Tempest Recipes: Donk Bass

That familiar hollow ‘thwank’, mainstay of a gazillion garage records. Nevertheless a great foundation for our own, less cheesy variants.

Start with a square wave on Osc2 and set Osc mix to 0/100 so we only hear Osc2.
Use a 12dB filter with cutoff at 40 and a modest amount of resonance to start – say 30 also. Set filter keytracking to 15 or thereabouts. (To access this parameter, on the filter screen press the right arrow. The parameter is called LP KEY>FREQ).
Now use the Filter envelope to get our ‘twang’. Perhaps a decay of 60 and amount of 20-30. A pinch of velocity control – but not too much as we want to keep the filter fairly subdued. Bend it if you wish.
To give more volume, change the amp envelope amount to 32 and reduce it’s velocity sensitivity to 64 also (in general a nice compromise, I find).
You could also try adding a little pitch envelope – but short and barely noticeably to give the attack more interest.

Now we’ll apply some FM. Fellow fans of FM synthesis will know that the most pleasing sounds pop out when the frequency of the modulator(s) is at integer ratios of the carrier’s frequency. As we detune the frequency of the modulators we hear first a vibrato effect on the carrier. As we detune further we are led into to the familiar clangorous tones that only FM can do. Well, the same principle applies on the Tempest, although less dramtically. Nevertheless useful to know.

Even if you don’t understand FM, you can easily hear this difference. Osc1 is our modulator (which we don’t hear) and Osc2 (or more correctly, the filter input) is our carrier – what we hear. So…

..put another square wave in Osc1 and set it’s pitch to one octave above Osc2 (C5 if you left Osc 2 at at default). Now turn-up the Filter FM (Audio mod) about half way. The sound should become perceptibly more hollow. Play with the filter and it’s envelope until you get the sound you want – in my case a bouncy bass where the harsher frequencies are still filtered out.

Now if you change the frequency of OSC1, one semitone at a time, you will notice the tone becoming less ‘pleasing’ and more metallic at certain ratios, but seems to ‘fit’ at others. Lots of scope for experimentation here. In particular where controlling the pitch and volume of Osc1 with envelopes should open the door to plucks and various weirdness. Next time….

For now, back to our bass. We could apply a little feedback to beef-up the sound. As you have probably already discovered yourself, velocity-sensitive sounds with feedback can give some loud and potentially damaging surprises if a pad is hit too hard. So for setting Amp feedback I first switch-on ‘Fixed’ level’ for the pad. In this way I know I am hearing the maximum feedback level at all times and thus it can be set more precisely. Usually just a small amount is sufficient.

Tempest Recipes: Apito – The Samba whistle

So it’s been a while – life and all that – but I’ve somehow found time to rekindle my love for the Tempest. Let’s get back to the business of making sounds on this thing.

To start, a nice ‘n’ easy analogue take on the apito – the brazilian samba whistle – otherwise used world-over by your friendly local match official.

Start with 2 Triangles – around F6 and F#6
Apply extreme detuning to Osc 2 (fine +/-40)
For the Amp envelope, use ADSR with a decent amount of sustain and shorten the default release time to around 30.

Sounds vaguely familiar, but needs some movement…

Arm LFO1 with the random waveshape map it to Osc1 frequency – a high rate 126 but only a small amount 5.
Map LFO 2 (square) to Osc 2 frequency and give it some welly with a rate of 120, Amount 83. This mimics the little ball inside the whistle.
Try both filter slopes with lots of Filter FM and a slight envelope to emphasise the attack. Also, use the high-pass filter with a setting of about 50.

As always, not set in stone – play around with it. You can spice it up, perhaps by adding a little pitch envelope or noise to model referee spit. 😛

Plenty of bonus sounds open-up when played chromatically, especially at low and high octaves where Tempest’s analogue character really shines through.

Try it through a nice delay. Mmmmm.

Tempest Recipes: Tom-Toms

Many varieties and sizes of tom-tom, but for our purposes they can be considered as basically snares without the snare. Electronic toms rarely sound close to the real thing, their whackyness often a signature. The function is what’s most important:

Tom-Toms are tonal instruments – that is, if they are pitched correctly relative to each other, they can play a tune. If they are tuned to the key of the track, you can play key chords with the Toms, which tends to provide a strong harmonic reinforcement. This is a phenomenon you need to hear yourself, but the recipe below should get you going.

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Tempest Recipes: Snare Drums

I’ll be honest – I’ve been fretting over this recipe for quite a while. I did a lot of reading and experimentation with snare synthesis and I had prepared a lot of background text on different snare types and how they might be approximated blah blah blah.

But then I came to a stark realization: You probably don’t want to hear all this – it’s all on Google anyway – but more than that, although snares can be highly individual, the core snare sound is pretty standard and can be synthesized with ease. There’s no big secret. Once you know how to get the basic patch, there is a rich vein of snare variants to be mined from it.

In many modern music genres the snare tends to hit on the upbeat (beats 2 and 4) and serves to give a fixed focus to the entire rhythm. While other drum elements fly around, it is the snare that reinforces the sense of tempo. Thus the snare is often be the loudest instrument in the kit. It is an important reference for our ears. Changing the pitch of the snare can completely change the feel of a beat. To me, short and snappy snares make a rhythm sound more ‘urgent’, but this also depends on their placement.

Snare ‘ghost’ rolls are those barely-perceptible snare-hits in between that can add a lot of interest and variation to a beat without dominating. On the Tempest, the roll feature is perfect for real-time ghost rolls on velocity-sensitive snares.

Moving-on, for patching references we must define a standard. Our archetypal snare is a complex instrument. The stick hits an enclosed drum head, giving the initial impact transient which is then consumed by the rattling of the snares, producing a rich, noisy tail. But there is also some vibration from the second head which adds more subtle elements. Don’t forget that, these days, post-processing makes all the difference. A snare without reverb rarely works.

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New Baby: PreenFM

I built my first synthesizer today. Yay!

Constructed from the PreenFM kit, it’s a 6-OP, 4 voice FM module with 2 step sequencers and a 12 slot mod matrix.

Need to re-solder some joints but she’s alive. Alive I tells ya! 🙂

Here is the First Note.