Via this post on MatrixSynth a lovely bit of synth atmosphere with the SS-30 by Mechana (Craig Sue) from Sydney, Australia.
"This is a quick snippet showing me laying up the Yamaha SS-30 part for a
track on my new Mechana ep entitled "A Lonely City"... The SS-30 is going
through a Electro Harmonix Small Stone, and, out of shot my Meris 500 series Mercury 7 Reverb... Enjoy..."
Here's the Bandcamp link to the album. Check Building #III for the SS-30.
It's a dream come true. Gordon Reid has something to say about the SS-30
"..remarkable..."
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| The Gordon Reid |
Let's take a (not entirely serious) look at how the Gordon Reid agrees with me that the SS-30 is the best. Ahem.
I hadn’t noticed that GE Force Media’s Re:Strings had been added to Reason as a Rack Extension. Nor did I know that SS-30M blog favourite Gordon Reid had written a brief history of string synths as part of the manual. It's all here:
https://www.reasonstudios.com/shop/media/product_documents/51196fd13744/RE-STRINGS_MANUAL.pdf
This is what Gordon had to say about the SS-30:
“Even the mighty industrial giant that is Yamaha decided to enter the market and became the first to combine Freeman’s method with a BBD-based chorus unit. Announced in 1977, the resulting keyboard was the SS-30, a remarkable instrument that was equally capable of producing the edgy sounds of the Freeman; the high, aetherial tones of the Solina; and the thicker, lush sounds of a conventional ensemble.”
Freeman’s method was to use more than one oscillator and combine these detuned banks with vibrato to create the impression of an ensemble. Whereas Eminent, who got the next string synth out in the form of the 310 Unique, used as single oscillator bank and added the BBD chorus. They started in 1973 with the 310 organ, famously used by Jean Michel Jarre on Oxygene, and carried on into the Solina. It then took till 1977 until Yamaha put both detuning and chorus together in the SS-30, beating the Solina, Elka Rhapsody, Roland RS-101 and RS-202, Korg PE-2000, Crumar Multiman etc. by dint of using both techniques. Losers!
Beyond the SS-30, the ARP Quadra and Korg Lambda followed-up on the detuning & chorus idea, so they can probably be compared more fairly with the SS-30. I suppose. I mean, the Quadra isn't really a stringer and has that phaser too, and the Lambda has three oscillator banks. Rick Wakeman did replace his SS-30s with Lambdas though and this is the blurb about that machine from the RE-Strings manual:
"One of the kings of the string ensemble keyboards. Amongst the string ensemble intelligentsia this instrument ranks as highly as the Solina, Logan and Freeman."
Oof! I need to take a moment. That was tough to hear. I need a boost after that.
Gordon's final point is to say how versatile the SS-30 is. It can be like a Freeman - "edgy", being on the edge of polysynth territory, I guess - a Solina - "aetherial", with that high-end sheen, - or just "lush" like any other strings ensemble worth its salt.
Of course, there's no one best instrument and no-one could choose just one, not even Gordon Reid. The summary of the SS-30 in the manual that it is "another legendary string machine". I'm also not serious about trying to make a case for the SS-30, but I do find it interesting. Reading through Gordon's overview of the string machines it seems clear now that the SS-30 was the last of the pure stringers from major manufacturers. After that ensembles tended to include extra voices and are really in a new class of instruments. Finally, my SS-30M has addressed some of the missing features that later machines included, such as variable chorus rate and controls over the voices.