{"id":1628,"date":"2023-05-07T05:45:20","date_gmt":"2023-05-07T05:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/?page_id=1628"},"modified":"2023-08-02T09:45:05","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T09:45:05","slug":"oberheim-xpander","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/oberheim-xpander\/","title":{"rendered":"Oberheim Xpander \ud83e\uddfb\ud83e\uddfb\ud83e\uddfb\ud83e\uddfb"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Before I started making music there was an Australian band called Mi-Sex. Some of them became Twilight Productions that made soundtracks for film and TV (including Beyond 2000<\/em> – a show on which I later appeared). Their business required constant updating of the studio, and in one of those upgrades they moved away from their analogue gear into the digital realm. My brother handled their finances and kindly arranged that I borrow their unused Xpander on extended loan. (Which was funny – when my band first started we bought their drum machine 2nd hand. Small world). Anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I had an Xpander for a few years, during which time I never managed to get it completely working. It was out of tune pretty much all the time, and you had to retune it just before recording something, only to have it change halfway through. I’m not going to review that bit of it – except to say that I got quite a lot of complaints about one album being … er … microtonal. You can hear that below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The filter is by far the best part of it. Up to that point I had only heard low pass, high pass and the occasional band pass. Here you can combine these – along with notches and phases to get some really organic, vocal, textural, whatever-you-want to-call-it frequencies. Since using the Xpander I’ve never been fully satisfied with the usual LP\/HP gruel that comes with ordinary synthesisers<\/a>. To hear a taste of Xpander filter – with say the Micron<\/a> – brings a little joy in life because you can direct the sound to fit exactly where needed in the frequency domain. I’ve since become enthralled by spectral sound creation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The oscillators are American, a bit whisky, gruff and fit well with the filter. Being VCOs they go all analogue out of tune – which in my case became a problem. After a while the loan passed to another soundtrack company<\/a> who I think were able to repair it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These days I wouldn’t bother hunting one down and paying the collector tax. The Arturia emulation<\/a> is good – keeping in mind that my unit was idiosyncratic I can’t make any statement about accuracy but I can confirm familiar methods provide a familiar good result. If you want alternative hardware then you’ll have some searching – the Alesis Ion<\/a> is not that common. Another method would be multiple layers each with their own filter (so for example recent Rolands<\/a> might work. Some synthesisers such as the Radias<\/a> have dual oscillators per layer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do miss it, but I’m not taken with the more recent Oberheims. Too much money, not enough weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n