INTRODUCTIONThese pages are the work of Mark Cottle. You can
contact me via the feedback page. I get
a steady stream of questions and requests and I am happy to try to
answer those that I can. However this site is a labour of love and
sometimes I have to let things slip because the day job and the rest
of my life also make demands on me. The Oscar is a slightly obscure, mostly monophonic, partially analogue synthesiser which was produced during the 1980's. Although much less well-known than landmark names such as the Minimoog, VCS3 or Sequential Pro One, the Oscar inspires a certain affection among a small band of devotees thanks to being packed with features that turned out to be way ahead of their time. - ROOTS -The Oscar was the brainchild of UK designer Chris Huggett and its name derives from the initials of the Oxford Synthesiser Company, which was set up as a vehicle for his synthesiser ideas. This website has no connection with Chris Huggett and is purely a "fansite" inspired by his designs. (If you ever read this Chris it would be nice to hear from you) O.S.C. was Huggett's second commercial venture into the dawning era of electronic music. He had previously been involved in the company Electronic Dream Plant Ltd, for which he designed a range of basic synthesisers, best known of which was the Wasp, released in 1978.
Described at the time as "One of the biggest advances in synthesiser design - an ultra low cost, high performance instrument", it was an odd looking device. Built in garish black and yellow plastic with a flat yellow keyless, two octave "keyboard", it weighed no more than a couple of pounds. It had two digitally controlled oscillators running through an analogue filter which gave the instrument a distinctive and powerful sound belying its awkward appearance. Other products from Electronic Dream Plant were:
Wasps were used by a number of well-known groups and you can still find secondhand ones advertised quite frequently. At least one company, Analogue Solutions, produces kits to add additional features to the Wasp. - THE OXFORD SYNTHESISER COMPANY -
The OSCar has two wide-range digitally controlled oscillators (DCOs), capable of producing both conventional analogue waveforms and programmable additive waveforms. I used the description "mostly monophonic" at the top of the page because the two oscillators can be set to respond to the keyboard independently thus giving a duophonic effect. Like the Wasp, the OSCar has analogue filtering but its dual filters are much more versatile than its predecessor. There are also dual ADSR envelopes, an LFO and a white noise source. There were many innovative features but perhaps the most useful was the fact that OSCar's voices were programmable - Most other analogue synths suffered from the disadvantage that in order to recreate a sound setting you had to remember where you set all the various knobs and switches. OSCar's knob settings could be stored in a digital memory, which allowed you to hold up to 32 different "patches" and recall any one at the push of a couple of buttons. The OSCar also came with various automatic playing features. There was an arpeggiator; there were various arrangements for repeatedly triggering envelopes under the control of either an internal clock or external sync; and perhaps most forward looking of all, there was an inbuilt sequencer - initially capable of storing up to 580 steps and expanded in later models to 1,500 steps. This made the OSCar a tenuous ancestor of sophisticated "music workstations". It has to be said that although the sequencer is theoretically capable of complex compositions the lack of a visual display makes it fiendishly awkward to program. Editing and complex tunes are virtually impossible. Despite these limitations the sequencer offered some useful creative possibilities when used in combination with other features such as the duophonic mode. Another selling point, and one which distinguishes OSCar from many of its contemporaries, is that from September 1984 there was MIDI. Although OSCar has a fairly basic MIDI spec compared to modern keyboards, it is perfectly serviceable. (I still use my OSCar as a controller keyboard. Its only failing in that role is its lack of velocity or aftertouch functions - but with my playing that's almost irrelevant!) The original retail price of the OSCar was UK£599 and approximately 2,000 were built during the short lifespan of the Oxford Synthesiser Company. Huggett's ideas seem to have been constantly racing ahead and there were numerous revisions to the specification during the production run. Had the company been as successful financially as it was technically then there is no knowing what OSCar would have evolved into. At a trade show in Frankfurt in 1985 the company exhibited a rackmounted polyphonic synth module called the ASG (for Advanced Sound Generator), which used 16 OSCar voice cards. As well as the digital additive synthesis featured in the OSCar the new synth could use its digital oscillators to play back sampled sound. It was clearly marching into the territory of megabuck machines such as the PPG Wave, Synclavier or Fairlight. But the company was not a financial success and Huggett moved on to other projects. (He worked for Akai on the operating system for its S1000 sampler and more recently he has worked for Novation - a British company which has combined analogue sounds with modern control technology) The OSCar's downfall was that it quickly ended up having to compete with new polyphonic programmable MIDI synths produced by the likes of Casio and Yamaha. Who wanted an OSCar when the DX7 arrived and became the "must have" synth for bands? And for those eclectic souls who still wanted analogue then Sequential Circuits or Roland were offering OSCar's programability and MIDI features but in polyphonic machines. Nonetheless, OSCar lives on. It is one of many vintage synths to win new fans following the revival of analogue sounds through dance music. Thanks to Chris Huggett's foresight it can link up to modern MIDI systems more easily than other vintage analogue synths. Its digital control system means that its tuning is much more reliable than notoriously unstable analogue contemporaries. And, best of all, it offers a wide range of great analogue sounds with all the infinite "tweakability" that you get from having a user interface consisting of loads of knobs rather than a few pushbuttons. Well known artists credited as using OSCars include:
Examples of OSCar sounds on commercial releases include:
(The source for these two lists was a "retrozone" article in the September 1999 issue of Sound On Sound magazine written by Paul Wiffen who was involved in the development of the OSCar) - My OSCar -
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