Assignment One MUSC3020

Analogue Sound

For my analogue sound I used the Roland SH-2 because of the bass sound it creates as I wanted to generate a bass guitar sound. The diagrams in the appended post can be used to complement the steps below when recreating the sound.

This synthesiser produces rich bass sounds which were perfect for what I wanted. The modulator switch was at zero. In the VCO-1 panel the waveform switch was set to a triangle wave with a range of thirty two. In the VCO-2 panel the range was set to 32 again but with a square wave with a narrow tuning. In the audio mixer the VCO SUB, VCO-1 and VCO-2 were all set to the maximum setting of ten. In the VCF control panel the cutoff frequency was set to three with a resonance of zero. The envelope follower was set to the middle setting (view VCF specifications post for diagram) with a value of eight. The mod setting was zero and the keyboard setting was three. In the Envelope panel the attack was one, the decay was five, the sustain was three and the resonance was one. These envelope settings are what I found to best represent a bass guitar.

The analogue sound solo is at 0:10.65 - 0:15.54.

Digital Sound

For my digital sound I sampled a trombone every minor third which gave me a total of nine samples. This interval gave me the best sound quality when I had to stretch my samples up the keyboard. When making my digital instrument the one big problem I found with doing the trombone was tuning. Even when you thought you were playing straight habit would kick in and put in some vibrato. Looking back if I did this assignment again I would have sat with a tuner in front of me while playing my samples. This would have been helpful as I had to spend a lot of time tuning all my samples because the smallest difference with the analogue synthesiser became extremely dissonant. In the final mix I added a piano part which gave a different timbre and rounded out the sound. I think the piano part worked well as gave the synthesised sounds something to blend with.

Digital sound solo is at 0:15.6 - 0:23.6. 

This is the link to the WAV file at soundcloud:

http://soundcloud.com/travis-bismark-41605118/assignment-1-bounce

Travis Bismark 41605118