I was walking through a local music store one day in 1996 expecting to see only new and expensive keyboards I could never dream of owning, then something got my attention. It was an incredibly dated looking machine, with its big colourful buttons, its switches, knobs and sliders, and most of all its wood panel sides. WOOD! ON A SYNTHESIZER! I also chuckled when I saw the word "compuphonic" in computery letters on it.

"Oh yes," I thought sarcastically, "this is sure to be state of the art!"

I immediately imagined some 60's B-movie mad scientist twiddling at the controls of this arcane keyboard, no doubt making good-old-fashioned space noises to be heard in galaxies far away. This was my first impression of the Roland Promars (also known as the MRS-2), which was released in 1979, for a hefty price of almost $2000US. I've heard tell that it's considered a little brother to the Roland JP-4.

I looked at the price tag. $189?! My mentality at the time dictated that anything good had to be expensive, so I wasn't convinced this squat little synth would be worth its relatively low price.

Still, I was compelled to listen. The music guy who looked like Jay Leno with a perm set it up. I played a few keys. I was struck by the "juicy" quality of some of the sounds, which I didn't know at the time was characteristic of analogue synths. I played a sustained note of the SYNTH-I preset and turned a knob labelled "brilliance". When I heard that lowpass filter sweep, I knew I had to buy this thing. I had heard a similar sound on a Juno Reactor remix that had turned me on to the glories of analogue. This was the type of sound and modulation I couldn't get on my digital boards, it was a resonant, hands-on experience.

I bought the Promars that day and it has been used in much of my music ever since then. It's got a main oscillator, a squarewave sub, and a VCO-2 switch for selecting one of two tunable secondary oscillators, good for detuning or setting at harmoninc intervals. You've got the standard sawtooth and squarewave, as well as a pulsewave that can be modulated with the LFO. The LFO itself has sine, square, and two sawtooth waveforms. The filter envelope polarity can be reversed. There are three switches to select any combination of bend or modulation for VCO, VCF, and VCA controlled by the joystick, as well as two knobs to set the range of the bend/modulation (alas, my model makes a little fuzzy noise when I use the joystick). There's CV/Gate inputs and outputs on the back so it can be sequenced or synced to other CV boards. Last but not least is that wonderful brilliance knob, which has been fingered oh so much over the years. With a MIDI-to-CV converter driving a fast 16th note run into the Promars, my hands are free to twist and turn it with near-orgasmic delight. And when the programmable bank is selected, all of these parameters are ready to be tweaked in realtime.

"ZEEOWWWWAAAHHHH!"

"TYOOP!"

"THIP!"

This thing can make some of the standard noises, as well as ones that defy narrow dancefloor convention. The Promars may not be the most well-known or sophisticated synth of the analogue era, but it's cheap, user-friendly, nice to look at, and sounds great. That makes it a classic in my books.