Gabor Lazar / SND / Mark Fell etc... sound-palette using u-he synths

[nilhartman]

Hey everyone,

I'm getting more and more obsessed by the sounds Gabor Lazar & co use in every track or so.

I know Razor is the perfect contender to nail these sounds, as GL notoriously uses additive synthesis (and Mark Fell also collaborated with Errorsmith (whose an amazing electronic musician and designed Razor (and Gabor Lazar and Mark Fell wrote and produced an LP together))... but rather than buying a new synth, I'd love to reach similar sonic territories with what I already have and love, namely Zebra and Bazille.

FM might be the ticket as well, but so far ermm I've failed Usually I love to figure out these sorts of things on my own, but here I feel like I'm in a dead-end

Any help / hint would be great! Thanks!

Here's an example of what I'm talking about (those sorts of stabs throughout the tune, from the very beginning):



Cheers,
n.

[drzhnn]

Interesting sounds. Looks like they used a lot of FM synthesis there indeed. Though there's a phaser somewhere in the chain, that makes the bright FM sound more smooth and glassy. To replicate this in Zebra I'd do something like this:

OSC1 in Spectroblend mode (sparse harmonics, bell-like texture) +24 semitones --> VCF1 (AP Phaser --> FMO1 (FM by Input, Pure Sine) with Env2 modulating FM amount to brighten up the attack. In this configuration the VCF1 cutoff and FM knobs would be the main control to form the final sound.

Here's a quick test patch. I assigned Cutoff and FM Amount controls to an XY1 to make it easier to scan for the right texture. Try playing fifths or chords in higher octaves.

[nilhartman]

Thank you ! Sounds pretty good indeed.
Genuine question regarding Spectroblend: is there any theory behind the harmonics you’ve decided to use or is it trial and error ? Everytime I use this osc I tend to overthink it.
By the way, I’ve succeeded in getting some really, really nice similar timbres out of Bazille... but way too unpredictable at the moment. I could record / sample / chop etc.. the result but as much as possible I’d love to stick with real-time synthesis. My computer is fast enough to handle that, and I love the flexibility so much!
Thanks again drzhnn!

[drzhnn]

Genuine question regarding Spectroblend: is there any theory behind the harmonics you’ve decided to use or is it trial and error ? Everytime I use this osc I tend to overthink it.

For this patch the theory was that I want a bell-like sound but I don't want it to have too much high frequency content, because feeding it into FM then will end up as noise. So I started with a couple of harmonics in the lower part of the spectrum, then I added the rest of the modules and modulation, and after that I started adding new harmonics to the oscillator while constantly turning the Cutoff knob of the VCF to see if I'm getting the right texture. Then it's a back and forth process of adding and removing harmonics by ear. There's probably more FM centric approach to this by choosing only odd or even harmonics with right ratios, but I'm more of a subtractive-thinking kinda guy.