That One Time That Fender Made A Synth...

In 1984, Fender put out a synthesizer – the Chroma Polaris. This short film explains why and how that happened. With thanks: Paul DeRocco (original designer and ARP and CBS employee) Mary Lock (original ARP and CBS employee) The Alan R Pearlman Foundation Richard @ Marc Brassé Midera: Nathan @ …and the owner of the featured Polaris II. Social: Nerdy details (from left to right) Sequencer: Play, record, stop buttons, although a tempo tap footswitch is also required to operate it. The polyphonic sequencer can store up to 12 sequences and a total of 650 notes, although the sequencer memory is shared with the patch memory. Keyboard: Stack, unison and split modes, plus range selection. Oscillators: 6 voice polyphony with CEM3374 dual VCOs. Each oscillator has “saws“ (as described in the video) and a pulse wave with manual width and bi-polar width modulation of both shapes. In fact, there’s no mixer section and so to lose an oscillator you set a pulse’s duty cycle to 0% so that you can’t hear it. VCO 1 has a ring modulator and VCO 2 can be phase synched to oscillator one. There is a discrete transpose button for each oscillator. You select it and then press a key on the keyboard to do this. Sweep: LFO with sine or square waves with a continuous rate. There’s one per voice and the sine waves are always free running and different for each voice allowing for LFO modulation with different phase. Filter: 4-pole CEM3372 with cutoff, resonance, bi-polar sweep depth, bi-polar envelope depth and bi-polar keyboard tracking depth. Noise on/off is also found in the filter section. Filter Envelope: Attack, decay, sustain, sustain decay and release. Touch sensitivity on/off. Volume (Amp) Envelope: Attack, decay and release. Touch sensitivity on/off. Assignable Control: Modulation section that is uni-polar on the left and bi-polar on the right. As well as five external pedal or switch parameters, there’s (monophonic) glide, volume, mod lever and bend lever ranges, vibrato delay, VCO 1 and 2 vibrato amounts, envelope modulation of oscillator 2 and detune. Bank select / Program select: Here you’ll find 132 memory slots (A - K and 1 - 12), advanced sequencer commands, external sync settings, midi channel setting and cassette backup utilities. Midi: In Out / Thru Good midi implementation with control of parameters via CC, although some weren’t available at the time of the mkI (e.g. program bank selections and NRPNs). Chroma Interface: Parallel port for a proprietary system. Connectivity: Headphone out Audio out low / high Sync in / out Pedal in Sus footswitch in (this also allows you to freeze a note and then use the bend lever to create pedal steel-like effects) Cassette din Metronome footswitch in Processor: 16-bit CPU Intel 80186. Release: 1984