Patch Request – charming LEAD from The Cracken – Vesuvius (Extended Mix)

This one was trickier than I expected. It’s always challenging when there are layered effects. And this pluck is particularly strong and clear. Really nice sound design. I think this is pretty close.

How It’s Made

• Synth: Serum
• Oscillator: Pulse Wave with thin Pulse Width. 6 Voice Unison, even Blend, mild Detune, 0 Width
• Filter: Low Pass 24 dB, bright Cutoff at about 5200 kHz, with a decent amount of Resonance to give it a little focus and sharpness.
• Filter Envelope: Create our bright attack transient, by setting Sustain to 0, and Decay to 275 ms. Mod amount should bring our Cutoff up to its max.
• Amp Envelope: Further accentuate our attack transient by setting our Sustain a little under halfway, Decay to 221 ms (roughly similar to Filter Env Decay) and Release to the same. Boost Main Volume so that the transient gets louder, and we bring the sustain back up to a normal level. So now having both the Amp and Filter Envelope creating the same quick decay will give us a really prominent attack transient.
• LFO 1: Create a subtle and quick vibrato. Route it to Osc pitch, with a REALLY small amount. Quick rate at 1/8 (with 140 bpm). Triangle wave.
• Distortion: I used the HardClip distortion in Serum, but any straightforward distortion will work. Pretty heavy Drive, but stop just short of turning our sound into a square wave. This makes the sound more aggressive
• Compressor: Squeeze it with Threshold around -30dB, and Ratio at 4:1. Add some makeup gain to bring our volume back up.
• Filter: We’re going to use Serum’s Phs 24+ filter type to create a focused Phaser effect that we can modulate very slowly, so that the sound becomes rounder at times, and lighter at others, but isn’t being dramatically shaped by a more clear-cut filter like Low Pass or and EQ. Set the Cutoff to 48 Hz, lots of Res to bring out the Phaser. Then modulate the Cutoff with…
• LFO 2: Modest amount so that it doesn’t get so thin at the top that the sound disappears, nor does it get too dark and muted at the bottom. Triangle Wave, with a loooong 8 Bar rate.
• Reverb: Plate, with a pretty big size. Lots of Pre Delay so that the strong pluck attack transient doesn’t get washed out by the reverb. Cut off some Lows so it’s not too murky and muddy. Cut off some highs so it’s not really bright. We’re going for a big cavernous reverb that doesn’t take away from our strong pluck. 50% wet.
• Delay: We’re putting the Delay after the Reverb, because when we do it the other way around, the echos don’t have a strong attack transient. Medium Feedback, 1/4 Rate, Ping Pong style so we bounce back and forth from left to right. 50% Mix. THEN, route the Amp Envelope (or an envelope with identical settings to the Amp Envelope) to Delay Mix and give it negative modulation. Now, when our Amp envelope is up, which is essentially anytime a note is playing, the Delay is silent or quiet. But when we let go of the note, the Delay comes back. This allows us to set a pretty noticeable Delay, without clouding up the actual notes while they’re playing. It’s like applying sidechain compression to the Delay’s Wet signal
• EQ: Use a Low Cut (High Pass) to remove some lows, getting rid of any boom

piotrrudnicki wrote:

Thank you very much for spending your valuable time making this

My pleasure! And great job recreating that bassline. It’s spot on.