poblequadrat

Berlin School is basically a sequencer playing a bass patch two octaves higher than what you'd consider "bass", pads under it and sometimes a lead over it all.

You can also use any synthesizer that will let you use hand-drawn waveforms as modulators, rather than automation.

The pad part is not difficult - as for the shimmery part, there's this chimey bit at the end of Radiohead's Motion Picture Soundtrack which was sampled in Four Tet's Rounds album in a more shimmery form (the album itself is full of chimes you could use) which, with a bit of mangling, could be useful. There's also this sound at the beginning of Jean Michel Jarre's Chronologie which might serve this purpose. Another thing you could do is take the same pad, pitch it up wildly, and apply some sort of modulation to it - either amplitude or filter, not quite sure which. edit: you could also sample this particular song and be done with it?

I hope it's not bad etiquette to have my first post be a new thread asking for help without having contributed anything to OCR... Anyway, the thing is last month I got a Yamaha DX21, and in order to learn a bit about how patches are made I use VOPM to check sounds I like and study them. So far I think I'm actually getting a better understanding of how to get sounds out of FM synths and what the 4-ops can and can't do, but I can't work out the sound that plays at 0:32. I believe it's a layered sound: using an emulator I found out there's a PSG square wave under it, but since none of the instruments in the OPM file seem to match it, I'm guessing there are two layers of FM sounds as well. Since the DX21 is bitimbral I tried instrument 8 on top of instrument 9 (a horrible FM piano and a woody, squareish wind patch), but that's not it. I guess some of you must have VOPM, so maybe someone could be interested in this patch as well...