emusonacid! legacy

I have tried and tried and to no avail. I just can't make my emu produce the kind of pads I want. All my pads seem to go the way of a lead with a slow attack. The tail gets dropped off alot when I have alot of voices. But ultimately this is something that isn't an issue. What the issue is, I can't get my pads to flow like they do on a synth. You know how each note seems to blend together. The emu doesn't seem to do that very well. Even with portamento, it doesn't quite work the way I want.

So I wave my little white flag and I think I am going to go off and pick up absynth for my pads. It sounds pretty good... But the site doesn't show min requirements... I am getting tired of that. Absynth also has some effects that interests me for off board processing.

So the fate of my emu is now just for the bass's, leads, breaks, and the strange sounds I can come up with. I just can't get the pads I want. 6 months and I just can't do it.

Any one here come up with cool pads, the kind that make you go wow on your emu? I always get average ones, or ones that sound like they are coming from a moog.. you know the ones that are too fruity for even a rave choon.

And on a completely different note. In my attempt to use a pad in my last choon... I found that one of my choices wiped out the upper harmonics of my bass. So I had an idea to pan two copies of my "pad" to see if moving the two channels out of the way would work. I am about speed, so I always go for the quickest way to do something as possible, and that way was to take my midi channel and duplicate it. when I did this, I found that my stereo image was freaking hughe. I compared this to copying a voice in a preset and panning the two voices hard left and right. It was only about half as wide as it sounded when I did it with two midi channels.

So, yay for me, I found a way to get a wide stereo spread... Then my lower pad disappeared. Boo, now I have phase cancellation problems with lower notes. The funny thing is, they are all FIR'ed and should be pointing in the same direction. Who knows.

Oh well, the intro is fried anyway, I am going to redo it when I get absynth running... If my computer and go for it. And maybe, finally get a freaking song done.

snh

sampleandhold wrote:that way was to take my midi channel and duplicate it. when I did this, I found that my stereo image was freaking hughe. I compared this to copying a voice in a preset and panning the two voices hard left and right. It was only about half as wide as it sounded when I did it with two midi channels.

So, yay for me, I found a way to get a wide stereo spread...

Could you eleborate a bit more on how you did this?

Also, I've been able to take samples and turn them into great pads on the emu. Usually they aren't synthetic samples, though sometimes they are. Try elongating the release ... sorry can't really be of more help on this cos it's so case specific.

High!

The copying trick is often referred to as 'poor mans flanger' if you add the two in mono. There is a tiny little delay between the two notes. this delay should widen your stereo image. I assume that the delay just kills some of your low end... Bad luck... But why don't you resample the low end in 'mono' and the higher notes in 'pseudo stereo' ??

aXel

I think I know what you mean.
I days of yore (Kraftwerk, & early 80's electro), synth strings & pads would be played by hand, giving them a fantastic live feel & 'flow'.
'Back in the day' they would have needed two sequencers, & two 'tardis sized' modular synths, just to get a kick & snare going (no spare sequencers for strings).
I can't be bothered to play strings in every time I play back a sequence, and I assume, neither can you!

Try using both stages of the amp env generator for attack & release, giving you 'near enough' exponential sweeps instead of linear (which can sound quite wooden).

Try removing quantization on the string track. Strings / pads with long attack portions sound better if they start slightly earlier (you do this without thinking when you play them in).

Try using delay instead of a long release, if you've got an outboard delay on an aux send this will help with polyphony too.

And if all else fails; use the 'list editor' on your sequencer to input controllers for attack before each 'note on' controller & input a release controller before 'note off'. Giving you different envelopes for each note. You might end up in the 'insanitarium' but that's the path you have chosen!

mwa ha ha ha.................

You know how you have a midi channel? Well I duplicated that channel. So what you end up is channel 1 and 2 are both playing the same thing. I then use an old recording technique that I picked up from my days using cake walk pro audio 8 and panned one channel hard left and the other channel hard right. So there is a slight delay between the two channels with they play and that created the huge field. The sound didn't flange, even when I tested it in mono in my head phones.

