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Thursday, January 8, 2015

One Of My Turns

The idea here is to replicate the synth brass from the introduction of One Of My Turns. Wright performed this in a Prophet-5 synth, and you can find tutorials on the internet showing how to create this on a Prophet or an equivalent VST, like this one.


This is the original (or a very similar to the original) patch. The Frequency of each oscillator is just to lower one octave of everything. In Korg R3 we can do it just by setting Octave -1. Notice that the mixer is adjusted such that the volume of OSC-2 is set to zero. Nevertheless, this oscillator will be crucial to reproduce the sound.

The idea will be the following: OSC-1 will generate a wave that will be synchronized with OSC-2, that is, it will just generate harmonics that are present in OSC-2. So even though OSC-2 volume is set to zero, OSC-2 frequency will be the one guiding the pitch of the tone, and OSC-2 Frequency is set to 

The filter envelope will have this strong decay shape, and a very short attack time. We will use the same envelope to change the frequency of the first oscillator, OSC-1, using the Filter Envelope in the Poly-Mod section. Adjusting this carefully will reproduce the characteristic sound.

Now to the R3. We want then to set one oscilator to be sync'd with the second. The first oscillator will recieve a frequency shift specified by a similar envelope, shown below:


Notice however that the option to synchronize oscillators is inverted in the R3, that is, OSC-2 can be sync'd with OSC-1, but not the other way around. That's not a problem, we just invert our programming, that is, In the mixer, the volume of OSC-1 will be set to zero, and the envelope will map to the filter as well to the frequency of OSC-2 (not OSC-1).

This is the final result. Let me know if you have suggestions to improve it. 


Friday, August 16, 2013

Animals - Pigs (First Whistle)



To built that very first sound appearing at 0:03 after the pig, I started with a standard SAW wave, with no modulation, and no frequency filter (THRU). The note starts somewhere around F# and slides quikly down to A, than quickly up to B and then ends again close to A.

To get that, I shaped the envelope EG3 like below, assigning it to Pitch with level close to 40 (I picked 38).



Make sure the envelope is such that when you play the A key, it slides down to B and just slides to A after you release it. Of course you also have to set the AMP envelope (that is, EG2) with a small release time, so that you can hear your final A note. Since the attack is quite loud, I shaped the envelope like this:


It is now starting to sound like what we want. Also, notice that the beginning of the sound is quite strident, not at all clean. To get that, I put the second oscillator as SAW to modulate the first with RING. Since I want this modulation to happen only at the first attack, I also attributed the EG3 to OSC2 Level. To make it even dirtier, I attributed the same EG3 to Noise Level.


Almost there. Now we add a delay. I chose a Modulation delay, with 1 second delay time. Make it in such a way you can hear your note four times before it fades completely. My settings were


I also added some reverb, just to make it look nicer. 

And that's it. To play it, you should also use the Pitch Wheel to make the note go a little below B after the slide down, like this:


In case you have done the same sound using different parameters and you think you got a better one, please let me know in the comments!