Five classic sounds
Squelchy bass
It’s the sound that filled a thousand dancefloors – the screaming, squelchy acidic bass of Roland’s TB-303. Though the original unit costs a small fortune these days, the sound is pretty easy to approximate even without a dedicated emulation.
Start by sequencing a square wave in a short loop (the TB-303 also offered a sawtooth waveform, so that’s game, too). Next, add some glide to some of the steps. The 303’s envelope control was limited to a Decay knob that could be tweaked in real time, so keep your envelope simple: fast attack, full sustain.
Next, plumb it all through a piercing resonant filter (preferably diode-based), modulated by the same envelope generator as the amp. Add some overdrive and away you go!.
Resonant zap
Whether you’re a classic Kraftwerk fan or an oldschool industrialist, you’ll have heard plenty of percussive filter sweeps – sharp, chirping bass blips only barely discernible as pitched notes.
We can make ’em using any resonant filter that can be modulated with an envelope generator. It doesn’t matter what waveform your oscillator passes into the filter – in fact, selfoscillating filters can do the job by themselves. The trick is to use an instantaneous attack, followed by a near-instantaneous decay and little or no sustain. This forces the filter to open and close suddenly for that instantly recognisable ‘thwip’.
Noise FX
Many early synths couldn’t be kept in tune for any length of time, so users relied on the instrument’s noise generator to produce hissing, swooshing sound effects. England’s own, affordable (at the time!) VCS 3 was such an instrument. Used by Jean-Michel Jarre, Klaus Schulze, Hawkwind and Roxy Music, it was dead easy to make some noisy sci-fi sounds on the thing, though just about any synth with a noise generator and a filter will do. Simply plumb the noise through the filter, modulate the cutoff with an LFO, add a bit of echo, and set your course for the depths of space!