10.6

Table Of Contents
729Logic Pro Instruments
Another solution was to design synthesizers as a computer peripheral, rather than as a
standalone unit. The growing popularity of personal computers from the early 1980s made
this option commercially viable. Passport Soundchaser and the Syntauri alphaSyntauri
were the first examples of this concept. Both systems consisted of a processor card with a
standard musical keyboard attached to it. The processor card was inserted into an AppleII
computer. The synthesizers were programmed via the Apple keyboard and monitor. They
were polyphonic and had programmable waveforms, envelopes, and sequencers. Today’s
sound cards, introduced in countless numbers since 1989, follow this concept.
Exploiting the ever-increasing processing power of today’s computers, the next
evolutionary step for the synthesizer was the software synthesizer, which runs as an
application on a host computer.
The sound card (or built-in audio hardware) is needed these days only for audio input
and output. The actual process of sound generation, effects processing, recording, and
sequencing is performed by your computers CPU—using the Logic Pro software and
instrument collection.