Welcome to the second installment of the Patch Remake series, where I’ll show you how I recreate patches that have been requested in the Syntorial Forum.

We’re kicking off with the sweet, sweet filtered distorted strings from “Worlds 2018 Rise” from League Of Legends, by Glitch Mob and Mako

RECIPE:

Oscillator 1: Saw. If your synth has a bowed-string-style wavetable, you can use that instead, and modulate the Wavetable Position with an LFO, to get a more string-like sound. But a Saw will get you close as well. 6-voice Unison with enough Detune to smear the sound without making its pitch wobble.

Oscillator 2: Same as Osc 1, but one octave lower, and much quieter.

Amp Envelope: To create a strong bowed-style shape, set a quick Attack around 35 ms, Sustain to halfway, very quick Decay around 10 ms, and a quick Release around 50 ms.

Distortion: Tube-style, fully cranked.

Filter: It’s important that this goes AFTER the Distortion. 24 dB Low Pass, a decent amount of Res, and bring the Cutoff down a little above halfway. You’re looking for a pretty rounded sound, but tweak until it sounds right.

Reverb: Medium size, very wet. Cut off some lows to reduce the mud.

If you want to request a patch, create a topic on our Forum!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

All right today’s patch remake is World’s 2018 Rise from league of legends made by Glitch Mob and Mako.

Here is the patch, which is this kind of like, filtered distorted string-like patch. Kind of arpeggiated.

Here’s a remake. Pretty close. You’re just going for that kind of like hard bowed, you know like a bowed string, like a cello or violin, kind of orchestral thing that’s the kind of vibe we’re going for here so, Let’s start from scratch,as always.

Here’s what it sounds like with a plain old saw. So first thing to do to get this sort of string texture is we add some unison to this and i’m actually going to go with uh more of like an analog saw.

You’d be fine to use a regular one, I just like the way this sounds. So I’m gonna to bring us up to six voice unison and this blend- just make sure all the voices are equal volume.

Gonna bring detune down,we don’t want to sound pitchy we just want to be able to hear that nice smear when you get with a bunch of stringed instruments and…

I’m going to reduce the width of the unison a little more narrow, a little more focused. And then simply because they did this in the recording,I’m going to pan it to the right a bit.

Okay now, we want the second oscillator to be the same but an octave lower. In serum’s case we can just copy oscillator A to B and then bring it down an octave. And we still want the upper one to be more noticeable, it’s kind of the primary part of the sound.

So I brought the level down of Oscillator B, so it’s just kind of just kind of like a lower layer. All right, next I’m gonna bring in some distortion, some tube distortion.

I’m going to crank it, so that gives us our dirt. Now we immediately need to filter it afterwards. In this case, for this patch, the filter makes more sense afterwards because we want the distorted sound that then has this rounding you know at the end.

And this um,this distortion effect has a filter,you can switch to post and do it here, but I couldn’t quite get the sound I wanted so instead I just put a filter at the end.

So I want a 24 db filter, make it a little brighter and then give it a little shape with res. right?

Kind of points,almost gives it sort of a vocalesque kind of vibe
now to really get the string sound we need to set the amp envelope a certain way. Again we wanted this like attack bow kind of thing.

So we wanted to kind of fade in really fast with a short attack, so we’ll go like that and then to give it a kind of right that immediate sort of attack. We’re gonna kind of bring our sustain down and then give it a short decay.

Actually, before I do that let me give it some release. Okay, now right? when sustain’s all the way up, it’s kind of very almost kind of rigid but when I bring the sustain down with a fast decay, it gives me more of that “yum” that sort of bowed attack.

You can really see the shape if I zoom in, there’s kind of the beginning of the bow and this immediate spike and then a bit of a short tail for the release.

Lastly, our reverb and we want the reverb to be after the filter, so let’s move the filter here. We’re going to go with a plate, medium size.

I want to be pretty wet, I want no pre-delay in this case. Ppre-delay puts a little bit of space between the dry sound and the actual reverb. We want to blend right in, right? We want the reverb and the dry sound to happen at the same time and then use low cut to get rid of some of that low mud.

All right there it is, that’s the sound. Now, I also made a version that uh uses a sort of a string wave table sounds like this.

Gives you a bit more of an actual string vibe it’s it’s pretty similar, but this is a cello wave table it’s from this add-on pack this doesn’t come with serum but it’s it’s basically a bunch of wavetables with orchestral instruments like strings, horns, that kind of thing.

And so this was one for cello and the key is when you want to use one of these wavetables is you want to take an LFO and modulate the wave table positionso it’s constantly changing the waveform a little bit because that’s what happens with an actual sample, like an actual string sample.

It’s not this rigid waveform that’s repeating over and over again. The waveform is changing and morphing that’s what you know, a real instrument, a sample sounds like so you kind of get that vibe by having the LFO modulated.

So it’s just an option, if you want a bit more of a realistic kind of string tone but again for this patch, it’s more just about the filtering, the distortion and most importantly the amp envelope.

All right, if you like this patch remake and you want to request another one, wanna request one from your you know, that you want to hear me do, want to see me do, head over to our forum and post a topic there with a link to the YouTube video.

Also, if you’re good at doing remakes yourself, you know take a look at the forum, see what other people are requesting and see if you can help out.