Making Guitar Man’s organic arp in Reason

Dave layers up a sample with synths and lashes of processing to make the track’s trippy lead line

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The psychedelic arpeggiator lead in Guitar

Man comprises three sound sources: two Thor synths and a sample played back via an NN19. Dave solos the first Thor and notes that it “sounds weird on its own actually, I guess that shows the importance of layering up sounds!”

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The first Thor patch is based around the synth’s wavetable oscillator set to the PPG24 Organ 2 table, run through a low-pass filter with percussive envelope modulation and shaper. Reverbed is added with the RV7000, and lightly parallelprocessed with a Scream 4 distortion unit and a CF-101 Chorus/Flanger.

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The next layer is a sample Dave recorded from his children’s toy xylophone via with a Shure SM58 mic. The one-shot sample is played back with NN19, compressed (“maybe a bit too much,” Dave frets) with the MClass Compressor and run through The Echo delay and u-he’s Uhbik-A Ambience Processor reverb.

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The final part of the sound is another Thor synth which beefs up the part’s mi-range. This patch is also based on a wavetable oscillator, and it’s heavily delayed with The Echo, reverbed with an RV7000, and compressed with a Pulveriser.

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The device used to create the arpeggiations is an RPG-8, fed with the same chords as the track’s PX7 synth organ part. The RPG-8 is set to two octaves and is in Random playback mode, which means that the sequence of notes is different every time. “When I did the premaster it was slightly different to the version I’d been playing out before, so I kind of liked that,” Dave chuckles.