ARP Odyssey "...and a summer full of music" ad, Contemporary Keyboard 1979

ARP Odyssey "...and a summer full of music" full page colour advertisement from page 5 in the August 1979 issue of Contemporary Keyboard.

Aaaaah... the ART of recycling ads. And ARP has it down to a science.

Take an musician name-dropping advertisement from six months previous and turn it into a promotional free-gift ad. Magic! Same layout, fonts and logo placement.

Why mess with a good thing?

Even the first sentence is the same.

"When you play an ARP Odyssey your solos sizzle"

It's a nice catch phrase. And one that works especially well for the ARP Odyssey - mostly because it's true. NOTHING beats the truth.

The ARP Odyssey has had a good run, and although the synthesizer would be around for a bit longer, this was one of the last ARP Odyssey solo ads you we see in the pages of CK. A damn shame too. Because for the most part, ARP has consistently churned out quality solo Odyssey ads.   They are surprisingly rare for such a great selling synthesizer... but consistently good.

In fact, ARP is epic for the consistency that can be found in most of their ad series - design, terminology - everything. These two ads are a good example. And so are those "Halloween-themed" ads I blogged about recently.

ARP has also been pretty damn consistent in how they approach their name - "ARP". Always capitalized. even the press and publications such as CK always used "ARP" in all caps.

Recently I got into a rather heated discussion about the capitalization of ARP. And even better, I got to play devil's advocate. I often do this when I don't know much about a subject... such as the technicalities of the English language.  :)

Technically, the name ARP was created by using the acronym of it's founder's name, Alan Robert Pearlman. And I like names that are acronyms. For example, I couldn't think of calling IBM "International Business Machines". It would just sound weird.

 "Hey, is that an International Business Machines' laptop?"

See - awkward.

But, the actual name of the company was ARP Instruments Inc.  As far as I know it was never Alan Robert Pearlman Instruments Inc. So, shouldn't the actual acronym for the company be A.I.I.?

Trying to argue this point to an ARP enthusiast is quite entertaining until you realize just how angry you are making him. Then its just becomes as awkward as saying "International Business Machines".

Again, I admit I don't know much about the technicalities of the English language. Anything more complicated than picking out a noun or an adjective in a sentence is beyond me. So, it baffles me that "ARP", consistently capitalized in the past, is sometimes in camel-case, mostly in the quotes, of the following ads.

In the first ad above, in the third set of quotes (last sentence) it says "... like all of my Arp equipment."

It's also in camel-case all of the second ad - whether in reference to a specific ARP synthesizer ( "Arp Pro/DGX synthesizer") or the name of the company ("Naturally, the sound is always first, and Arp delivers clean, clear sound..."). And you will find this camel-case in the third ad as well.

Am I missing something? Is there some kind of grammatical thing-a-ma-jiggy that I'm just not aware of?

Or did the Logo-and-Style police (as I affectionately call them at my company) take a vacation?

Mmmmmm... vacation. I've been day-dreaming about jumping on a plane and taking a quick hop to a city near by. What is Chicago like around Christmas?