Vagabond Synth Nerd’s Journal Vol. 252 - Recreating That Sound with the Oberheim Synthesizer TEO-5

■ Sound Creation with the TEO-5… But First, the Birth of The Cars

The punk rock movement started emerging around 1977. As a keyboard player, I couldn’t really get into the raw, guitar-heavy sounds of bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash, who didn’t have keyboards.

The punk boom originated in London, but that trend crossed over to New York in the US, passing through various filters and giving rise to a new category.
This category was called New Wave.
Bands like Talking Heads, XTC, and Blondie were grouped under New Wave.

Within the New Wave movement, a band emerged that added melodic elements to punk rock and incorporated mechanical rhythms to create a more polished and sophisticated sound.
That band was The Cars. The Cars gained popularity with their bold use of analog synthesizers in their sound.

Their musical style was distinctly different from punk, and leaned toward a more intellectual and refined direction. Their fifth album, Heartbeat City, became a major hit and reached number three on the U.S. album charts.

In 1984, when MTV exploded in popularity, their promotional video for the single “You Might Think” won the very first MTV Video Music Award. The video was highly praised for its quirky, humorous, and stylishly low-budget aesthetic.

The Cars also had connections with Andy Warhol, a central figure in New York’s art scene. Remarkably, Warhol himself appeared alongside the band in the promotional video for the song “Hello Again” that was featured on the Heartbeat City album.

Also, their album covers showcase stylish and sophisticated artwork that reflected their intellectual and refined sensibility. There’s no doubt that they possessed a high level of artistic expression that set them apart from other bands.

■ The New Wave Synth Sound Used by The Cars was called, "Hard Sync".

In this report, I’m going to focus on the synth sound called “hard sync”, which can be considered a standard in synthesizer tones and was used in the promotional video for "Hello Again", featuring Andy Warhol.

Hard sync is a function that forcibly synchronizes two oscillators to create waveforms that undergo forced timbral changes.

When using oscillator sync, the two VCOs (voltage-controlled oscillators) that previously operated independently are forced to synchronize with the slave oscillator following the pitch of the master oscillator. This process generates complex waveforms , which is what is known as hard sync.

To describe the sound in words, it produces a rough, distorted, gritty or dirty sound. By forcibly combining the two different waveforms into one, the intense hard sync sound is created.

This sound became almost a trademark of the Prophet 5 synthesizer, which many people became familiar with. The Cars’ keyboardist, Greg Hawkes, was also a user of the Prophet 5 and favored this hard sync sound.

Besides “Hello Again”, the hard sync sound is also effectively used in songs like “Let’s Go” and “Just What I Needed”. Especially in “Hello Again”, the riff, which can be considered as the main theme of the song, is brilliantly crafted using the hard sync sound.

Because the hard sync sound is quite strong and distinctive, overusing it can easily become overwhelming, so it really tests the player’s sense and taste.

In every live performance I’ve seen with musicians using the Prophet 5, they almost always use the hard sync sound during their solos. For example, in the band Chicken Shack led by Eiji Toki, keyboardist Toru Tsuzuki played on a Prophet 5 placed on top of a Rhodes piano, delivering powerful hard sync solos with expressive pitch bends. It was a performance that left a strong impression on me.

OBERHEIM / TEO-5

■ Creating Hard Sync Sound on the TEO-5

Press the OSC2 (Oscillator 2) button on the filter mixer to activate the oscillator 2.

Press the SYNC button to enable sync.

Set OSC1 (Oscillator 1) Frequency to C+2

This expands the pitch modulation (frequency modulation) range to enhance the hard sync effect.

Set the keyboard octave from 0 to -1

This lowers OSC2 (Oscillator 2) by one octave below OSC1 to prepare for an even stronger hard sync effect.

In the envelope section, set ENV1 to Aux, and ENV2 to Filter + Amp

This configures the ENV1 (Envelope Generator 1) as an auxiliary envelope to modulate the pitch of OSC1, while ENV2 controls the filter and amplifier envelopes.

Set the Amount (modulation depth) on the value knob to +100, and assign Osc1Freq as the destination.

This allows ENV1 (Envelope Generator 1) to modulate the pitch of OSC1 using its ADSR (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release) envelope shape.
By adjusting the Amount value, you can further shape and vary the sound.

Set the waveform for the hard sync modulation with ENV1.

Adjust ENV1 as follows: Attack at the 9 o’clock position, Decay at 1 o’clock, Sustain at 10 o’clock, and Release at 11 o’clock. These settings are just my personal preference, but please adjust them according to your own image of the hard sync effect.
Finally, use ENV2 to set the sound’s attack and decay.
With this process, you can create the hard sync sound.

In the past, Oberheim synthesizers did not have this sync function, so the hard sync sound was a unique feature of the Prophet 5. It was through the collaboration between Dave Smith of Sequential and Tom Oberheim that this hard sync sound became achievable on Oberheim synthesizers as well.
I pay a lot of respect to Dave Smith, who created the historic Prophet synthesizer.

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