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Synthesizer programming Megathread.


Yoozer

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Good timing, I was just listening to a song today and trying to figure out a sound.

 

This one is kind of difficult, because it's not at the forefront and is in a busy arrangement. This song is "Intergalactic Fluoro Funkster" by Cosmosis. For the first half of this 1-minute section of the song, it comes in every four measures starting on beat 1 of the second measure, then in the second half it comes in every other measure, alternating octaves. It rises in pitch in a sort of gliding step manner, pans back and forth, and has some reverb on it.

 

http://www.veracohr.com/audio/Sample.mp3

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1. the erasure sound is a simple one. the amp is modulated with an env with an attack at roughly 20% time slope. the filter is opened at slowly with the same envelope but is only allowed to open to 70% maximum (adjust cutoff to around 50% and use positive envelope amount to boost slowly) basic wave is some saw waves with very minimal detuning this was probably made on an arp 2600 as it's vince's favorite however it's an early song so maybe a roland sh series.

 

:facepalm: For a start the source is unlikely to be ARP 2600 or SH-something because those synths are monophonic. Also, stating percentages is useless because different synths have different parameter ranges.

 

Naaa... I reckon this is synth+drummy>vocoder. Here's that link again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDKioRMxj1c

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Wondered where this had gone :cop:

Anyway nearly got the cars intro sorted. now moved onto the organ from "Won't get fooled again", I can get the sound in Reason using a tute of the youtube but I'm sure I've seen another clip of Pete Townshend saying he used sample+hold. Now the reason version uses a sample of a b3 an modulates it with a sq wave , not using sh at all. So which is right ?

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It's not sample & hold (coincidentally, I don't get why it's such an often-asked question for this song). Sample and hold (which is not equal to random either) samples from (generally) noise, holds the value for a while, and then samples again.

 

So, if I have a row of random values like this:

 

1-7-4-2-5-4-3-8-9-4-2-2-5-6-8-7-3-1-6-3-2

 

the "rate" of the S&H means the speed with which it picks out a number.

 

If my rate is set to max speed, it'll pick every number, but the duration of the "hold" is of course, small.

 

If my rate is set to half of max speed, it'll do this:

 

1-1-4-4-5-5-3-3-9-9-2-2-5-5-8-8-3-3-6-6-2

 

It samples a 1, then holds it for 1 step. It samples a 4, then holds it for 1 step.

 

If I set the rate to 1/3rd, it does this:

1-1-1-2-2-2-3-3-3-4-4-4-5-5-5-7-7-7-6-6-6

 

(what a coincidence - but that's what can happen with random numbers).

 

If I had a triangle wave:

 

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-

 

and I would put that through sample & hold, with careful (insanely precise, actually) timing, I could sample only the 1s and the 9s. That's nice - but not useful when you also have a square wave.

 

You either play the organ by playing the chord repeatedly, or if you're lazy, you put a square-wave LFO on the amp.

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Sample and hold (which is not equal to random either) samples from (generally) noise, holds the value for a while, and then samples again.

 

From what I can remember from stochastic systems a sample of white Gaussian noise is still a random variable.

 

[note: terminology and facts may be incorrect, that is a difficult subject, especially when its not fresh in your head]

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Hi,

Can anyone tell me how to emulate those famous synth bass sounds found in the songs like Berlin's "Take My Breath Away" & Commodores' "Night Shift"?

 

There was quite a long thread about this a year or so ago. Strange as it may seem, that sound is FM... with VERY meticulous programming!

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just a little bit of info I came across while reading SOS that I'd like to share:

That 'Pheeeooow!' Sound In Full
Manic Street Preachers - If You Tolerate This...

With drums, bass, acoustic guitar and a guide vocal on tape, it became obvious to everyone that the verse of 'If You Tolerate This...' needed something else - but no-one knew what. "Eventually," says Eringa, "James decided that something should be going 'pheeeooow', and then just left me and Nick Nasmyth, their keyboard player, to see what we could come up with!"

What Nick and Dave came up with was, in the end, almost unrecognisable as a keyboard part. "All the reviews of the single said 'there's this spectral guitar effect in the verse'," he complains, "but it's actually a Wurlitzer electric piano, put into my Korg MS20, distorted beyond all piano-ness and filtered live using both the low- and high-pass filters, with resonance set really high to get that extreme distortion. It was a live, kind of organic thing - him hitting the chords and me turning the knobs! Because the filters would sweep back too far, we had to record chords one and three, and then go back and do chords two and four. We disciplined ourselves to do the whole thing live. It's too easy just to go into Pro Tools and take one good one and copy it, and then it doesn't sound as real or earthy." - SOS

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My new band does a cover of Rosanna by toto. Fairly easy song to play, only thing is there are so many sounds in the solo that it's almost impossible to play with two hands on two keyboards and having to switch sounds all the time..

 

But whatever.. I would like to recreate that butterfly-y sound in the solo.

 

at 3:15 here:

 

 

and 2:58 here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq4ychrRkQA

 

I noticed David Paich never plays it, so I guess they sampled it and simply play it back. The whole sound is kind of a mystery to me. Anyone know how to recreate it on say, a blofeld or TR-rack.. (kurz is to difficult lol)?

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But whatever.. I would like to recreate that butterfly-y sound in the solo.

 

 

Are you ready to get even more depressed? Open the mp3 in Audacity and slow down 35% or so until you get around the middle C. It sounds like it's comprised of several sinewavey monosynth lines - no neat thirds or fifths, e.g. nothing you can cram into a single patch.

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