MnP 131: Double Dose: Metroid Fusion - Underwater Area & Sonic 3 & Knuckles - Chrome Gadget

[Wassup Thunder]

Loved everyone's compositions, congrats Hoboka!

[HoboKa]

On 3/27/2022 at 8:20 PM, Souperion said:

Congrats, HoboKa, and good job to everybody else. It was a real pleasure listening through 'em all.

Thanks everyone.  Maybe I need to render parts seperately then apply the reverb after I put in the WAV stems in the main project file.  I think i screwed up on the 'Ooh'* Consonant Sample and forgot to add more Release to it.  Mighta accidentally left a Reverb Master on as well.  Will have to see what I did when I get my PC back.  Hopefully today if all works out. 

Edited March 30, 2022 by HoboKa

[H36T]

You guys put a lot of work in! I enjoyed lots of the tunes. @APZXhas me wondering what synths he used ?

[APZX]

On 3/30/2022 at 2:30 AM, HarlemHeat360 said:

You guys put a lot of work in! I enjoyed lots of the tunes. @APZXhas me wondering what synths he used ?

Eh?

TyrellN6 (bass and lead), Synth1 (brass, pad/lead), CZ V (underlay for the main brass to add some more character), Jun-6 V (brass & lead), DX7 V (mainly used for bright sounds here, but of note the arp and the main synth sound as Sector 4 comes in are from the DX7 V), SEM V2 (chiptuney sound), Synclavier V (choir), Piano V2, OB-Xa V (thick pad in Sector 4) and various assorted FX sounds and drum sounds from Wave Alchemy. For main processing it is mainly a lot of Plugin Alliance and D16 stuff with most of the reverbs coming from Valhalla DSP of special note though is the reverb on the piano, that is an IR from my Kurzweil Rumour.

I would also like to say that you are not hearing these sounds as they really are, but rather after quite a bit of processing including real hardware in the mixing process (namely master buss compression and EQ).

Edit - I kind of feel like I left a bit too much out at first. So, here is a more full breakdown and a few tricks I used.

I'll start with the intro brass which comes from Synth1. This uses two features of Synth1 in particular. Technically, the sound is a single oscillator. However, Synht1 has its own implementation of a supersaw type thing via the det knob under Oscillator 1. Switching it to a saw and giving that knob a twist so that the sound is just a little bit past a full unison stack. The next trick is to use the Unison mode of Synth1 as well. Just two voices and crank the sprd control all the way over. This gives the sound a nice stereo feel. From there the envelopes and filter just tweaked to taste. However, there is more at play here. I did use the two LFOs as well. LFO 1 is quite slow and is only just engaged on the Pitch of the oscillator. This gives the sound a slight off canter pitch like a VCO that is just a bit too drifty. The second LFO is modulating the filter cutoff a bit for just a little bit of extra movement.

The main brass is from Jun-6 V. The actual sound is nothing all that special. Just a fairly typical brass patch that one would do on a Juno with a small ramp in on the vibrato. The real trick here is a very old technique. I duplicated the sound then grabbed the master tuning knob and raised one a few Hz and lowered the other one a few Hz. Then hard pan.

The lead sound in the first part is from u-He's excellent TyrellN6. This is a purely square based sound that uses PWM for the main movement of the sound. However, for some extra spice I mixed in a teeny tiny bit of ring modulation. This gives the sound just that bit more of an extra edge.

The pad that I bring in in the intro is also from Synth1 and uses pretty much all the same techniques as the brass sound except that instead of trying to get a lot of movement from the sound I needed something a bit more static to fill in the background a bit. So, its really just a fairly simple supersaw type pad.

Layered underneath the main brass sound is a CZ V that you really don't hear, but it adds a certain character to the sound to help thicken it up. Its just a preset too. Nothing too fancy lol.

The high wobbly lead that I used in both parts comes from Jun-6 V as well, and is a preset (mainly cause it takes a bit to tune a self resonating filter), but the trick here is that you're hearing just the filter of the synth

The bass is TyrellN6 and is a preset for really just a reasonably generic-ish bass sound. Nothing too special here.

The Chiptuney sound is another preset from SEM V2. But in reality all its doing is being a high duty cycle pulse wave to really thin out the sound.

Next up are the DX7 Vs. The first one is actually used in the lead up to the main part of the first mix just to help add some extra flair as the track goes into that bit. The next use is the arp that sits in this next section as well. Add some chorus, delay, and reverb to the Xlyophone preset and you'd be surprised at how close it'll be. Then for the transition part I used the Celeste preset with copious amounts of thick chorus, reverb, and delay.

The synth choir is from the Synclavier V (Space Choir if you're curious).

The next synth bit would be the use of the OB-Xa V where it creates that nice bright saw bit that kind of ebbs and flows with the track. It is a slightly tweaked preset, A Lonely Sunday.

The last real sound in play is from Piano V2. The main trick here happened in the mixing stage. So, onto the mixing stage!

My main choice for a channel strip (just makes things easier having 90% of the tools I need in one simple plugin) has been Plugin Alliance's Lindell 50. Generally, there is nothing too fancy that I did here. Of particular note is just the amount of additional hi-end I added to the Juno brass. Looking at the EQ and I've got a 9dB boost on a 20KHz hi-shelf... The piano though got a lot of attention. I was fairly heavy handed in the application of EQ here. Main thing though is a 4dB boost at 1.5K and a 9dB boost at 75Hz. I then tamed the low end with a 30Hz lo-shelf and rolled a bit of the high end off with a hi-shelf at 20K down roughly 4dB. But that is only part of the battle. The rest of the sound comes from the reverb. As I said previously I used an impulse from my Kurzweil Rumour. The particular one is the Dreamverb preset. This is a big lush reverb. But it can be slightly too much. So, I rolled off the bottom end at 250Hz and the last trick is to actually use a LPF before entering into the reverb. In this case around 7.8K. The removal of the high frequencies here helps to concentrate the reverb's sound exactly where you want to actually increase and improve the perception of the reverb. Though I am still not done. A typical thing I do is to invert the stereo field of reverbs as it is generally a free way to get a bit of extra stereo width in a track and the is no exception. Pay attention to how the piano's hi notes hit on the right, but the reverb comes in on the left. Though I still wanted more out of the reverb here. So, I opted to add a Baxandall type EQ after the reverb that's main job is to further increase the stereo width of the reverb tail. First, the EQ is set into M/S mode and now my goal is almost create an inverted pyramid of sound. That is I want the low frequencies to be quite narrow but the high frequencies to be wide. So, I set the low shelf quite high (on the mid it is about 230Hz and the Side it is about 360Hz). Then for some extra body the mid gets about a 1dB bump and the side gets about a 3dB cut. Then on the high shelf the mid gets about a 1dB bump at 3.4K while the side gets a 3dB bump at about 1.6K. However, to help tame the mid's increase in high frequency energy it also gets rolled off around 11K. Then to soften up the side's response just a tad it gets rolled off around 18K. Lastly, I add about 1dB of extra level to the side.

Besides that all I did was use an 1176 on the kick, a 560A on the snare, and on the master I used an API 529 (nothing too aggressive here, just a smidgen of glue) and MAQ-2NV (minor final tonal shaping of the entire piece) for the final bit of fairy dust.

Hopefully, that helps explain some of things that you're hearing.

Edited March 31, 2022 by APZX
Just more info