[dankitchen]

Hi,

The lead synth is this tech-trance track has some movement, its prevalent all the way throughout the track and it drops into this after the breakdown. I can tell the sound has a quick attack, fairly quick decay and zero sustain, sounds like some delay is in there as well as some other modulation maybe to give the sound some movement.

Any ideas?

[Joe Hanley]

Are you referring to the bright, saw-ish, noisy lead that starts playing a single delayed note around 4:34?

[dankitchen]

Joe Hanley wrote:

Are you referring to the bright, saw-ish, noisy lead that starts playing a single delayed note around 4:34?

Hi Joe,

Yes that is the I’m trying to replicate.

Thanks

[Joe Hanley]

Try starting with this (I used Serum):

1. Oscillator Saw wave. Unison with a ton of voices, 16 if you can. Heavy Detune so that it sounds pitchy. An even Blend of the voices. If you can control the voices’ start phases, you want about 50% aligned (in Serum that’s turning the Rand knob to about 50%). This way you get a bit of an attack transient.

2. LFO. We’ll use this to play each individual note. Route this to the Oscillator’s amp. For the waveform use a Saw that’s curved upwards. This will give you a fatter note. Set the Rate to a dotted 1/8th (bpm 120). Turn trig on. Now when you hold down a key, it will repeat a note over and over.

3. Filter. Low pass. 12 db. Cutoff a little above Noon, to be modulated by…

4. Filter Envelope. Set the Amount so that it starts at max Cutoff. Set Sustain to around 50%. And then set the Decay to be twice as long as two LFO cycles (about 500 ms). Now, when you hold down a key long enough to hear the LFO play two notes, the second note will be darker as the filter envelope moves the Cutoff down. The Envelope here is tricky so you’ll have to tweak.

5. Compressor: Turn down the threshold until you get about 8 dB of reduction on the first note. This will create a fat attack transient on the first note only, as the compressor will already be partly engaged when the second note comes in. Increase makeup gain to fix the overall drop in volume.

6. EQ: Subtly boost the highs with a high shelf.

7. Reverb: Big hall. Cut off some highs. Mix around 30%.

[dankitchen]

Thanks Joe I really appreciate the response. I don’t own Serum yet but I’ll apply this logic to my other tools, it will be a great learning experience.

[dankitchen]

Just wanted to say thanks again Joe. I used Ableton 10s Wavetable synth and yielded similar results. I did not want to copy Marks work like for like but create something with a similar character and this helped a lot. Plenty of room for me to experiment with as well.

[Joe Hanley]

dankitchen wrote:

Just wanted to say thanks again Joe.

My pleasure!