Reading through the older Van Halen – Jump thread and the long-running Zynthian + Mellotron one got me thinking: there’s a handful of truly iconic synth lines that almost every keyboardist has tried to nail at some point, and I’d love to know if anyone has already worked on recreating them on Zynthian — or if there’s appetite to start collecting them.
A few candidates I’d personally love to crack:
Vangelis – Chariots of Fire / Blade Runner — the classic Yamaha CS-80 brass and pad. Surge XT seems the most promising starting point; ZynAddSubFX could probably get close on the pad side.
OMD – Electricity — those early Korg Micro-Preset / Mini Korg lines. Should be reachable with synthv1 or ZynAddSubFX.
Limahl – The NeverEnding Story — Moroder’s production with DX7-style FM bells, big brass stabs, pulsing bass. The FM side is the tricky one — curious what people reach for on Zynthian for proper FM work.
Van Halen – Jump — OB-Xa territory, already discussed in 2019 but maybe worth revisiting with current engines (Surge XT, Vital via LV2, etc.).
My thinking: if a few of us collected .zss snapshots — or even just engine presets with short notes on the approach (oscillator setup, filter envelope, effects chain) — it could grow into a nice “iconic sounds” companion library. Useful for live work, for learning sound design, and for showing newcomers what Zynthian can do out of the box.
Has anyone already gone down this road and I just missed the thread? And if not — would there be interest in starting a shared collection? Happy to kick things off with my own attempts and post results here.
That sounds like a great plan. A little side project for anyone who cares to partake.
Dexed is generally the “FM” engine that most users reach for. Indeed, whilst at SynthFest UK a few year ago, I was opposite a guy showing vintage zynths including the DX7. A punter was playing there then walked over to look at the zynthian. After a while he asked if it could reproduce a particular patch he loved from the original DX7 sounds. I could the patch in the dexed presets and he was a very happy bunny!
Thanks for the warm welcome — and great anecdote! That’s actually really encouraging, because NeverEnding Story is exactly that kind of late-DX7-era sound, so chances are good that the bell and brass voices are already sitting somewhere in the Dexed factory banks. Saves a lot of from-scratch programming if so.
I’ll start digging through Dexed for the Limahl sounds and try Surge XT for the Vangelis side over the next weeks. Plan is to post results here as I go — patch files plus a short note on what was tweaked, so people can follow along or improve on it.
If anyone else wants to grab one of the other candidates (Jump, Electricity, or something completely different they’ve been chasing), feel free to jump in. No pressure, no schedule — just a slow-growing shared sandbox.
I really like this initiative and would like to propose to make available this “iconic synth sounds collection” as a set of snapshots that you can load-merge into your own snapshots. This would allow to use the full power of zynthian chains for sculpting the sound.
@jofemodo — that’s a much better structure than what I had in mind, thank you. Load-mergeable snapshots make total sense: people keep their own setup intact, just pull in the chain they need, and the chain itself stays editable for further sculpting. I’ll follow that format going forward.
@HansR — wow, that’s a serious head start! Seven ZynAddSubFX chains covering CS-80 Guitar, The Unknown Man, Blade Runner, Brassy, two Vangelis Strings variants and Chariot Strings — thank you for sharing. I’ll load it tonight and have a proper play. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to take this as the seed snapshot for the Vangelis entry of the collection, with full credit to you.
Next on my side: digging through Dexed for the NeverEnding Story sounds (bells, brass stabs, that pulsing bass) and packaging them the same way — one chain per voice, load-mergeable.
