How could I mimic this synth sound?

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Punky921
Posts: 675
Joined: Fri Jun 22, 2007 6:15 pm

How could I mimic this synth sound?

Post by Punky921 » Sat Dec 24, 2022 4:41 pm

https://youtu.be/VTILXMMXIc8?t=195

I love the synth sound at 3:15. How could I program that sound in Ableton? Would I use Operator? Wavetable? Something else? How could I go about building it?

Punky921
Posts: 675
Joined: Fri Jun 22, 2007 6:15 pm

Re: How could I mimic this synth sound?

Post by Punky921 » Sat Dec 24, 2022 5:20 pm

I don't have much experience creating sounds - any tips on how I would go about that? I know I should set the oscillators to sine waves, and then detune them against one another... but then what?

yur2die4
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Re: How could I mimic this synth sound?

Post by yur2die4 » Sat Dec 24, 2022 5:47 pm

Unison is a setting that’s usually set on a master out part of a synth, though sometimes near the oscillator source.

On Wavetable for instance, it is furthest to the right.
In Analog it is also far right.

I think Wavetable will give you quite a bit of control over your result.

Unison is different from detuning oscillators in that, it does it For you even if it’s just a single oscillator. You decide the number of voices, and just increase the amount that they will be tuned against one another. And there is often a spread amount for splitting the detuned instances further into stereo, or keeping them absolutely mono.

The previous poster mentioned Saw and not Sine waves btw.

But yeah, on top of using Unison, you can also detune the second oscillator. Or set them apart by various intervals. Or do something involving the Sub osc.

On a last note, some Wavetables might have a pseudo detuned option. So that’s another thing to play with. Or if a particular synth doesn’t support Unison, you might be able to get clever with fx

Oh, and one last last thing to point out. Unison hits the Voice Limit of a synth pretty hard. For some synths, switching to Unison means you’ll be be allowed to use a monophonic sound. In others, you might set voices to ‘16’, unison voices to ‘3’, it’d mean that if you hit more than 5 notes simultaneously, the 6th note might be stealing from one of the others, since each single triggered note takes up 3 voices.

Punky921
Posts: 675
Joined: Fri Jun 22, 2007 6:15 pm

Re: How could I mimic this synth sound?

Post by Punky921 » Sun Dec 25, 2022 1:18 am

Thank you for the guidance! I'll give it a shot!

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