emusonacid! legacy

Tip on tone generation and some music theory - written by Sampleandhold
(mate, hope you don't mind my posting your tips but they're good ones and I though we should get all the EMU tips from the doa board onto this one)

okay, i bought a sample disc once, that i can load shite on to my sampler and make it emulate classic analog sounds, they are alright. but onething took me by surprise. i couldn't understand why i had a moog string patch that i could just sit there and hold and it would play and play, and never stop, but it was on a second long sample. I was like wtf!
so i systematicly deconstructed the patch, and discovered that all it was was sample of the patch, that was looped, with a sloped adsr enevelope, to make it sound like a string.
so this is what you are going to need to do. get your computer, md, cd burner, and get it ready to record. then go into master, you should see some buttons that come up, one will say efx, one will say utilties, well you want to hit those buttons, i beleive it is utilities, until you find something that says test tones. you find that and then you can chose what tone you want to play, then record it, sample it then do this.
i try to cut it down so you have a clean start, get it were there the wave is at the zero crossing. so when it starts it wont sound procussive. unless that is what you want (like i said you can make a tr808 kick from this, if you picked sine) and then what you want to do is going into sample edit, go into tools 1. you should find something that says loop, and loop type, just go into loop
once in there you should find a box that says fix, take that off, if you don't you can adjust the loop points.
now what you want to do is adjust the loop points, it really doesn't matter if the start of the loop is actually at the begainning, you could lets say play a vocal and it woud play through until the loop point, thus looping the last word if that was the sample you were working on. you will want to play around and listen for clicks, if you hear a click that means the loops points aren't at unision. they don't match, you could try using the auto correlation, just push the right or left dirctional buttons on your sampler. personally i find this to be worth less, i can do so much better then a machine can.
now once you find your loop point and it sounds clean, no pops, select that fix box again, this may not matter but just in case. select it anyway. you can also use, i think it is sample integrity to make the loop sound better, but i don't know, i haven't tried it.
if you still have a pop at the begaining and you just couldn't find the zero crossing set the attack at about 5 and that should take care of the click but still give the illusion that the sound is sounding on time.
now you have your very own, pure sine bass patch...

that is the fun part, you can do anything you want with that. basically you should set that loop to have an orgin of A because, you should have sampled it at 440.0, that is actually the note of A, A4 i think. now you should set the high and the low all the way up and down, and then you should be able to play the sine up and down the keyboard at all the pitches you need.

what i typically do is layer waves over and over each other, having some low pass, some high pass. i even do chord factors. you can even go so far as detuning things slightly and making the sound sound out of key. it all realy depends on what you want.

so basically lets say you have a sine wave and you have the origin at A3 for example, and lets say you take a square wave and layer that ontop of the sine wave. i am going to go for a major tonic chord... for right now. so you set the square at an origin at f#, you should go lower then the sine waves origin. because you are making the middle harmonic of the patch. so it would be F#3. that should make the square sound at c#, the mediant of a major scale, the third degree. so basicaully if you play you keyboard you should hear the square and the sine play at the same time. but just a major third interval.
so lets say you go into the filter enevelope section, and lets say you want the square wave to go from a closed low pass and move up to an open low pass filter. just tweak that envelop, you will have to set this in the chord screen for that to work, on the square wave section of the voice we are creating. set it so it just sweeps in, so as you play a note, you should hear the sine and then slowly the square wave comes in from a low pass filter. add q for more of a bell sound.
take a new square wave and set that orgin at d, that should play a dominate factor, E. now this might sound whole at first because of the fact that the third degree of the sound is filtered in the begaining. set that one to a low pass filter too, but set the enevelope to filter out as you play, have it open the close, so the idea is that you should have the fifth go and meld into the third, and you have your bass note constant. if you want, you can set the sine to a much higher orgin, as long as it is still placed at A. what will happen is that the sine will be lower and giving you bass that you want. you can also now mix the different voices. if you want it to be really bassy you should go in to the preset edit were you can individually pan things and set levels and tweak that. if the sound sounds kind of narrow add chorus to something, i wouldn't go much more then 13 percent, anything more sounds funny, unless that is want you want.
now once you have that all sorted, you can go into the amp enevelope and tweak the adsr. becareful about the stain, i have had the unit get stuck and the stupid note played and played and played, and if you really fuck up you might get it were the sustain gets louder. that is kind of funny because you will feel panic increase as you realize what you have done, and then the understanding that there is nothing you can do to stop it.
once you get the adsr were you want it, you could do even more, you could have the fifth degree square, say pan from left to right, by using and lfo, and the sine you could mod the pitch with an lfo. and the middle tone you could do that chorus thing that madmax talked about.
one last thing, you can resample your voices so you can save polyphony, but if you have independant adsr filters working on amps or the filters, you will not want to do this, because what will happen is the adsr will change when you hit different keys, basically the value of the adsr goes faster the higher you go up the keybaord, and the value goes down the lower you go. but if you want that go for it. you can do anything really at this point, you can even add more voices to it, you can detune them slightly and make them flange if you layer two of the same waves close to each other or ontop of each other.
i am still learning how to do this, this is something that i have been trying to develope since i don't have a decent synth. you may get lame sounding stuff, but the funny thing is, you can use the same set and come up with different sounds over and over again. i have made an organ sound once using the same waves over and over again, then the next day doing the samething i came up with a freaky bass line. it all depends on how you do it. just trial and error really. hope this helps and sorry so long...

