- Product: Prodigy
- Developer: Martinic
- Version: 1.0.0
- Format: VST, VST3, CLAP, AU
- Requirements: macOS 10.9 or later
- Source: martinic.com/en/products/prodigy-plus
I did some research on the original Moog Prodigy just to see what it’s about, and turned up some pictures online — one out in a garden somewhere, but also a couple of nice clear shots of the side and the back of the unit. I pulled up the Wikipedia page for it, along with the list of artists who’ve used it on recordings — the band Prodigy actually named themselves after it. How cool is that?
I also found the original owner’s manual scanned in online, by Tom Rhea, which is a little crazy that someone did that whole thing. It’s got a lot of interesting stuff in it, including a bunch of presets you’d otherwise have to dial in yourself by hand — and comparing them, some, if not all, of those manual presets show up in the Martinic Prodigy as presets too. So whoever built the plugin must have found the same manual. After the preset list it gets into descriptions of all the controls: oscillator 1 goes from a saw wave to a triangle to a pulse, and oscillator 2 goes from saw to triangle to a square wave.
Song One: Tuba, Muted Guitar, Sync
For this one I used three different presets from the Prodigy. First up is tuba, a bass sound, and a lot of what makes it read as a tuba is that slow attack — shorten the attack and it stops sounding anything like a tuba.
Next is muted guitar. Part of why a sound like this is even possible in the plugin is that Martinic added things the original hardware never had — you can see poly mode and unison mode in the interface, plus extras like reverb, which I cranked up so you can hear what it does (pretty neat). The original synth was monophonic only.
Sync sound came out sounding like a classic hip-hop lead — you can see them using the square wave for it there. The second time it comes in, it’s the same patch, just with delay added, which gives it a different sort of aesthetic.
Song Two: Disco Bass, Analog Keys, Female Soprano
First preset here is disco bass — I really like the envelope on it, it’s got that Thundercat bass kind of sound. Then there’s analog keys, which I’m pretty sure I messed with — I think I lowered the decay time because the original sound ran a bit long for the part I was playing. Turning it back up, you can hear it hang a little longer; shorten it and it gets that weirdness back. I also stacked the Arturia Tape Mello-Fi on top of it to make it sound a bit more wobbly and out of tune — flipping that off and on, it’s not doing a ton, but it adds some of that analog character. (What does a born prodigy sound like?)
Then there’s female soprano, which I honestly don’t fully understand how they’re pulling off — somehow it does sound like an actual woman’s voice. In the patch, the filter’s keyboard tracking is set to full, which pushes the brightest sound onto the highs; turn it down and it goes very quiet. It’s a strange scale — off gives you more information down in the lows, half sits in the middle, and full accentuates the highs more as you move up the keyboard. Last one in this batch is just labeled example patch, though I think I added some reverb on top of it. Very pretty.
Song Three: Automation, Cosmic Shift, Charming Snakes
On the bass sound here I put automation on the cutoff frequency, so as the track plays you can see that frequency moving around — you can do that with pretty much any parameter, and I probably could’ve pushed it further than I did.
Cosmic shift makes a weird sound on its own, and then something happens to it later — I think I added delay, which gives it a kind of bubbly, almost Eno-esque quality. At one point two of the patches get layered together and they play off each other nicely. Then there’s Charming Snakes, a super bizarre lead sound, which also has automation recorded into the modulation — I’d forgotten that was in there — aimed at making it sound even more destroyed as it goes.
I think this is a pretty cool synth.
