Yeah, listening to it I was thinking of something like that but more DS-1 or RAT.
Didn’t hardfloor use a rat in there acid techno productions?
Possibly! But also most analog synths have some kind of oscillator fm built in. A lot of times when decoding 90s techno sound design, it’s more often the case that the producer was using a simple set of gear with clever arrangement rather than a secret sound design weapon
Yes they did.
Definitely FM. Possibly linear FM since it seems to track notes roughly (exponential FM won’t do that) If you don’t need it to track closely with other notes though exponential FM will do just fine, and you can dial it in “close enough”. Or you can use a ring modulator to do it. Ring mod can make the same type of sound at the right settings.
Sounds like FM between maybe a triangle or sine and a sawtooth. Lower audio rate, two oscillator.
Would be super easy on an Analog 4, Syntakt, modular, any of the more complex mono-synths out there with decent sequencer.
It is not a distorted single oscillator instrument.
If you mention which instruments you have we could get you started in the right direction with a basic patch.
Maybe you can do some research on the net, sometimes you can find a bit of video, a photo, an interview that helps. There are also sites dedicated to the material of bands and artists, but rather well-known artists, in general.
There is also the possibility of finding the members of the band to ask, if you are very motivated.
Im with @J3RK on this one. Sounds like a simple FM patch. Possibly some mixer saturation/drive.
What a Track!
Maybe some Quasimidi gear? Technox or 309?
I think it would be really funny if the artist dropped in and was like “oh yeah, I made that with my DX7”
Discogs have the producer listed as Basil Hilborn.
If you look after this kind of mid-to-high pitched squeaky lead sound I think to remember at some notes a formant like touch … like an “ow”.
With typical analogue synths we get this “ow” using
- formant-filters
- high-resonant LP-filters, where we modulate the cutoff with FM
- high-resonant filters, which tend to produce such sounds, if we modulate the cutoff with a fast synchronized ADSR or LFO. Maybe the 303 filter supports this, but I don’t know.
This said … I tend to guess we could use a saw wave, a dedicated high-res LP, the right amount of filter modulation and a distortion unit to achieve a similar sound.
Maybe a Korg Prophecy? Came out the same year as the track, is monosynth, has FM and distortion etc.
It would actually be easy to make on the DX-7. Being FM, you would just use two operators (instead of all of them).
I had a little play around with Arturias acid-v earlier, got pretty close with some wave folding and tape saturation… probably not close enough for you techno aficionados, but it was fun having a twiddle to see how close I could get. I’m not an acid guy so probably no where near as discerning…
Digitone; syntakt, a4mk2, and a few others but don’t have the space to set the others up at the moment so just using the Elektron machines, although mostly tone and takt as I use them on the road
Yeah, I think it totally could be FM! I kinda want to try it, but I don’t have a DX7. Maybe it would be interesting to try to recreate it with the Dexed plugin or some other emulation
Wave folding is actually quite similar to two operator linear FM in effect. So both should be able to make sounds like this.
I didn’t know that, I was just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks it was a fun experiment though, until today id never used the plug-in before so it was an eye opener just how much mileage you can get out of the acid sound, never realised the range of tones you can get out of it, I must admit I prefer the muddier end of the scale rather than the screaming filter stuff…
Multiband distortion in the late 90s? I’m thinking more like a Mackie board.