Steel drum-like sounds

[merges]

Hi all! First time poster to this forum.

I'm curious about making steel drum-like sounds with a Virus TI2. Has anyone here gotten good results? I'm not quite sure where to begin but would love pointers or tips!

[TweakHead]

do you mean with a metalic texture to them?

[Timo]

Welcome to the forum!

Incidently I actually happened to make a patch a while ago that is reminiscent of a steel drum. I'll share it.

http://www.infekted.org/timo/patches...-A001-Timo.MID

Back up your patches beforehand, as I have no idea which patch slot it will upload to (although I reckon it will be A001) as I have an older Indigo and used SoundDiver to export it.

Anyway, it's most effective when you play two melodic notes loosely at the same time, just as you would a real steel drum (using two sticks in tandem).

Top tip: In general, though, I found you can pretty much easily turn any patch into a steel drum-type timbre by changing all oscillator waveforms to PCM Wave 16. The harmonic content of that waveform seems to fit that metallic attribute. You can try other PCMs too, altering the octaves on each oscillator, and mixing the harmonics.

In otherwords, steer clear of the usual generic saw/sq waves, use the PCM waves instead.

Hope this helps.

[merges]

Thanks, Timo, that's a great start for me!

Yes, Tweakhead, looking for that fairly metallic sound. But I definitely want it to sound synthesized rather than attempting to too-closely imitate a steel drum. My ideal sound in this case is something that is obviously inspired by a steel drum, but definitely not a steel drum.

[nutrinoland]

FM works great for Metallic sounds or even woody ..FM results in all sorts of great sounds actually

[namnibor]

Originally Posted by merges

Thanks, Timo, that's a great start for me!

Yes, Tweakhead, looking for that fairly metallic sound. But I definitely want it to sound synthesized rather than attempting to too-closely imitate a steel drum. My ideal sound in this case is something that is obviously inspired by a steel drum, but definitely not a steel drum.

THIS is where all your Viral Filters are definitely your friend as well as sweetly cold reverb.
The PCM Waves actually extend to alien territories of a lot of sounds, as you have whole synth engine to mangle them to serving temperature!

[TweakHead]

yeah, filtered noise can be used to create metal drum sounds. the classic 808ish hats are done like that. on the virus the color parameter comes handy when designing such sounds, you can always assign it to a soft knob for proper tweakage. hand pass and band pass filters are good for this, each providing a fairly wide range of sound. it's all about the sweet spots and percursive envelopes really. then, a little distortion - more like saturation/exciter for this kind of use - along with the envelope (!!!) doesn't hurt either.

fm can indeed provide a wide range of metalic sounds and so can the ringmodulator or both combined.

then it's all about imagination. you can modulate the "OSC VOL" parameter to use the fm/ring mod sound just on the beggining (transient) of the sound, followed by a lush noise tale washed in a deep/cold reverb. for this kind of patch, you probably won't have any lfo (cycled) modulation going, so you can use one in "envelope mode" to turn down the "OSC VOL" while raising the noise volume and possibly even sweeping it's colour a bit, maybe even raise or lower the resonance? and - last but not least - add the reverb into the mix (reverb send parameter) for a lushy reverberated sound. reverb with a pre delay and a small decay can sound like a blury echo (something like that), and bringing it closer to the original sound can (if tweaked good) sound like the splashy sound of the pedal hats in a synthesizer kind of way!

lots of stuff to experiment with! have fun!