Bass, Pads And Brass – Starting Points

The OB-6 excels at staple ‘bread and butter’ brassy sounds, bass and pads. Here’s some tips on creating them… No doubt you’ve heard Obies all over some classic records, so if you’re an OB-6 owner you’ll likely want to recreate them as your first port of call. In terms of some famous brass sounds there’s Van Halen’s Jump and Prince’s 1999, and pad-wise once again Prince is up there with the intro to Little Red Corvette. Then of course there are numerous records featuring OB basses and leads too. While we’re not going to directly recreate those sounds here (we’ll leave that to you, as we’d no doubt get ‘flamed’ for them not sounding exactly the same!), there are some general starting points to follow which you can then take further by adding extra modulation or the lovely OB-6 effects.

Basic Bass: Initialise patch (Manual + Write). Combine square/pulse and saw, set to half/half mix. Sub-osc to taste. Velocity off, amount to filter=3/4. Filter ADSR: fastest A/S/R and D=half. Amp ADSR: fastest A/R, D/ S=full. Filter frequency to 0...