I often find myself producing similes of classic video game sounds on my vintage analog gear like the Pro-One, Casio CZ-1000, Juno-106, MKS-80, or in this case on the Oberheim OB-8 that I am borrowing. Usually this involves pulse wave oscillators, LFO modulation, or high-speed arpeggiation. Aside from being nostalgic it is a good exercise for learning the synthesizer’s controls. Here’s some Pacman-esque sounds done on the OB-8. I converted it to mono and left it unprocessed to exemplify it’s vintage sound.
Here’s one of the first recordings I made with the Oberheim OB-8 Once I started experimenting with it in my studio. This recording was made without any external sequencing or arpeggiation. I used the on-board arpeggiator, held down a chord, and then started turning knobs. Here’s a small segment of what came out. You will notice the hard panning on the voices. This was also done on the OB-8.
This is a sound programmed on the Oberheim OB-8 using the oscillator sync mode. I set each oscillator to the pulse wave, enabled sync, then modulated the frequency of the synched oscillator. This made a very rich sound and when I viewed it on the oscilloscope I saw these crazy animated castle walls going by. I used my Nexus One to shoot the screen then added in the recorded audio so you can properly hear how it sounded.
I recently acquired the temporary use of a beautiful Oberheim OB-8 complete with the official Oberheim MIDI modification. My friend Chuck Love is temporarily using one of my electro-mechanical favorites, the Musitronic Wurlitzer, and in exchange he has allowed me to setup his OB-8 in my studio.
The machine is in excellent condition and sounds amazing. I did run into what might be a minor calibration issue. Four of the eight voices are significantly louder than the others. Fortunately I discovered a workaround to solve this problem for recording purposes.
Each voice on the OB-8 can be panned left or right. I panned the four louder voices to the right and the quieter ones to the left, then adjusted the gain on my input levels while watching the oscilloscope until they matched. Finally I used the Utility plugin in Ableton live to reduce the width of the panning so that the voices weren’t jumping hard left and right constantly. This makes the instrument much more consistant and nicer to play.
Here’s an excerpt from a seven minute experiment I did today by sending the MIDI from Ableton’s arpeggiator to the OB-8 while manually adjusting the filter and envelopes during the recording.
In continuing my analogue synthesized study of the Japanese reed instrument called a shō, I have played and recorded the traditional chords for the instrument using my programmed version. This brief composition is a sequence of the traditional chords Otsu, Bi, Ichi, Kotsu, and Hi.
After pre-recording the chords I set them up with triggers on separate tracks then played them so that they overlap creating dense and eerie harmonics during the transitions.
