Owner`s manual

CHAPTER 1 -

The ARP 2600

CHAPTER 1 -

Foreword

Unfasten the seat belts of your mind. The TimewARP 2600 will be an astonishing, exhilarating, and

enlightening experience.

Creating this manual has been an astonishing, exhilarating, and enlightening experience for

me.

How

many are ever given the chance to revisit an earlier life, an earlier project, a project like the ARP 2600

Manual, decades later, and get it right? It’s time travel. I’m grateful to Way Out Ware for providing

me that opportunity.

When, at Alan R. Pearlman’s invitation, I began work on the original 2600 manual in September of

1970, the 2600 itself barely existed. For the  rst two months, I was writing “blind” - without a machine

in front of me. My  rst hands-on experience with a synthesizer had been only six months earlier (it

was a Putney VCS3).

I  nished the text in March of 1971, Margaret Friend created the graphics, and the Owner’s Manual for

the ARP 2600 began what turned out to be a surprisingly long career. In spite of the many defects that

my inexperience contributed – the gaps in coverage, and outright errors - it became quite popular. To

this day, it still gets an occasional respectable mention in the analog-synthesis community.

When Way Out Ware’s Jim Heintz called, early in 2004, to tell me about the TimewARP 2600, a lot of

time had passed. Regarding software synthesizers, I had grown weary and cynical. Analog-modeling

software had been a decade-long disappointment; some products did interesting things but not the

things that real analog modules do. Jim, however, had already encountered, and thought about, and

solved, these problems. He owned a real 2600. He really aimed at getting it right and would not

be satis ed with anything less. It was a pleasure,  nally, to accept his invitation to do an Owner’s

Manual.

It’s clear, now, that Way Out Ware has set a new standard for software-based audio synthesis. The

behavior of the TimewARP 2600 software – both module-by-module and integrated into patches - is

effectively indistinguishable from that of the analog hardware that it emulates.

Soaring and swooping through the free air of analog synthesis – a world of nothing but sliders and

cords and continuously evolving patch con guration - was a capstone course at the Boston School of

Electronic Music in the 1970’s. That is the world that the TimewARP 2600, for a new generation of

musicians in a new millennium (that means

you),

provides access to: it is the  rst – and I believe only

- software synthesizer to support real-time performance by sliders and patchcords alone.

So here it is: your new Owner’s Manual, for the new TimewARP 2600.

Unfasten the seat belts of your mind. How else can you hope to experience time travel? How else

can you enjoy free  ight?

Jim Michmerhuizen

Jim Michmerhuizen is the author of the original ARP 2600 Manual and Founder and Director of the Boston School of Electronic Music.