Digitone sound design help

Elektron Gear Digitone/Digitone Keys
#1

Hi

Had the digitone for a few months now learning the ropes and diving into FM synthesis, trying to learn via recreating different FM sounds I’ve heard from other synths and in tracks I like.

Had one that has left me a bit stumped the lead synth in this track by Garrett David (https://youtu.be/zXeVCO48wzo) comes in at around 15 seconds.

It sounds like FM to me and I’ve seen him use a digitone so I’m assuming it’s from the DT.

Tried to recreate it myself but didn’t manage to get close I’m still quite new to FM synthesis so any help or advice on forming sounds similar to this would be appreciated.

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#2

Hello, and welcome to the forum!

To my ears it sounds very likely that this particular sound comes from the Digitone. The bass and chords too maybe?

The sound itself isn’t very complex, and should be fairly straightforward to program. It might require some time to get exactly there though.

To me it sounds like a fairly simple algorithm (1 or 2) with one of the operators set to 0.50 ratio (there is a hint of a suboctave there). Try Algo 1, and set operator A to 0.50 and the rest to 1.00, and play around with operator Level A and Level B.

Also, I think they use two key elements in shaping the sound:

  1. Random LFO in HLD mode set to control operator level (eg level B).
  2. Low pass filtering with some envelope modulation (zero attack, decay at around 50).

I did have a go on my DN and came to a fairly similar sound, though not quite there. Sadly no time to upload audio or sysex atm, maybe in a couple of days :slightly_smiling_face:

Good luck!

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#3

That’s a nice sound. I followed @Nils’s guidelines and came up with this:

Here are the parameters:

  • SYN1: everything default except HARM -17 and A ratio 0.5.
  • SYN2: level A 16, level B 32, the rest are default.
  • FLTR: BASE 84 WDTH 0, ADSR 0 60 0 17, FREQ 50 RESO 60 TYPE LP2 ENV 22
  • AMP: DRV 14 ADSR 20 20 76 17, DEL 18 REV 40
  • LFO: both random SNH; first controls LEV A with DEP 16, second - LEV B with DEP 32 (same values as the controlled parameter, so that it swings from 0 to 2x), speeds of the LFO’s are different so that they run asynchronously, but both have MULT 32 BPM.

I also set filter key tracking to 100 and unison to 4 - makes a big difference. Delay settings high passed, ping-pong, low feedback. There was no LFO left for the resonance, so I just recorded the motion into the sequence.

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#4

Nice! And interesting additional points on the sound design :+1:

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#5

Welcome to the board/forum.

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