Help with figuring out a sound (Chromatics "Cherry")

[krp312]

Hi everyone,

Brand new to this forum and sort of new to synths. I'm trying to figure out this sound which occurs at 13-14 s. in the track (the link should take you directly to the spot).

Here is a link to a clip of what I have so far. I'm using NI Massive. 2 sawtooths an octave apart, Stepper as an arpeggiator, high pass filter, slapback delay, some reverb.

I've told told that the keyboardist uses a Minikorg 700S live, however I don't know if this is helpful because he may not use this voice live anyway.

Any help is appreciated.


Thanks,
krp

[krp312]

I think what I'm looking for is what happens at 2:57 in the track--here's a link to that spot. An instrumental section begins, and that synth voice starts up again. It repeats a few times, and then on the last time (before the whole passage repeats), the voice is made bigger somehow (which takes place at 3:11). How do I get it to do that?

[optimus prime]

Your starting point is appropriate. I'd make sure that the filter key follow is enabled, and the sound source appears to be monophonic. Also, I'd probably go with a band pass filter, rather than high pass. Not sure if there's any delay there, but there's definitely a ton of reverb. You need a short envelope on the filter too. And the oscillators sound 2 octaves apart to me, and the higher one appears to be a square wave.

The difference between the 2:57 appearance and the on at 3:11 is just different mixing, the sound was probably doubled to a track that's almost completely drenched in reverb for the 2:57 bit, then another, cleaner track comes in at 3:11, with the same audio in it.

All in all, not a simple sound to replicate. Play around with it, you might come up with a better one.

Great song, BTW.

[krp312]

By filter key follow, do you mean Keytracking Filter?

How would you configure the band pass filter parameters?

Thanks so much for your help!

[Z]

To me, it sounds more like low pass filter with resonance at about 50%.

[optimus prime]

By filter key follow, do you mean Keytracking Filter?

Yep.

How would you configure the band pass filter parameters?

Cutoff and resonance at halfway positions, trial and error from there.

Check out this other track by Chromatics, it features a similar sound, but a bit more intelligible: It appears at the very beginning and again at about 3:30. Here it sounds like the arpeggiator is just triggering a single note, while the octave parameter is being manually tweaked, perhaps a similar approach is used for Cherry.

[krp312]

Check out this other track by Chromatics, it features a similar sound, but a bit more intelligible: It appears at the very beginning and again at about 3:30. Here it sounds like the arpeggiator is just triggering a single note, while the octave parameter is being manually tweaked, perhaps a similar approach is used for Cherry.

The manual tweaking of the octave parameter does seem like a good possibility for this sound. I'll try to figure this out in Massive (along with the Keytracking Filter--always wondered what that was). I really appreciate that you looked into this more!

Do you know how to get more than one octave in the Stepper?

Lastly, I pm'ed you a recording from practice tonight.