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Topic: ARP 2600 sounds, presets?< Next Oldest | Next Newest >
hairy old hippy Offline




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Posted: June 05 2007, 05:14

I recently got hold of a piece of software for the classic 1970's synth the ARP 2600. I'm after the drone like sound Mike used predominantly on Ommadawn and Incantations. I wondered if anyone had any presets or knows how I can get that sound.

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Nicolas Offline




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Posted: June 25 2007, 14:34

oh my, for a second I thought you were going to ask whether MO used presets on his 2600  :D.

I can't help you, I could try to synthesize them on my korg and give you my settings though. Can you point to a specific point in ommadawn or incantations where I can clearly hear the sound you're after?

Note that your software (what is it, artuaria or something like that?) is a very good emulation of a 2600, but it isn't the real deal so it will not sound 100% like a 2600 even if you set it up identically. Well, not even two real 2600 will sound the same, but anyway :). Of course, in the software you'll miss some of the lovely analog oscillator instability and musical detunability that gives the 2600 its beautiful sound, but you should be able to get very close.
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hairy old hippy Offline




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Posted: July 03 2007, 10:33

Sorry for the delay Nicolas,

Perhaps it would be easier to say that the sound I'm after is the synth sound on 'First Excursion', the low drone sound used by Mike alot in the 70's. I'm wondering now if it's an arp at all, perhaps it's a soilina string ensemble.


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Listen to Mohribold; an epic musical tapestry that weaves between a multitude of genres.

Andrew Taylor's Mohribold album has proved very popular with fans of symphonic-rock, prog-rock, psych-folk and indeed Oldfield's classic albums!

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Nicolas Offline




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Posted: July 04 2007, 19:40

On first excursion he certainly appears to be applying the string ensemble for the high/midhigh pitched strings. I owned a solina string ensemble myself, but a slightly different incarantion with a slightly different sound; I never could compare it 100% with the sounds MO got out of it.  But that high, middle and middle low, quite silently mixed string certainly appears to be the solina string ensemble. As for the real lows,  low sounds out of my solina sounded different, but these were of a really different kind than MO's ensemble anyway. (I had separate string sounds for bass pedals).

But I must say that on First Excursion, it sounds simply as low octave chords/notes on a grand piano to me, in some cases with the lower chords/notes of a distorted electric guitar playing together with these chords. Maybe with some extra chorus/reverb/short echo on it, but it does sound like a grand piano. The solina string ensemble also plays lower here than during the rest of the piece, where it most often blends perfectly with the guitar sustain unless it plays midhigh to high solo chords, but it does not play "drone low" even when sustaining the piano drone. I think you'll get a lot of the effect heard in First Excursion if you play a grand piano really low for the attack of the drone sound and sustain it with a string ensemble somewhere in the region between its first and second octave. And then some low notes of distorted electric guitar on it, solo high electric and right hand grand piano and midhigh to high solina notes/chords as well above it, thicken everything with some effects from the chorus/reverb family, and you're finished. I may be totally wrong though, don't take my word for it. But I don't think there's arp2600 or SSE involved in the First Excursion drone attack phase itself, that appears to be pure grand piano to me.

Just listen at the very start of the tune. brrrroing grand piano and whhiiiiiiiiiiiiii solina strings fading in at a midlow pitch in order to sustain the sound (after that, the high distorted electric guitar part starts, and quite a bit later in the tune the solina appears to be played also in an additional higher pitch, but that's hard to distinguish from the guitar sustain upto the point where it starts soloing in high and midhigh chords). Of course the very start of the tune doesn't sound like the full drone you hear later on, but IMO that is simply because here he's not yet playing fortissimo low chords on the grand piano, and no low distorted E-guitar chords are played over it.

Maybe I mishear one or all of the sections I identify as the string ensemble, where it actually is filtered noise or other string ensemble like sound from the arp2600 (like the one that gets cut of at 5:10 and then transfers into a choir like string, it doesn't really sound like a solina string ensemble but it's possible, certainly with external effects. it sounds like a VP-330 but that one is from 1979...). But in that case still the arp2600 or whatever noise/string isn't droney low, it's a mid to low pitched string/noise sound to sustain the low piano notes. So whether it's the 2600 or SSE, the reasoning stays the same. My money would be on an SSE rather than a 2600. I think he plays it polyphonical, which is a strong indication of it being an SSE, not a 2600.

Anyway, never forget that MO also used external effects (guitar pedals, echo tanks, etc) so an end result may be unrecognizable compared to the original sound source. And of course, David Bedford may also have had some synth like things from his own, so the choice is larger than SSE and ARP2600.

Do you have other specific examples than First Excursion? Maybe I can detect a synth in there.
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Thea Cochrane Offline




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Posted: July 08 2007, 20:19

G-media are about to release a virtual instrument that takes sounds from a lot of string machines, so it could probably make the sounds you are after (with some careful choice of EQ).

Link to the G-media website.
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Nicolas Offline




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Posted: July 09 2007, 05:47

Not if the attack is a grand piano ;). (well, unless he also has a grand piano sound, obviously)

But you should be able to get something like (remotely) sounding like a SSE out of it.

I make my strings using a subtractive synthesizer. Not too easy and it doesn't sound like an SSE, but for my own music it doesn't have to. Whatever synthesizerstring sounds good in the recording is OK. So that's fine for me :). Maybe an older analog would be able to make less clinical strings than my VA (though the VA certainly also has some warmth too it, it's quite ok actually), but still I can get very nice sounds from it.
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