So I've been learning about how to make sounds. I've been listening to songs trying to pick apart the sounds in my mind and trying to figure out how I might recreate them on my synthesizers. I figured I'd start with one of the most famous synth sounds of all time, the opening growl sound at the beginning of Rush's "Tom Sawyer":
I had no idea how to make that noise despite all the different books and tutorials I'd seen so far. So I did some searching and found this page that talks about recreating the sound:
Tom Sawyer Growl Sound
There's quite a long discussion on what was used to make the original sound, and some discussion on how to re-create the sound. From there I made my first attempt to recreate the sound. It really sounded awful compared to the original sound.
TomSawyerTake1.mp3
I think I ended up passing the sound through both a high and low pass filter essentially removing most of the sound and getting nothing but the growling noise. I had to add a second sound to try to add the low E back into the sound.
After studying the write-up on the page again, I went back and started again. The page talked about modulating Oscillator 1 with Oscillator 2. I attempted that by using the R3's Cross Modulation feature.
TomSawyerTake2.mp3
This still ended up more of a hiss than a growl.
So I went back and looked some more. He talked about Rush using the Oberheim OB-X synthesizer. I found that there's a virtual version of the classic synthsizer here:
Sonic Projects OPX
I'll post more about that synth later, but using that plug-in I could see how they programmed that particular patch more carefully and attempt to recreate it on the R3. Here's the Tom Sawyer patch on the virtual Oberheim:
TomSawyerOPX.mp3
So once again I went back to start over. This time I tried to match the settings of the OP-X virtual synth with my R3 editor. The biggest difference this time was this time setting the patch to monophonic with 4 unison voices. The Oberheim has 6 which gives it a slightly more powerful sound, I believe. And then adding a slight LFO while holding out the sound.
TomSawyerTake3.mp3
It's still not completely right, but much closer to the original sound. It's amazing how just tweaking one or two little parameters can have a major effect on the sound which is why it's hard to get it completely accurate.
And just for fun, I tried to recreate it on my Korg DS-10 as well, this time just by ear.
TomSawyerDS.mp3
Yikes.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Creating a Sound: Tom Sawyer
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7 comments:
Hello, this is a GREAT post. I'm trying to recreate the same sound on my Roland X7 (not ideal but it's what I have, and it does have an analog modeler so I wanted to give it a shot). I'm rather new at creating sounds and I was hoping you could tell me what your actual settings were on the OP-X?
thanks Much.
Great job on the OPX - is it OBX? Anyway... Kudos!
I have OP-X, and I have a real Jupiter 8. I've achieved this sound,like the OP-X take 3 clip, on both synths with unison mode engaged on each. The trick is not just using a 2 pole high-resonant filter sweep, or making sure that the fundamental frequency of that Low E puts some growl in there, but that the oscillators have sufficient beating against each other. For OP-X, just play with the spread knob. For the Jupiter, I had to power it on in maintenance mode, which bypasses the auto-tune routine, so each VCO isn't so neatly tuned against the others.
Good job, though.
Cant play any of the sounds on this post (stuck at buffering).
One of the earlier posts said, "I had no idea how to make that noise... found this page that talks about recreating the sound:
Tom Sawyer Growl Sound."
That hotlink (http://www.rainycitynights.com/band/rush_stuff/tomsawyergrowl.htm) is now a dead link. Would anyone have that info on how to create the Tom Sawyer growl? Please post or email me at rbbarbero@yahoo.com. Thank you!
Hey rbbarbero,
The link you refer to as being dead is now active again. I wrote the article and it's available on my server at rainycitynights.com. Sorry about the temporary 404 but the server had to be shut down for a while after I moved.
Andy aka Dr Raven
Please fix the links to your growl sounds. They are not working now... ;(
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