Always keen to embrace the latest technology, a new video tour shows that Jean-Michel Jarre has been keeping his synth collection up to date with some tasty new additions to sit alongside a selection of stone-cold classics.
In the clip, produced by Headliner, the French electronic music pioneer is keen to shower praise on the Osmose, the new MPE keyboard that finally started shipping earlier this year. Despite “looking like a Bento box,” Jarre describes the synth/controller as “totally revolutionary,” presumably because it provides additional dimensions of expression in a form factor that feels familiar to existing players.
Another interesting weapon in Jarre’s sonic armoury is the C15, a dual sine wave synth that does away with LFOs, sequencers and the like and encourages you to shape your sounds using the ribbon controllers, a pitch bender and pedals.
There’s a Moog One in here, too, a synth that Jarre rightly describes as “the Rolls-Royce of Moogs,” not least because of its hefty price tag. He also owns a Moog Sub 37, along with a digital Mellotron (“great for travelling”) and a Eurorack rig
Back in 2019, Jarre (perhaps unwittingly) leaked the news that Korg was working on a reboot of the ARP 2600, but the Korg instrument he talks about this time - the MiniKorg 700S - is actually the company’s very first analogue synth, and one that was revived a couple of years ago.
New synths are not the only tech that Jarre is interested in, of course. He recently talked up the possibilities of Spatial Audio and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, performed in VR.
