What Do You Use to Generate Subharmonic Frequencies?

Played these chords on the Super Jupiter the same day I recorded the last sound. As is my habit, I programmed the patch without saving it, so this will be a one off microtrack unless I decide to reverse engineer the sound for one reason or another. Again, I decided to apply the same technique to add the bass frequencies as I did before (adding it to another layer, dropping the pitch an octave, and running it through a low pass filter). Out of curiosity, what processors do you use to create subharmonic frequencies in your work? Do you use hardware or software? What in your opinion are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Polyphonic Synth with Subs (Part 2)

Polyphonic Synth Passage with Subharmonics

I played this passage of notes on the Roland MKS-80 after spending a couple of days programming sounds. Listening back I wanted to hear more bass, so I looked around for a good subharmonic generator plugin, but didn’t find anything and decided to just add it to another layer, drop the pitch and then run it through a low pass filter. After some customized chorus settings, delay, and reverb, this is what I ended up with.

Polyphonic Synth Passage with Subharmonics

Sawtooth Modulated Sawtooth

This unprocessed, lawnmower-like, drone was generated on the Roland MKS-80 by modulating a sawtooth waveform with the LFO configured as a sawtooth waveform as well. I found the pitch (a low C) on the keyboard that closely matched the top speed of the LFO then manually swept the tuning of the oscillator by no more than a semitone. This is what created the phasing that can heard throughout the recording.

Sawtooth Modulated Sawtooths

Auto Panned and Delayed Arpeggio

Now that I have my laptop back from service I can get back to experimenting with processing on my daily synthesizer sounds. For this arpeggiated sequence I wanted to hear it swimming around in my phones, so I started with some tempo mapped auto-pan, plus ping-pong delay, and reverb.

Auto Panned and Delayed Arpeggio

Nice Accents

This brief phrase from the Bitstream 3X arpeggiator has a nice combination of rhythm and accents. I am well impressed with the huge variety of rhythms, accents, and melodies possible with this feature on the BS3X and I’m not finished exploring it yet.

Nice Accents