one last thing i might be wrong with the orgins on the degrees. silly. basically i need to hear to see if i am right. but you might need to do the third either f or g, i think it would be f, and the fith should be fine though.
this actualy were that music theory obsession come in handy. what you are actualy doing when you set those origins, you are actually doing inversions of intervals.
so basically if you have:
unison, or the first becames and 8th, this is perfect
a second major becames a seventh minor
a major third becomes a minor sixth
a perfect fourth becomes a a perfect fifth
a perfect fifth becomes a perfect fourth
a major sixth becomes a minor third
a major seventh becomes a minor second
a perfect 8th becomes an unison.
if you already knew this, then cool. but this might help more too.
so basically if you want to make a major third interval you need to move the orgin to the left until it hits the minor sixth. that should make the key start on the third factor of the chord. so in the key of a it would be f, because the major sixth interval of A is, A and F#, to make that minor you would have to move F# down a half step to F and there you go. so choose f, it will sound better. hehe. sorry. i stayed up too late last night :)

(and some people here think music theory is a silly waste of time)

madmax, it is alright if you post my tips. i find that to be really cool. here a emu god is taking my tips and saying they are good enough to share, and someone who actually has released stuff. it's like if bad company sampled off of one of my tunes (ha ha). it is all good.

i might have some more to go with this thread. i am going to have to test some stuff out. last night i made this really cool, i don't know, "cat getting hit by cement mixer" type sound. but it was loud and all the sudden i couldn't hear the high end of the music that i was making... i was like "oh my god, i have just damaged my ears! no wait, it's my shitty behinger mixer..hhmmm, no, oh god, no not my expensive amp... oh thank god, it is just the twitter blown or something in my speaker"
needless to say, very terrifeing night.

what would be cool about this thread is if people post there patches on here telling how they came about it. ah, but then most people may have a multi thousand dollar synth and this doesn't matter too much to them
it's all the invention of a poor man's quest for good sound.
i wonder if it is possible to post sound bites on this thing. i think will give it a go tomorrow, show you guys what i was able to make the other night, see if you guys like it.

here is an idea, for you guys to give a go with.
simple
sample your sine off the emu's test tones
take the sine and load it and set it so you can have it play over the full range (of course you should get a loop going as well)
now take that sine and load it again, but set it so it is a minor second above the originals origins.

what you are going to hear is a pulsing since. kind of interesting. and also if you do this with the square or any of the other tones, you can make a tone that is dissonant (this sine will be after all) and make really creepy sounding stuff. i might post or whatever a sample of a sound i made doing this...

kind of makes me wonder if i should get a synth... had alot of good sounds i have made doing this tech....