John Bowen SOLARIS Demo of tweaking, sound design and some patches

Published on Aug 30, 2019 synthlegends

"The John Bowen Synth Design SOLARIS is almost 8 years on the market. Since 2012 there were approximately 380 units produced. The 7th production run just finished and is sold out.

The SOLARIS is a very sophisticated digital virtual analog synthesizer with 4 oscillators, 2 so called rotors, tons of waveforms, filters, mixer routing possibilities, 5 LFO and 6 envelopes. It contains about 1200 parameter and countless routing possibilities. It is like a polyphonic modular synthesizer which is capable to recreate all classic vintage synthesizers and also never heard digital stuff. With the SOLARIS a programmers dream became true. The GUI is quite logical thanks to 5 text displays for each section in the signal path plus a big graphic display.

My new purchased SOLARIS with Serial Number 356 has a new hardware feature, OLED Text Displays. In the meanwhile the OS is "grown up" and there are also more than 2000 user presets programmed by a big community of sound designers.

In this video I only scratch on the surface. In the beginning I want to demonstrate a bit the different sections (oscillator, filter, envelops, LFO) by tweaking an anlog sounding JUPITER style Pad. Then I demonstrate a couple of typical analog leads, bass, sync sounds and some digital sounds to show the wavetable section. In the end I play a gorgeous string patch demonstrating some further routing capabilities in the mixer section, where you can layer 4 parts.

I did not use any additional effects, mastering, compression or eq. You hear only the SOLARIS from Out 1 and 2 directly to the audio interface.

I hope, you enjoy this video, which only shows a very little part of this unbelievable flexible synth. I am very happy to read your comments.

Cheers, Rüdiger"