That is how I did it. The difference was incredible. Probably I don't have my cubase set up proper yet, as the sequencer seems sluggish compared to cakewalk pro. But it gets the job done.

I will have to try some of these ideas out. I am still thinking of getting absynth as some of the effects are tasty.

snh

Actually SNH, that technique is called double tracking. Its quite commonly used on pop records. Man, I was really surprised to see you fly the white flag. I would have thought that if anyone could get a sound of an Ultra, you could. Maybe I ought to give up.

I like to layer more than one note of one resampled pad/sample.

Apply some lfo at a slow wind to control a peak shelf morph, the spread the stereo image to +/-5 pan, and add h/w chorus

i find the glide/portmento works quite nice and i've just been told how the preset chorus although lowering the overall volume can really help to thin it out.

Surely setting some good loops points and having two parts intersecting would create a nice flowing sound that pulsates to the beats but doesn't crowd, sound boring, or lose momentum.


Not sure if this will help, but i found since getting the emu its my pads and breaks that have improved the most!

.........7 months down the line.

sampleandhold wrote:You know how you have a midi channel? Well I duplicated that channel. So what you end up is channel 1 and 2 are both playing the same thing. I then use an old recording technique that I picked up from my days using cake walk pro audio 8 and panned one channel hard left and the other channel hard right. So there is a slight delay between the two channels with they play and that created the huge field. The sound didn't flange, even when I tested it in mono in my head phones.

And this sounded different than duplicating the voices, panning hard left and right and delaying the trigger on one?

I'll have to check it out ...

When you dup the voices in the emu the timing is more accurate, at least for me then playing two voices on two different channels in cubase. But I wonder if I have midi issues that I am not aware of.

Check it out and tell me what you get.

snh

Yeah, you'll always get 'poor mans flanger' if you double track in a sequencer, it shows you how poor the timing is. E-mu samplers are said to be 'phase linear at 20kHz' I think this means that if two sounds are triggered, the phase difference will be less than 0.2ms or so (can't be bothered to do the maths), so your dog might hear phasing at 30k but we wont!

.....and as snh says, by panning hard left & hard right, you get a true stereo channel, in all its heavenly glory...

This is why I like my hardware, my E-mu's sole purpose in life is to play back my filthy samples (in time). My PC however, seems more concerned with updating microsoft calendar, and opening & closing obscure drivers for programs I didn't even know I had, let alone use!

If you and your bird are going through a rough patch, before you go out and buy a 'soft synth', just remember the good times... those special moments you have shared...

mwa ha ha ha......

word ... all I can say is that there is a parameter in the tune menu called "delay" which delays the triggering of the sample and leaves it otherwise uneffected. This might be a way to do this within the EMU as another sequencer track has an "unreliable" delay in triggering samples (ie it flanges/choruses cos of small delays but these tend to vary randomly, at least on my computer)...

I think I tried the delay in the emu and It didn't seem to do as well as what I found with the sequencer... But I will have to give it ago again and see what happens.

My sequencer seems to be pretty consistant, but once every 2 hours or so, the samples will center again as the samples actualy play at the same time.

Funny thing, I tried this with the Funky Drummer break. I convert my breaks to mono for cutting purposes. So when I tried this tech on the Funky it had a huge bias to the left. I couldn't get it to stop either. I pan two midi channels left and right and the sound came from the left. so strange. When I moved the the pot on my mixer left and right i could still hear the break on both sides.

I have heard of a type of event that happens with mono and stereo. When you convert a sample that was in stereo and panned to the left, when you go back to stereo it will reappear as it was before. Maybe this is what I am experiancing with my break.

I have tired converting the samples I have back to stereo inside the tool section of my emu, and it ruined my breaks and it just doesn't sound all that good. It didn't have the depth that I got from duping the midi channels. Actually nothing has quite compared to that accident the other night.

snh

Just wondering what you chose to do in the end SNH...And also...

What waveforms do you start with to make a nice sounding pad?