Basically, the story is that the Japanese manufacturer who Sequential Circuits subcontracted to make the Six-Trak "borrowed" some of the core design and components to create the Pro-8 (so as to make a more appealing product for their market) and when Sequential was presented with this "changeling child", they asked for a few redesigns and it became the Split-Eight.
One of the last synths produced by SCI, the Split-Eight had little visibility and, to this day, doesn't get much love. Regardless, being able to stack two analog timbres on top of each other and still have four voice polyphony really makes the Pro-8/Split-Eight stand out from the other one-osc synths made during the twilight years of Sequential.
I'm certain some of you might want to summarily judge it as crap because it's built around the infamous CEM3394 "synth on a chip" but I absolutely love the sound of this limited 8-voice-one-OSC/4-voice-two-OSC beastie! But then I'm fond of the SCI Six-Trak as well. It's still good, warm and fuzzy VCO-VCF-VCA fun with a fully-analog signal path and just an amazingly wicked-filthy filter rez! :)
One of its interesting odditys is that you can Filter FM one patch with the output of another patch when they're stacked in "double" mode which can yield some very unusual results, allowing for some surprisingly powerful "signature" sounds. There is a "link" scheme available so, when in "double" mode, calling up a patch in slot A automatically loads your pre-chosen patch into slot B as well.
The onboard chorus is a little weak but is reasonably quiet...especially when compared to my Juno60! ;)
A tiny bit of reverb on some of the "thinner" sounds and this beast really shines - though many of the two-OSC patches and even a handfull of the one-OSC patches are suitably lush all by themselves! The main downside of the Pro-8 (shared with the Prophet 600 and Six-Trak) is the coarse knob quantization.
This is actually my second one of these weird synths (don't ask ). Lastly, I should probably mention the white grid on the right is a spot for folks to record patch info with a glass marking pencil or grease pencil. Talk about old-school!
What you give is what you get.
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