as the Omni and Omni-2 had been, but it still had a large and loyal following, most notably Tony Banks of Genesis, who used the Quadra on many of the band's most popular albums (here's a live version of "Abacab" from 1981, where the Quadra dominates all the instrumental sections).