ARTURIA OB-XA V

‘Growl… da… da… da… da-da… daa… da… da… da da daaaa’. Now you too can recreate one of the most ‘iconic’ synth intros of all time. But please don’t

There’s been a decades-lasting joke among members of the Computer Music team – and indeed between us and many other music gear magazines – that whenever we attend a music equipment show, we are guaranteed to hear someone, usually of middling age, either demoing or auditioning a new synth by playing the intro to Van Halen’s Jump. At least five times. A day. And considering we’ve been going to gear shows for two decades now, that’s an awful lot of times that we have heard that intro. It’s fair to say, then, that when we finally get to review an emulation of the synth behind it, the Oberheim OB-Xa, you can surely understand that we are approaching said review with some trepidation. Actual anxiety and shaking, if you must ask, and even the ‘fact’ that some say the actual synth used on Jump was actually the OB-X (the ‘a’’s predecessor), doesn’t calm us down at all, especially when the very first video we stumble upon on Arturia’s website demoing

COMPUTER MUSIC

this new OB-Xa V plugin hits that growl intro chord, and plays that (bloody) riff… But if you can, look past that intro – and apologies for planting it in your ear for the rest of the day – as the OB-Xa was used on many other tracks and by artists as diverse as Talk Talk and Prince. And to seal its approval in our eyes, Gary Numan once cited it as the ‘best analogue synth ever’.

X versus a versus V

The original early 80s synth that this emulates had a 2-oscillator design, with 4, 6, or 8-voice options. Whereas its predecessor, the OB-X, as mentioned earlier, was more raw and aggressive, the ‘a’ refined things a little as its internal circuitry became more integrated, although the newer synth did offer more flexible 2 and 4-pole filtering to bring back some of that aggression. The ‘a’ also delivered more presets and keyboard splits, although it did drop the X’s FM modulation option (where one oscillator could modulate the frequency of the other) in favour of pulse width modulation.

With OB-Xa V, however, Arturia have supplied both modulation options, and of course those polyphonic restrictions have been lifted, so you get up to 16 voices. While the exacting sound of the original has been adhered to thanks to Arturia’s TAE® (True Analog Emulation) technology, the Grenoble-based company have

“Its seal of approval in our eyes is that Gary Numan once called it the ‘best analogue synth ever’”