Hey all,
I'm a lifelong singer and novice keyboard player - I used to play guitar, but my fingers have developed issues with squeezing the neck, whereas I can bang on keys all day, so it became the right time to pick up a new instrument.
In order to properly motivate myself, I'm teaching myself parts for the songs my band does - mostly it's just a lot of simple repeated patterns, like Pink Floyd's "Money" for instance - it's literally just three chords on a "60s EP" patch and a wah pedal, with a good sense of timing.
Where I'm consistently stumbling is when I try to duplicate a sound from a tune which relies on the synth's patch to set the atmosphere. Current example would be "Human Race" by Red Rider, an early 80s Canadian pop hit (
). That reedy, droney pad the key player is laying down is crucial to the song, it seems to me, and I'm having a lot of trouble finding something close.
My rig at the moment is a Roland VR-09, poor boy's Nord Electro. It's actually a pretty great little unit for all its limitations, particularly since there's free software (Ctrlr) which opens up the guts of the sound engine: by default you get two sounds you can either layer or split. However, with the software, you can actually layer 4+3 patches, either all 7 at once or split in two zones, so there's room for quite a lot of texture there. It offers extremely granular synth control on four of those voices, and some very good sampled sounds elsewhere. And highly serviceable organs.
As such, I've found that I've been able to pretty closely match most of the synthy tunes we've put our hands to, though there's been some which work better than others - I Ran So Far Away, for instance, I've got a basic "fat bass" which is not nearly as harmonically active as the original, but I did create quite a lovely "ice castle" organ for the heavenly bits. I'm floating in the beam of light already.
I've been hoping to connect with some seasoned players who are good at listening to a patch and going, "Yah, take one square and one saw wave, detune them a bit, with a pretty resonant filter" or some such, or even better, some people who use the same rig to maybe share some patches round, like they do on the Nord Forum. Just cause we can't afford a $5k rig doesn't mean we shouldn't have a user community, seems to me, but I have yet to locate it.
Anyways, Human Race sounds to me like a couple of square waves layered, but there's more going on than that and I'm having trouble getting the atmosphere out of it that the original's got. Any advice would be amazing. If this works, I might have more such puzzles. :>
I'm a lifelong singer and novice keyboard player - I used to play guitar, but my fingers have developed issues with squeezing the neck, whereas I can bang on keys all day, so it became the right time to pick up a new instrument.
In order to properly motivate myself, I'm teaching myself parts for the songs my band does - mostly it's just a lot of simple repeated patterns, like Pink Floyd's "Money" for instance - it's literally just three chords on a "60s EP" patch and a wah pedal, with a good sense of timing.
Where I'm consistently stumbling is when I try to duplicate a sound from a tune which relies on the synth's patch to set the atmosphere. Current example would be "Human Race" by Red Rider, an early 80s Canadian pop hit (
My rig at the moment is a Roland VR-09, poor boy's Nord Electro. It's actually a pretty great little unit for all its limitations, particularly since there's free software (Ctrlr) which opens up the guts of the sound engine: by default you get two sounds you can either layer or split. However, with the software, you can actually layer 4+3 patches, either all 7 at once or split in two zones, so there's room for quite a lot of texture there. It offers extremely granular synth control on four of those voices, and some very good sampled sounds elsewhere. And highly serviceable organs.
As such, I've found that I've been able to pretty closely match most of the synthy tunes we've put our hands to, though there's been some which work better than others - I Ran So Far Away, for instance, I've got a basic "fat bass" which is not nearly as harmonically active as the original, but I did create quite a lovely "ice castle" organ for the heavenly bits. I'm floating in the beam of light already.
I've been hoping to connect with some seasoned players who are good at listening to a patch and going, "Yah, take one square and one saw wave, detune them a bit, with a pretty resonant filter" or some such, or even better, some people who use the same rig to maybe share some patches round, like they do on the Nord Forum. Just cause we can't afford a $5k rig doesn't mean we shouldn't have a user community, seems to me, but I have yet to locate it.
Anyways, Human Race sounds to me like a couple of square waves layered, but there's more going on than that and I'm having trouble getting the atmosphere out of it that the original's got. Any advice would be amazing. If this works, I might have more such puzzles. :>
