Prince-style riff

Prince’s love of Oberheim Polys was well known, liberally heard across his soundtrack for Purple Rain. We emulate the When Doves Cry riff with help from our own ZebraCM

> Step by step 2. Create a Prince-style sound for free

1

We’ll begin by opening up a copy of your DAW, and loading an instance of our fantastic Zebra CM plugin. Head for the menu/display at the top, click and hold, and select Init from the bottom of the menu. This will initialise the plugin, making it ready for us to create a patch. 2

Osc1 should, by default, be set to a Sawtooth wave. We’ll leave this in place, but we do need to turn down the oscillator volume. Adjusting the Volume pot to the left of the waveform, set it to 80. The value is displayed at the top of the plugin, as you make any alteration. 3

Now we can switch allegiance to Osc2; we need to use a triangle wave on this oscillator, so click and hold the waveform icon, and drag it up until the display reads a value of 3. This should reflect the picture of a triangle wave in the waveform display. 4

Osc2 Will be pitched one octave above Osc1. Click, hold and drag the Tune pot, located within the Osc2 section. This should present a value in the upper display of 12. This relates to the number of semitones, with 12 semitones occupying the space of one octave. 5

This patch also requires Osc2 to be at a much louder volume than Osc1. Adjust the Volume for Osc2, to 140. The triangle wave is made much louder, due to its lack of harmonic content and decreased volume, next to the sawtooth of Osc1. Hence, we’re giving it a nudge! 6

Now it’s time to head to the filter section; to help emulate the sound of an Oberheim poly, we need to select the LP Vintage filter type. Click-hold on the filter display, and select LP Vintage from the dropdown menu. 7

Set the filter cut-off Amount to a value of 90. We also want to set the assigned Env2 pot within the filter section to a value of 45. This will send our second envelope in the direction of the filter cutoff, for the purposes of modulation. 8

Envelope one (Env1) will be assigned specifically to amplitude/volume duties. We need to make the following settings; change the Decay pot to a value of 54, the Sustain pot to zero, and finally the Release pot to 48. 9

Env2 will exclusively control the filter; set the Decay to 50, Sustain to zero and Release to 27. The subtle differences between Env1 and 2 settings means a slight musical overhang when you play short notes. Decrease the master volume on the Zebra CM, to around 50, to prevent your DAW channel from overdriving.