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.
Lost Arpeggio Passage
Here’s a little arpeggio I recorded using my Roland D-50 and the factory preset, Vara Coma Veri La. A quick search shows that the patch, somehow on my D-50s internal memory, was part of the Cinascope Studio soundbank programmed by Paul Naton. All the processing heard is native to the D-50. No additional processing was added. Patches like this really show off the spacial qualities of the instrument with hard, slow auto-pan drenched in reverb.
Spacey D50 Arpeggio
On a few occasions during the One Sound Every Day project I presented a sound without any explanation and left it to the readers to guess at what it was and where it came from. Bragging rights went to the first reader to get it right and post their answer in a comment.
So here’s a mystery sound for you. You can tell it’s a recording of synthesized drums, but from where? What device made this beat?
Clue: I’ve used it on a couple of mixes that I have posted on ACB. Bonus goes to anyone who can identify exactly what device it was.
Mystery Analog Drums
Here’s another segment from the recording I made of my Roland Juno-106 while it still had a bad voice chip. This time I decided to run it through some spacial processing, including ping pong delay and reverb to hear what it sounded like with some atmosphere.
Roland Juno-106 Processed Glitch
Today’s One Synthesizer Sound Every Day involves using the arpeggiator built into Ableton Live. The arpeggiator, found under MIDI Effects, is a pretty simple tool, there are the usual up, down, up/down patterns as well as random, random once (repeats a random pattern), and random other (doesn’t play the same note twice).
This one minute and fifty second microtrack is composed of two layers of arpeggios created by routing Ableton’s arpeggiator to my newly restored Roland Juno-106. I added some filtered tempo delay and mixed in some reverb on the fade out to polish it off. I wish I had a piece of hardware that did exactly what Ableton’s Arpeggiator does (perhaps with the addition of a tap tempo button). In fact I started a discussion about this on the Electronic Musicians Network, a Facebook group started by my friend Robert Luna. Friend me, then message me there if you’d like to participate in the group. I’ll write an article soon compiling my research into dedicated hardware arpeggiators and hardware sequencers. Here are the arpeggios combined.
Two Layered Arp at 114 BPM