GForce OB-1 (Kenobi?)

They’ve done it again and parted me with my money, as its currently on half price intro offer…

You do ask yourself “do I need another Obie clone”, but these Tom Oberheim endorsed Obie soft synths sound amazing, and after messing about with it for 30 mins last night I had inspiration for a few songs.

Including one I have moved up the active development queue! Where I am running this through Eventide H3000 MKII and Valhalla Supermassive to create a stellar ambience that is, well, super massive! I was quickly reprogramming my hardware synths tonight to get some equally massive ambience patches (leads and bass drones) and in 30 mins, there’s a song.

I had never heard of the OB-1 before, but it turns out it was the world’s first programmable analog monsynth, but it was a bit “ARP QUADRA like” in that not everything was saved in a patch!

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I picked it up over the weekend. They were right…it is “ANGRY”.

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I just bought it also. Really awesome, and I love the extra LFO/Envelope matrix they add on to these.

  • Paul
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Yes, indeed! It’s absolutely not as smooth as a Moog, it sounds wild in the style of an ARP 2600 or Korg MS20.
Anyway, I’ve never played it, so I have to trust Gforce.

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Well, Tom Oberheim is endorsing it…

A big plus point. And of course I trust Gforce, one of my fav developers since the first Minimonsta.
What I’m trying to say is that I don’t know OB-1 at all (except for Kenobi :rofl: ), so I can’t compare it to the original.

Few of us, if any, can. It’s why I was saying that if Tom O is putting his name against it, that’s good enough for me. :slight_smile:

Endorsed or not, it doesn’t matter. This obie is great.
The trigger was pulled.

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LOL, I needed another analog synth about like I needed a hole in the head. But I am a big fan of purchasing quality sound design in presets, especially ones that are readily manipulated to come up with something related but different. And this one has some great presets that fit that description. Not that I can’t do my own sound design and presets, but I find buying them makes for a cheap and fast way to get ideas from others that I probably wouldn’t come up with myself, but once presented with it, would use… Plus this is just a great synth anyway. So bye bye money. Fortunately I already have OB-X and DMX so got the additional discount on top of the intro price!

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I hadn’t noticed the additional discount, but to be fair to GForce it was automatically applied. I didn’t spot it as the discounted VAT INC offer price was close to the VAT EX offer price.

It is a good point on the presets. I am perfectly capable of rolling my own, but it is also nice to have some “how do they do that” examples that give you ideas and I am perfectly fine with using somebody else’s patches if they sound good. I will often though do some tweaking to my taste even on those.

I only went through the first dozen alpha patches the other night (all I had time for) and they were all top notch.

Quick side note on this posts’ title:
I grew up in Chicago, and was told by the owner of a keyboard shop there (Jim Head IIRC) that the name OB1 was the result of a night on the town with Tom Oberheim and a bunch of talk about Star Wars (Kenobi).

Decades later I was having a nice conversation with Tom Oberheim and asked him about it, and he said: “No. Not how it got its name.”

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