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Music Thing: The Creamware Prodyssey

ryan block
Updated ·2 min read

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:


The big music gear story of the last few years has been the triumph of software. Sure, plenty of people are still making cool music-generating boxes, but the mainstream has shifted, and part of the reason for a resurgence of interests in vintage synths is that they're so readily available, as people put entire studios on eBay before retreating into a laptop running Logic and a bunch of plugins.

That's fine for sensible musicians who want acceptable sound quality, convenience, compatibility, and value for money. But what about people like me, who love hardware? We want dust. We want cables. Most of all, we want knobs and buttons and things to play with (they are, in my case at least, a great distraction from a lack of musical talent).



That's where Creamware's successful-but-cheeky ASB range comes in. Creamware used to make DSP boxes for computers, which would take some of the sound-crunching duties away from your CPU to run extra software synths and effects. All good, but not very interesting.


Then, last year, they took their well-regarded software MiniMoog clone 'MiniMax' and put it into a self-contained wood-and-metal box with all the same knobs and switches as a real MiniMoog. It was kind of small and slightly plasticy, but it sounded really good, was 12-voice polyphonic (the MiniMoog was monophonic) and it was small, light and reliable enough for any amount of gigging, and cost around €750. All the convenience of a software plugin, without having to carry around a computer (just a synth).

Next, they pulled the same trick with the Prophet 5, the big, expensive and slightly unreliable synth used by pretty much everyone in the early 80s. And then the Hammond B4, which they reproduced in the B4000, complete with little drawbars. And then again last week at MusikMesse they revealed the Prodyssey (pictured all the way up top), a little grey slider-covered recreation of the Arp Odyssey, the MiniMoog's slightly cultish arch-rival during the 70s. It looks great, and unlike most software plugins, it won't be appearing on a file sharing network near you any time soon.