Attack
Operation Manual
28
Waldorf
TR-909 Side Stick
The TR-909 Side Stick is made of 3 resonating band pass filters that are triggered by a
short impulse. Behind the band pass filter cluster there is a distortion unit, followed by
a VCA with an envelope and a high pass filter.
Its specific sound comes from the cutoff frequencies, the resonance, and the volumes of
the trigger impulses of the three band passes. These settings are:
* 500Hz, 20ms decay, full volume
* 222Hz, 45ms decay, half volume
* 1000Hz, 5ms decay, full volume
Now, the Attack doesn't have three band passes plus a high pass filter, but there's a
way to simulate the architecture with the Attack.
What produces a resonating band pass filter? Nothing more than a sine wave. So, why
not just use two oscillators producing two sine waves, plus a high pass filter that uses
the lowest frequency setting as the third sine wave generator. Thus the filter will inclu-
de both oscillator signals and add its own resonance to the sum.
The high pass filter is therefore set to 222Hz, with a resonance of 100%. Oscillator 1
produces the 500Hz sine wave, while Oscillator 2 is set to a 1000Hz sine wave, but is
controlled by a very short Envelope 1 set to around 75% to produce the 5ms signal.
The fact that oscillator 1 plays longer than 20ms can be ignored, because it's not that
noticable. Don't add it with full volume, however; set it only to a level of around 25%.
This comes into play because there is an additional high pass filter on the original TR-
909 Side Stick that dampens lower frequencies.
Finally, add a good amount of Drive (around 30dB) to the signal, set Envelope 2 Decay
to 45ms, and you will have the sharp attack of the original sound.
TR-909 Hand Claps
TR-909 hand claps are made using the same signal routing as in the original TR-808.
However, due to the differing parts and internal parameter settings that were used in
the TR-909, the TR-909's hand clap sounded different. Essentially, the "Crack" (or as
Roland called it "Sawtooth Envelope") was clearer, and the reverb effect was longer.
Hi-hats
For hi-hats, we don't use references to classic drum machines, although there is a quite
good emulation in the TR-808 set included in the sound library. Hi-hats can be made in
various ways:
The simplest method is to use the built-in samples of the Attack. However, those are
provided just in case you don't have time to "synthesize" a good-sounding hi-hat.
If you like a really "vintage" sound, use a high pass filtered noise. This gives the very ar-
chaic hi-hat sound that was used by many drum machine companies for years. One of
the last examples of this sound was the good old Roland CR-78.
If you want more sophisticated results, use FM. Don't use noise as FM source, but
instead use a sine or triangle waveform with a very high pitch. The modulated oscillator
can be set either to square or sine. The FM of the Attack has a maximum amount of a-
round 8 waveform cycles, which results in heavy but tonal noise. When you don't use
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