[sdiy] Building a Better Bass Patch

[Tim Parkhurst]

So I'm reading in the latest Electronic Musician about synthesizing
bass sounds, and I see a comment about how some of the best bass
sounds come from a single oscillator patch. Now this makes sense, as
multiple, out of phase VCOs could tend to 'muddy up' the all-important
attack transient. Same thing with percussion sounds.

So all of this got me thinking that maybe a way to build a great bass
sound would be to use multiple oscillators, but sync them all so that
the rising edge of the first (audible) cycle was perfectly in phase
with the attack portion of the envelope. I suppose this could be done
on a synth with sync on every oscillator, and you used the keyboard
trigger as the sync signal, AND THEN you immediately turned the sync
off after the first cycle so that the VCOs could drift a teeny bit and
fatten up the main body of the sound. Two oscillators could result in
a pronounced dip in volume if they went 180 degrees out, but three
would avoid that problem. I think some of this has been covered before
on SDIY, but I still haven't seen an imlementation of it (or some
recorded examples). Anybody got a modular, or even a soft synth
capable of such a setup?


Tim (following my bass instincts) Servo
-- 
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein