Can a Virus b do Ueberschall synth's???

[soundsubs]

for this sound, which is either a 303 or 303 clone (or 101 with mods as noted) you can certainly come close... virus b, or ti

1.) main ingredient is a single sawtooth. although adding more osc's and a sub might make more interesting sounds, to emulate this precisely, stick with a single oscillator. i think sometimes we forget how powerful a single roland oscillator can be (101,202, 303, 106!). might want to play with the vatiations, but basically a sawtooth. the 303 had a nice sawtooth and a nice approximation of a square. if you want to have a square on the 2nd oscillator, you can approximate a 303 by simply crossfading between osc 1 and 2. its ~close.

2.) 2nd ingredient is the filter. on the 303, it was an 18dB/oct (~3 pole) lowpass that was modulated by a fixed envelope. this can be had by putting the 2 filters in serial, and cranking the res. you might want to modulate it with a semi random lfo, and definitely with the filter envelope. the resonance has to be high, but not near oscillation. (so 1/2 to 2/3rds) and let it pump a little bit, so that the filter opens with every note. if you put 2 lfo's on here, its like someone is manually turning the knobs for you.

2.5) the filter envelopes DECAY is important, as this opens it up depending on the bpm of your song. this can be at about 0-20%. the sustain is fairly important for longer notes, so that can be between 0 and 50%. amp envelope is attack 0, decay 0 thru 50%, sustain up 50 to 100%, release minimum.

3.) definitely distortion. you can get this through overdriving your preamp (even a mackie will overdrive!) you may have a guitar pedal laying around too. its interesting to mic the speaker for some distortion too, try it (but keep your feedback loops from happening). remember that guitarists rely heavily on post preamp distortion, so should we. some of the distortions in the virus are acceptible, but not going to get you strict emulation results.

4.) programming programming programming! this can certainly make all the difference in the world. program some 16th notes with shortened decay (less than 100%) and randomly pepper these in there. make sure if you use portamento to overlap the notes in the piano roll view. obviously, putting in some 8th notes (or longer) here and there would do too to spice it up.