Help with Broken Synth Sound?

[Grayburg]

Short clip - http://ifile.it/qvlzn8i

The synth comes in after the kick.

I have a feeling it has to do with overdrive/distortion, right? I've tried to use FL8's Fruity Blood Overdrive, but the result was atrocious.

[Yoozer]

That's not broken and it's not distorted either . It depends a bit on which synthesizers you have at your disposal.

What's happening here is that the pitch is controlled by an LFO, and that the speed of the LFO is controlled by keytracking. Anything you use should be able to do that, and have a high-resolution LFO.

In regular English:

Observe:

At 0:52 you hear the siren - first slow, then faster. The siren is a sound where the pitch is controlled by an LFO. However, the "intensity" of this - the siren has low and high notes is pretty high. The sound in your example doesn't have the intensity the siren has. Also, the LFO waveform is a saw instead of a sine or triangle (this is what causes it to sound "damaged").

Keytracking means that the intensity or speed of something are multiplied by which key you play. High notes = higher multiplier. In this case, keytrack controls the LFO's speed, which means a faster LFO on the higher notes.

Now, frequencies are higher with higher notes too, and the LFO kind of works in tandem with those - otherwise it just sounds awkward.

Example with the Xhip VST here:

http://www.theheartcore.com/megathread/rip_wave.mp3

[analoq]

Any fast modulation from a saw/square LFO will give you that rough side-band (broken) sound.

I don't have a synth or even monitors handy, but for this particular example:

I think it is pulse-width modulation rather than pitch modulation. No keytracking needed, either.

cheers.