Recreating the lead from Mat Zo - 24 Hours

[lja]

Hello sound designers,

I'm trying to recreate the sound of the lead synth from this old Mat Zo track at 2m58s (and onward):
https://youtu.be/t5YEKnikWmo?t=178


I've gotten a certain part of the way in Logic's ES2 using detuned rect waves sent through a peak filter and then a LPF, with an envelope modulating both filter cutoffs, a subtle envelope on the pitch, a subtle LFO on the pitch, and some analog and unison, but there's something about the timbre that is eluding me.

Does anyone have any ideas for what I should try next?

[CHOOS]

My "poor" attempt.

https://vimeo.com/420459167

Mat Zo - 24 Hours.zip

[chk071]

That's not poor at all.

[CHOOS]

Unless you know how he did it you can get close-ish

I think if you play with maybe a phaser and/or a vowel filter and/or a vocoder you might get closer than what I got but it's a start.

I can go nuts and spend hours trying to get something but sometimes I'm like whatever... as long as your close enough. gotta let shit go sometimes.

[lja]

Wow, that's amazingly close! Great work!

Any chance you could upload a screenshot of your Sylenth1 patch's settings? I don't own Sylenth1, and the Synth1 version doesn't quite have the same nuance as your video above! My end goal is to learn how the sound is being made and port it into another environment completely, so I should be able to get pretty far by reading the Sylenth1 manual and looking at how you constructed the patch.

Thank you!

[CHOOS]

Here I show how to get that sound.
The 2nd Osc isn't all that necessary but the 2nd (or third I can't remember, just closed the project) harmonic is louder in the original so why not.

The main character comes from using a pulse and playing with the width to get a thin/vowel sound

By the way this is Synth1 not Sylenth1
Synth1 is free
Sylenth1 is payware

I have very few paid synths and even the ones I paid for I can usually get what I need from freeware so in case I'm sharing a project with anyone it makes it easier for them to open/use it.

https://vimeo.com/420743845

[lja]

Cool! So it looks the core of the sound is that there's square waves at +-2cents and a triangle wave at +19, and both the square wave and the triangle wave have their pulse width set to 0.625. I would have never thought to add the triangle wave up there but it makes perfect sense based on the harmonic series! Also using ES2 for my mock ups was not great since it doesn't have a triangle wave with a variable pulse width, so I wouldn't have happened upon that either. I can totally do all of that in ChucK though, so I will get to it soon.

Then it looks like you have some pitch LFO, some chorus, portamento, and played around with the filter settings some without cutting too many frequencies (maybe a resonance in the highs sounds good). But the core of the sound is just those 3 oscillators.

Thanks again for your help!