Sound Designer Jexus on the Behringer Pro-800
Sound designer Jexus has released a collection of 100+ patches for the Behringer Pro-800 synthesizer, a Eurorack synth module, based on the Sequential Circuits Prophet 600.
As usual with Jexus’s patch libraries, the Behringer PRO-800 sound library is a comprehensive and creative exploration of the sound design possibilities of the Pro-800.
Here’s part 2 of the Behringer PRO-800 sound library demo:
Jexus also shared some pros and cons of the synth, with build quality being a strike against the Behringer synth:
“When it finally arrived to my doorstep and I took it out of the box and started to mess with it, my first impressions were… very bad. The quality of the product seemed low – there was a totally loose screw in the panel which I had to fix into its place. The blister buttons were hard to press. Also, it seemed to me like too many of the synth’s features were hidden in the menu – and the menu parameters were only accessible via the questionable membrane buttons (guess what – just like in the original Prophet 600!) Then some ghost editing started to happen and make the display go crazy with random values.”
Another con noted was the Pro-800’s accuracy in recreating the original Prophet 600 sound, noting:
“The Pro-800 definitely sounds like a clone of Prophet-600, but does not sound 100% like the real Prophet-600. Simple structures sound pretty identical, but the further you go into the wacky territory, the more obvious the nuances become. The most striking difference is that the Prophet-600 is brighter, while the Pro-800 sounds a bit darker & more stable (unorganic) in comparison.”
On the positive side, though, Jexus says that the Pro-800 sounds good, judged on its own merits:
“The significant amount of real-time controls made me concentrate on pure sound design and, step by step, I forgot about all these issues. The more I played the thing, the faster my disappointment gave way to enjoyment.
The synth sounded cool in its own right and it had a fair share of engine goodies that I needed: filter FM, oscillator FM and random LFO, to name a few. I really dig synths that sound a bit metallic and a bit raspy, not too thick and not too clean. And the Pro-800 has all these qualities in its timbre.”
The Jexus Behringer PRO-800 sound library is available now for $14.90 / €13.90 / £12.9
