how to make this lead sound?

djdizzy

djdizzy

Active Member
Joined
Jun 7, 2012
Location
Atlanta, GA
does anyone know how to make this lead? i recently heard it in "wilkinson - need to know" and immediately recognized that lead sound from a song that was a big guilty pleasure of mine back in the day - "kreo - burn for you". my guess is that this sound might be square wave-based and is monophonic with a fair amount of portamento but i can't get the tonality right so there's definitely something else to it. it's such an infectious sound.


the sound is at 0:00 in the song below:

the sound starts at 0:45 in the song below:
 
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I normally use ES2 for this type of sound, but the principle is the same for whatever you're using.

You're correct. Two square waves and a sine.

Leave the sine and first square where they are value wise, and detune the second square. The detuning will depend on the song you're doing (In relation to the key) so that's your call.
This should give you the basic sound, but it wont sound at all how you want it.

After this it's all in the modulation, much like a reese.
Apply plenty of analogue detuning to get that wideness and you should be set.

You can add a phaser too, but that's an after thoguht that depends on how you want it to sound exactly.


This applies more to the sound in the second song.

For the first, It really is simply just a square wave with some unison, reverb, and portamento.

Hope that helped.


- LG
 
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subprime said:
Triangle waves will sound smoother than squares for this sound possibly.
Click to expand...

Substituting the squares will make for a smoother sound, but you can't get a good enough humanization of the octaves and with the detuning with triangles from my experience. There's barely any width.

I re-looked at the songs, and actually, for the first one, you could make a smoother lead with triangles.


For anything like the second song though I think squares are better.
 
thanks for the advice! i'm an ableton/windows user but luckily my wife has a nice imac cuz she's in film production. apparently I have to upgrade her mac to yosimite so I can run the newer version of logic that a friend gave me. i'll give it a try and reply back, thanks
 
LG18 said:
Cool, let me know how you get on with it.
Click to expand...

thanks for the help. i wasn't able to get very close with ES2, which i'm sure was just a result of my lack of familiarity with ES2. but here's as close as i could get with the old Virus TI. I played around with a number of combinations but this is as close as I got:
osc1 is a pulse (75% pwm) and -12st
osc2 is a square and +19st plus some detune
osc balance is shifted in favor of osc2 so it has more presence than osc1
phase init (retriggers osc1&2's wave cycle from specific point with each note)
unison + unison detune + some unison stereo spread
some virus fx (delay, reverb, mild phaser, eq boosted the highs)
some very, very mild lfo-based pitch modulation
monophonic with portamento and retrigger for the lfo

then I just slapped in one of my old, unused melodies so it might be kind of hard to compare to the ones above because of that. I might take a stab at recreating one of the melodies in the youtube links above if you guys find it too hard to tell with the melody I used for my recreation. it seems like i'm on the right track but maybe it needs more pitch modulation?

https://soundcloud.com/djdizzyofficial/test-lead/s-n93Tg
 
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That's pretty much what you're after, I think.

Which sound out of the two songs you posted are you trying to make right now? Because they're quite different as far as modulation goes. One has pretty much non, and the other is quite heavily modulated.
 
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