Pre-dating polyphonic synths by some years, string synthesisers used electronic organ 'divide-down' technology to provide a totally polyphonic sawtooth waveform. This was then typically fed through a simple, two stage envelope shaper offering just attack and release and then onto an analogue 'bucket brigade' chorus unit to produce the 'ensemble' effect. They effectively replaced the noble Mellotron as a portable string section as they were FAR more reliable and, errmmm, more portable!

There were several manufacturers producing string synths that utilised the same basic technique in the mid to late '70s - Elka, Crumar and others and later on, Yamaha, Roland and Korg - but it was the ARP String Ensemble that was perhaps the best known. But that in itself was derived from the Eminent 310, an organ from a little known Dutch manufacturer that featured a great string synth sound (Jean-Michel Jarre used an Eminent 310 on his early albums often through an Electro-harmonix Small Stone phaser pedal for his signature sound on the early albums).

Eminent faced tough competition in a competitive market and were battling it out with the likes of Hammond, Farfisa, Vox not to mention Japanese manufacturers and they went through many troubled times. In an attempt to overcome these financial difficulties, they released a dedicated string machine under the 'Solina' brand name.

The Solina String Ensemble was to become a legend amongst certain keyboard players (mostly European) as one of the first string synths available. It retained many of the characteristics of the original 310 sound but in a compact, portable format. However, this small Dutch company didn't have the marketing clout to make the global impact this instrument so richly deserved. American synth giant ARP bought in or licenced the technology and it formed the basis of their own String Ensemble (and later Omni, Omni II and Quadra synths).

Facing competition from new polysynths such as the Yamaha CS80 and Prophet 5, different string synth manufacturers began building in extra features, typically adding filters and more synth functions.

Although they couldn't compete directly with polysynths (because although they had total polyphony, string synths only had one filter, envelope, whatever to service all voices), they did allow the creation of big, stacked and layered sounds. Roland exploited this very well in their 'Paraphonic' synths.

Moog came rather late to the market with their Opus 3. They had been eclipsed by Sequential, Oberheim and Roland with their polysynths and their MemoryMoog was some way off so they released the Opus which offered a lush string sound together with an organ and a brass sound which could all be layered.

Unfortunately, it was too little too late and the Opus made little impact on the market and to compound Moog's misfortunes at the time, their MemoryMoog - as fabulous as it was - was temperamental and unreliable but worse still, was released around the same time as the DX7 when anything analogue became yesterday's news and FM dominated! The brass and organ sounds were weak but the Opus had a truly fab string sound.

Today, even though the string synth technology seems dated, they still produce a sound that is unrivalled and have a character all their own that can't easily be replicated on modern gear. The samples on offer here are, as always, long and detailed, seamlessly looped but optimised for minimum disk/memory requirements.