I've stumbled across a few techniques here and there for fattening up a monophonic sound, so I thought I would compile a few of them into one blog post. We all could use a fuller, rounder sound, right? With that in mind, I humbly present to you the THK-1000 Sound Fattener!
By the end of the tutorial, we will have created a combinator insert effect that you can use to fatten up any sound. At least, it works for me, maybe it will work for you. Ready? Let's get started!
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This is just a simple organ style patch. Somewhat inspired by the Brecker patch used on the song 'Cajun' by Steps Ahead. If you want to hear some amazing EWI playing, the album 'Magnetic' by Steps Ahead has some great playing by Michael Brecker. They did a tour promoting the album and they made a live album - it's called 'Steps Ahead Live in Japan'. Highly recommended if you like jazz fusion.
This is a follow up to an earlier tutorial about creating a breath controlled patch with Subtractor. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Don’t underestimate the Subtractor. It is a great little synth and is easier to program than Thor. You can get some cool analog and digital sounds out of it. It can sound surprisingly good when pumped up with the right effects. It also makes a good starting point when learning synthesis because it is the most basic synth in the Reason family. You can stack them in Combinators for some pretty massive sounds, too. 99.9% of the Subtractor sounds you will encounter were created with keyboards in mind and therefore velocity takes precedence over performance controllers such as breath and aftertouch. In this tutorial we will walk through converting a regular Subtractor patch into a breath controlled patch, attempting to keep the character and sound of the original patch. Along the way we’ll discuss the various parameters and what they do. We are also going to stick with using the front panel controls only, a future tutorial will cover the use of CV to add breath control to virtually any Subtractor parameter. Since most of the patches you come across are set with velocity to control the various parameters, we will focus on making what is essentially a ‘struck’ sound into a ‘sustaining’ sound where we can control the parameter musically over time. Here is what the Reason Manual says about the Velocity parameters:
Over in the performance section where we set breath control, we only have Filter 1 Frequency, LFO1, Amp and FM. First set the indicator to breath in the performance area. Keep in mind, we are still sending velocity to the synth (at least I hope you have your wind controller set to transmit velocity!) so some of the velocity parameters are still valid. Let’s just go down the velocity list one by one and see how to map it over. The green ones are the easiest to map over. For everything else, either move the knob to 0, or leave it as is.
High Speed BC ConversionIf that doesn't make much sense, or you want something super quick, here is a super quick conversion, using some defaults that I like. Ext Mod section: F Freq Ext Mod = 49 LFO1 Ext Mod = 0 Amp Ext Mod = 24 FM Ext Mod = 0 Filter 1 Section Filter 1 Freqency = 33 Amp Envelope Attack = 48 Decay = 100 Sustain = 64-127 Release = 10 Velocity Section A. Atk (Amp Envelope Attack) = -24 If I didn't mention a parameter, just leave it as is. Try playing the patch and adjust. So there you have it - a quick way to convert a subtractor sound over to breath control. These settings will also work on an NN-19 patch! A lot of the parameters don’t have a 1 to 1 mapping, but in a future tutorial we will cover how to control just about any parameter using breath and CV. The best way to get a feel for it is to just play around and experiment and most importantly, have fun!
Every once it a while I like to something fun and silly, so here is a spooky theremin in honor of Halloween (in the States) this week. Be sure to play the spoooky notes - G - D flat - C. UPDATE: Reader Kenneth says it works in Reason 4 with no problems.
This week I took the Pan Flute from last week and kicked it up a notch! I put it in a combinator with some fx and a layered it with a synth sound from the Subtractor. It gives you that airy, new age feel. Of course, there are front panel controls for the fx and the level of the synth. Hope you like it.
After months of programming and tweaking, I'm pleased to announce our first commercial ReFill - the Cyclone Wind Synthesizer for Reason. I wanted to create a Combinator that is a tool kit for Reason for wind controllers. The main idea is to load any sound into a Combinator and have it gain a great degree of breath response without having to reprogram each and every sound.
I've largely succeeded with this ReFill, and you get 50 presets and an extensive user guide to get you started. I think you're really going to like it. Learn more at the product page. In this tutorial I'll share some techniques I use to warm up an analog sound. We'll use the Subtractor patch from a previous how-to, and explore how we can beef it up and give it that "vintage" analog sound. Boost the low end. It may seem obvious, but the first thing we can do is boost the low end a bit using an MClass EQ. To add it to the Subtractor, right click on the sub and choose Create -> MClass EQ. We’ll set Param 1 Frequency to around 275 and the gain between 5 and 8 db. We don’t want to change the character of the sound, just give it a little more punch. Analog Drift
NOTE: This tip probably makes more sense for polyphonic keyboard sounds, not monophonic sounds, like we have, but it does introduce using the CV connections in Reason, so I'll go through it anyway. It is one factor that made old analog synths sound that way. Going old school again with the Subtractor. This is a special Combinator because we've mapped the front panel knobs to the oscillators in the Subtractor, so you can use this Combinator to make all sorts of cool Subtractor sounds. I call it the MetaSub, but I probably should have called it the MEGA sub. Have fun as always.
This is a classic Michael Brecker inspired lead using 4, yes count 'em, 4 Subtractors. One Subtractor is set with a sound reminiscent of a harmon mute trumpet, the others are saw waves. There are front panel controls for controlling the reverb and delay, as well as the stereo spread of the 4ths in the chord. You could probably do a lot more to this patch in terms of effects and what not, but I'll leave that for you to mess around with. Look at this patch as a starting point and make it your own. You can make some great sounds with just the Subtractor. BONUS: This one works with Reason 3. Have fun!
Well, the sound of the week is the patch from the subtractor tutorial in the last post. There's a Combinator patch to download at the bottom and an explanation of how it was made. Hope you like it!
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Reason ReFills
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