Greetings
I wonder if any of you ever attempted to achieve the eerie and magical sound used by Goldfrapp in “Felt Mountain” themes. From what I’ve been reading, it’s Alison’s voice through a Korg MS-20 synth and I’d love to get hints on building a Zynthian chain to recreate it. Ditto for the base synth patch.
Thx in advance!
It’s certainly bewitching!
If it’s a Korg Ms20 it sound like a little bit of ring modulation via the external audio input, with a mild pitch bend of the carrier.
Anyone know of good Korg Emulators in the difficult and dangerous LV2 world, or have I already got one down in the depths of the zynthian engine collection…?
OR do we have to leave it for the wonderful boys in the PureData Dungeon to once again demonstrate how it could be done?
Thanks for jumping in!
I just found a comment buried in a 15 years old forum:
“Last time I checked (probably around 1983) the Korg MS-20 did not feature a vocoder circuit. Maybe they patched audio → filter → pitch follower → VCO pitch, because that can be done on the MS-20.”
Maybe I can explore this approach with the Roland SH201 that’s been gathering dust in my music room, and shed some light on my curiosity.
There is the expander unit the MS-50 that does feature a ring mod. My mate Stevo had both.
The Switch was a lovely trigger source.
That’s exactly what it sounds like to me, with a bit of the input voice signal blended in.
All together now . . . .
Rooooooooookk Soooooouuuuppp!
/me drooling
So… What would you propose if this is to be done with Zynthian?
Any of the available vocoders in zynthian.
Got it. I’ll take that direction.
During my research on this topic, i read at some point a clear statement that they did not use vocoder, but I’m realizing now that they could have, if it was available.
Thx a lot!
I’d use Puredata myself. The Sigmund~ object tracks pitch and amplitude at least as well as the original MS-20 External Signal Processor did, and the patch itself sounds really simple - a plain waveform with a little bit of highpass and lowpass to make it sit in the mix, and the pitch and amplitude (and maybe filter cutoff) controlled by thepitch and amplitude followers in the ESP. IT sounds like she’s overdriving the filter a bit and the PD filters are definitely not MS-20 filters, but you could get in the ballpark with their Moog latter style filter and then route the output from PD through one of the distortion or amp sim LV2s.
A lot of what makes it sound so good is her phrasing and articulation more than the actual synth patch itself.
I’ve been away for a week and just got home, but in a few days I’ll take a crack at it since I’ve already built some simple abstractions for the pitch tracking part of a patch I was working on (that probably won’t be finished since Ripplerx can probably do the same thing I was going for but better), it wouldn’t be too much trouble to expand them into a basic voice controlled monosynth. A proof-of-concept, at least.
