This is part of the bass line from a synthesizer waltz that I’m composing. The sound was played on the Roland Juno-106, which I can’t seem get enough of these days. No processing was applied. All you hear is the chorus along with the LFO modulating the VCF for a long, slow filter sweep. Oh yeah, and I was manually tweaking the cutoff, and probably the envelope amount as well.
Speaker Rattling Filtered Saw Octaves
One thing I hadn’t explored yet on the Roland Juno-106 is how well it produces synthesizer effects. This is the sort of sound that I would normally create using my Sequencial Circuits Pro-One, and admittedly the filter on the Pro-One is a little more agressive, but I decided to give it a go on the 106. This sound was made using the filter self-resonance discussed in detail in the article Eerie Pseudo Oscillator Microtrack. Using the LFO on the VCF creates the wobble, then I adjusted the LFO manually for speed modulation.
I found this synthetic guitar-like sound on my Roland Juno-106, tweaked it a little bit, and then ran it through some delay and reverb. The envelope gives it a similar sound to an electric guitar played clean. If I wanted it to sound more realistic I would stagger the attacks and perhaps distort the signal, but I like the synthetic nature of it. If I wanted a realistic guitar, then I’d record some guitar. Imitating acoustic or even most electro-mechanical instruments with synthesizers is something that was a necessary step in the evolution of synthesis and modeling. These days we appreciate how synthesis sounds apart from the modeling and reproduction of traditional instrumentation.
This pattern at 122 beats per minute was produced on the Roland Juno-106 with the portamento enabled.
I found this arpeggio that I created in Ableton Live and rendered on the Roland Juno-106, in a temporary folder weeks after I had deleted it from the set I was working on. I listened to it and decided it was worthwhile using it for today’s synthesizer sound. It includes some nice manual filter sweeps as well as some other tweaks. I added an un-synched delay to give it some depth, but that was it for processing.