[sdiy] Building a Better Bass Patch

[Harry Bissell Jr]

OTOH a real bass guitar would have only
"one" string so thats like one oscillator
anyway.

What I'd do would be to use three sinewave
VCO... sync them all like we discussed earlier...
then set them in this proportion...

1F      (fundamental)
1/2 2F   (octave)
1/3 3F   (octave and a fifth)

THEN make the octave a little sharp, maybe
1-2 cycles, and the fifth sharper still maybe
2-3 cycles.

This should nail the natural sound of the plucked
string VERY well. I use this technique for SPICE
simulation of guitar strings for testing my
pitch extractors. It really does look very much like
the real thing.

Thanks for bringing the subject up... I never
considered doing this in real life :^P

H^) harry



--- Tim Parkhurst <tim.parkhurst at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>