Tom Sawyer Growl Sound

[Gino Cortesi]

I had a lot of fun making this patch for Zebra. If anyone's interested here is my version of it:

Listen: http://www.box.net/shared/zxcleckxk8

Patch: http://www.box.net/shared/h70fbk47ds

And here is the target sound:

http://www.rainycitynights.com/band/rus ... rowl_E.wav

While making the patch I ran into a limitation. To make the patch, you route OSC1 to modulate the freq cutoff of the filter. I could not figure out how to do this, so used a fast LFO to approximate it.

Is this something that ACE or Bazille would do better than Zebra?

It would be interesting to hear the difference.

Here is the info on making the patch...

Best regards,

Gino

http://www.rainycitynights.com/band/rus ... rgrowl.htm

From the site:

"Its really fairly simple. The filter close should be obvious. Just set the cutoff freq. fairly low, and turn the "cutoff modulated by envelope" all the way up, and set the release for that envelope (and the amplitude envelope as well) to be fairly slow.

Turn the resonance way up too, but not high enough for it to oscillate.

The oscillators can be anything you want, other than sine or triangle. Probably best if both were sawtooth, but one can be a wide pulse. That will add some extra low end to the sound anyway. Detune them a wee bit and set the octave low. I set them both the same as opposed to one an octave higher than the other.

So, a fairly basic synth sound. The tricky part is the modulation.

There's an xmod button on the OB-X which may be how Geddy originally did it, but Im not sure. I really havent read anywhere exactly how he did it. Actually, the minimoog could do it as well, I believe. But keep in mind, every synth sounds different! I was playing around with my sequential circuits Six Trak and although it does the modulation routing, it definitely sounds different!

But here's how I do it. Fairly simple. Modulate the cutoff frequency with oscillator 1. In other words, you're modulating the filter at an audio frequency. The same frequency as the note you're playing. Thats where this sound can be tricky because not all synths have this modulation routing.

If you can modulate the cut off with the LFO that'll work too, as long as you can tune the LFO to that low E. The problem is, he uses that sound again in the "The world is the world is love and life are deep" part and in there you have to play B A and G notes, and the modulation frequency has to be the same as the fundamental frequency or it sounds really weird, messy. Thats why its best to just use osc 1 or 2 to modulate the filter.

After that, add some delay (outboard delay unit), around 120ms. When I was experimenting with this the other day I found that the initial thump gets echoed and sounds kinda weird, like a double hit, but Ive done it before and it sounded fine... not sure how! But if you listen closely to the original (not the live version), especially in headphones and compare it with the basic sound compared to the echoed one, you can hear the difference. Adding the second one (the echoed one) makes the sound a lot more juicey!"

[Urs]

While making the patch I ran into a limitation. To make the patch, you route OSC1 to modulate the freq cutoff of the filter. I could not figure out how to do this, so used a fast LFO to approximate it.

This is where you can use the XMF in Zebra. XMF stands for Cross Modulation Filter, and it has a sidechain input for that kind of modulation.

ACE and Bazille can do this too - that's where they excell.

(I'll have a look at your patch if I find the time...)

[mcnoone]

There is a Tom Sawyer preset within this ZPC11 folder.
Zebra Patch Contest 11: Emus and Emulations
http://www.u-he.com/PatchLib/presets/z2/ZPC-11.zip

It might help you some with your recreation.

[Gino Cortesi]

Thanks Urs, that seems obvious now that you spelled it out

I made a version of the sound using XMF, and while it sounds cool in it's own right, I don't feel the original sound actually benefits from the XMF sidechain.

Works perfectly fine as a feature in Zebra, I just feel that the sound does not really leverage it like the site above claimed.

Thanks Mcnoone, that's a really nice version of it. More accurate than my attempt (and I noted it does not use XMF with sidechain).

I found that modulating the filter freq at audio rate (XMF sidechain / FMO) is not actually required to make this patch. I even checked out the OB-X VST demo and sure enough it had the sound in their patches. Turning off the OSC1 mapping to the filter has no audible effect (to my ears at least).

Best regards,

Gino

[Urs]

Yes, the little Roland synth they used in the example doesn't have FilterFM either IIRC...

[waltercruz]

Just bumping an old thread to post my take on this classical patch.

Still misses the '3dness' that tha patch have on obxd (my reference).

[waltercruz]

Sooo. here I'm again

Well, I always get intrigued when certain patch works only with a particular synth.

And yes, modulating the filter freq at audio rate is not needed for this patch. For what I can understand, this patch is a simple envelope in a cutoff filter. The secret sauce is: unison (a lot of voices detuned) and, due to the Oberheim Architecture, it seems that the envelope decays slightly different for each voice. (The OPX-II Pro manual mentions about the envelope too).

After seeing this video, I tried to implement the idea of the video on Zebra. The idea is tuning all the keys to the same note, and play a 'chord' with a minor flam. I liked the result (but, it will need some Zebra instances, each one 'tuned' to the right note)

The ZPC patch got this idea right too, but it sounds like 4 separated sweeps