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Van Halen’s Jump

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Of all the sounds on our list, this is one of the easiest to recreate. The original was made with a much-vaunted vintage classic, though it hardly taxed the abilities of the original. However, that instrument – Oberheim’s OB-Xa – had a certain imprecision that made it sound huge. We’re going to attempt to approximate its burly sound with Dune CM. 2

Going to the Dune’s central display, we’ll click the button accessing the B Bank, calling up an initialised patch. Play a simple chord. It’s none too exciting, though it offers a hint at what it might become. Looking at the oscillators, we see that they are set to produce sawtooth waves – just what we want. Set the Osc Mix to about 11 o’clock. 3

The old OB-Xa had only two oscillators, but each of its eight voices was essentially a complete individual synth voice, and discrepancies in calibration meant they all sounded slightly different, making for massive chords. We can simulate some of that in Dune. We’ll start by setting Osc 1’s Fine tune to -5.0ct and Osc 2’s Fine tune to 5.0ct. 4

We’ll push Osc 2’s Semi knob up to +12 (an octave), and we’ll raise the Level of Osc 3 up to around 26%. You might need to re-adjust this later – we’re just using it to add a bit of girth. In the Filter section, we’ll set Cutoff to 50%, and push Reso up to 42%. We’ll shove the filter’s Env knob up to around 83%. 5

We need to create a slightly brassy overall shape. We’ll go to the Amp Env, and set its Attack to 7% and Release to 24%. Moving up to the Filter Envelope, we’ll set the Attack to 12%, Sustain to 76% and Release to 19%. This is a little closer, but perhaps we need to switch the Filter mode to Low-pass 24dB. 6

Finally, let’s top it all off with just a touch of reverb, courtesy of Acon Digital CM Verb. We’ll choose the reverb program called Studio A, and give its settings a little tweak, adjusting Reverb time, as well as the Low and High Cut-off values. Now we’re ready to don some spandex and jam out some block chords!