Elektron Musical Instruments

If you have the HVSC a good song for demo'ing some "typical" Rob Hubbard
sounds is "Phantoms of the Asteroids."  I've been running Sidplay in
Original mode and using the mixer to isolate SID Channels, trying to 
re-create some of the techniques Rob used in such stellar songs as
"Chimaera."  So far, I have learned quite a bit.  For starters, he's
not really tweaking the Sid registers very complexly, but he is using
some simple wavetables.  Want to learn more?  Then start your own
mini-project to figure out and recreate some more of Rob Hubbard's songs.

In Song #2 of "Phantoms", several very classic Hubbard-sounds are employed.
There is a pleasing, swiftly-changing melody played with two voices 
on Voices 1 and 2.  Below is "how he did it."  Hopefully you will be
inspired to try some of these simple but effective techniques yourself:

The first sound is in seconds 0-7 of the song.  It is quite simply
two square waves played at different intervals (G against B-Flat).

At 7 seconds comes a classic sound from "Chimaera."  It is quite simply
two high-pitched square waves with identical wavetables that go like this:
+00 +12 +12 +12 +12 +12 +12 +12 the time for the individual steps is
20ms and the whole table is 160ms.  They're separated by an interval I
haven't yet found out.

At 12 seconds comes a particularly beautiful sound.  It is two
simultaneous arpeggiations!  It's pretty hard to tell exactly what's
going on here, but it seems like Voice 1 is playing the Note E briefly,
then sliding up to F then a two-note arpegg E/B begins.  As this
arpeggiation happens, the Pulse Width is varied from 25% to 75%.  This
has an exceptionally cool effect of making the pitch seem to increase!

On Voice 2, it's a similar story: base note G (minor 3rd up from Voice 1),
brief slide, then alternating rapidly between G and B-flat!  Plus,
there is a more complex pulse width modulation sequence.  It begins
at around 25%, up to 50%, down to 10% then back up to 50%.  

Then at 18 seconds is the lovely Hubbard drum sound from many songs. in this
case, it's actually two sounds superimposed.  One is a kick drum sound, the
other a snare sound.  The kick has some wavetable action at the begin, but
is basically a square wave (with some filtering?) with decaying freq.  The
snare/white noise has some subtleties to it that you can see using the
spectral view.  First of all, there is a notch filter killing the narrow
band from about 1500 Hz to 2KHz. On top of that, a wavetable is used at 20ms
periods to swap the notch filter to between 2KHz and 5KHz, once again, at
1/8 of the steps in the table.  This gives a sort of echo effect!  brilliant!