Oxford Synthesiser Company OSCar

The 1983 OSCar is a legendary synth designed by Chris Huggett who originally created the WASP mono synth & after the Oxford Synthesiser company he founded, went on to Akai where he wrote the OS for the S1000 & other samplers in their range, eventually leaving to join Novation, a company he partly helped found where he designed many of their flagship synths.

Manufactured between 1893 & 1985 at an initial price of £599 GBP the OSCar mono-synth was quite unusual in that it was an analog digital hybrid, which used Digitally Controlled Oscillators but also could generate additional programable waveforms using Additive Synthesis, either choosing from a selection of preset digital waves or you could create your own using the upper 24 keys on the OSCar which function as switches in Harmonic creation mode, adding in up to 24 stepped harmonics, with subsequent repeated key presses increasing the volume of each added harmonic. This allowed users to very quickly build custom Oscillator sounds which they could hear as they added harmonics making it very intuitive.

These digital waveforms oscillators could be mixed and matched with more traditional analog DCO ones, having either oscillator programmed differently adding greater variety to sounds.

Each Digitally Controlled Oscillator also had its own dedicated LFO too for creating Pulse Width Modulation & there was the Filter Overdrive control, allowing users to dirty up clean oscillator sounds to yield an even more expansive palette of sounds. The filter was also very special being 2 x 12dB/Octave filters in series with an additional Separation control to 'separate the resonant peaks of either filter, with the filter section overall delivering Hi & Low Pass as well as Band-Pass modes. This dual filter meant you could achieve super peaky & hard driven treble top end on a sound while also keeping a big fat bottom end which was very unusual.

Although the OSCar is generally classed as a Mono synth, you could play the two oscillators separately in Duo-phonic mode giving 2 voices. The OSCar also had MIDI very early on after it's appearance in 1983, a built-in sequencer, an Arpeggiator & Envelope repeat modes, which combined with the OSCar's ability to save presets made it completely unique.

The main man behind the OSCar was Chris Huggett who originally created the WASP mono synth & after the Oxford Synthesiser company went on to work for Akai for 10 years, writing the OS for the S1000 & other samplers in their range, eventually leaving to join Novation, a company he partly helped found.

Around 2000 OSCar synths were made in its lifetime and today they go for silly money, like 5-7 grand or more in good condition! But they do have an absolutely unique sound, delivering sounds which span so many synthesis styles from hard very contemporary sounding leads to fat basses & more... check some demos out on Youtube.

You can emulate the classic OSCar with plugin Instrumenst from companies like IK Multimedia Syntronic collection or the well known ImpOSCar