Hello

My current project is a deep prog trancer and I want to experiment with having an acid line running through it.

I've never tried to create an acid sound before so have little experience in how to achieve it.

On the virus ti, I have got the general acid sound by switching the filter to analogue LP4 and cranking up the resonance. It sounds okay but bit basic. I'm also struggling to find a decent midi pattern to give that bubbling acid line.

I know I need to experiment again and again and I will but can anyone give me some advice on methods to achieve a good acid sound. Due to the nature of the track, I'm after a warmer softer acid sound rather than the sharp piercing sound that harder tracks may have.

Any advice welcome

Cheers

Greg

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Acid lines generally use pitch bending a fair bit, I also assume you have the whole envelope thing figured out to get that screaming sound? Filter envelope which opens and then decays anyway. You can get a more organic sound by riding your modulation wheel and connecting it to the resonance or cutoff.
Distortion is common, and for more movement just wire an LFO to the filter cutoff... Its really one of the simplest sounds to create, but its hard to do it WELL, that is, to get that bubbly moving sound your after. Most of that is in the writing itself.

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I've never found the Virus to be particularly good at making any sort of acid.

Your point of reference is the Roland TB-303 so go and download a demo of Audio Realism Bassline or d-16 Phocyon and those 2 are ok 303 emulations.

A big part of the acid sound is how its sequenced and for that you need something approximating the 303's step sequencer. Which means if you were to try doing this on Virus you would need to have to set the polyphony to mono3 (which slides from first to second note and then retriggers). You would also have to find some way to 'accent' notes. I would suggest building a multimode patch with 2 layers - 1 for standard notes and the other with the velocity of every note increased to taste (this second layer would function as accented notes).

On the technical front you only want to use 1 oscillator ideally but the Virus saw ans square wave oscillators sound not much like a 303's saw and square wave oscillators. I got some ok'ish results mixing saw with a bit of sine an octave lower and a tiny bit of PWM square but really its an uphill struggle to get a 303 oscillator out of it.

The square is very hard to do. I haven't made a convincing square wave acid sound on Virus.

Other than that you want a 3 pole filter which the Virus doesn't have. But you can simulate one by setting the Filter Balance to 9 o'clock or 3 o'clock with a 4 pole low pass filter in series with a 2 pole low pass filter. Then you need to saturate the fuck out of the filter input stage which is where everything goes wrong because to be honest, all the Virus filter saturation curves sound horrible. Also, the Virus filter (whilst sounding nice) doesn't behave like an analogue filter does with loads of resonance around the cutoff. It kind of goes peeeeeew peeeww! which is just weird and automatically makes acid lines sound fucked.

Don't use Virus distortion either since it never really sounds right. Instead, output to guitar distortion pedal if you have one.

You can spend forever getting the filter envelope decay curve right and emulating all the details of a 303 sequencer (even though you have no control over portmento so it never quite sounds right). But the bottomline is that its just easier to go and get a 303 emu like Phocyon and run it through a tube amp simulator and a touch of chorus.

claw is a nice freebie thats capable of doing some good acid sounds.

Thanks for all your help.

Think I'll have a good session experimenting to really get a feel of creating acid lines. At least now, I know the particular areas to focus on.

Cheers

Greg

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take 2 hits of acid man

Make good use of the filter saturation.

quote:

Originally posted by Derivative Other than that you want a 3 pole filter which the Virus doesn't have.

The TI does

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you could make a 303 acid line in any synth or vst

you want 1 saw if want more fattern use 2.

detune each other by 3

the eg,
no attack , small decay,no sustain or release set polyphony to 1
use a low pass filter and add distorion,portamento,delay,eq and whatever effects you may need.

then modulate some more with an lfo.

hope this helps .

The basics are easy to replicate on any synth. I mean a 303 is a singe saw/square wave oscillator routed to a 3 pole low pass filter which is routed to an amplifier decay envelope.

The difficult part comes in getting these bits down properly and so far no synth - not even xoxbox clones can do it properly.

303 square wave is not a square wave so you will get shit results using any single square wave oscillator on any other synth. There is no filter I have ever heard that sounds like a 303 filter. It saturates like crazy and the resonance is brutal. Theres only a decay envelope but changing the envelope amount on a 303 changes the amp attack phase of a sound. Both attack and decay phases are really non linear. Portmento is also weird on a 303 and it does not retrigger the envelope.

You can dial in a single saw/square wave oscillator, a 3 pole low pass filter and a short amp decay envelope easily on a Virus TI and set polphony to mono3. But I bet you it will sound horrendously shit.

I don't know where the LFO comes in. There wasn't one on the 303 - all the squelchy effects are done by waggling the filter cutoff and resonance pots.

check the devilfish video

HERE

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Hope you mean the Devilfish 303 mod. Because that is fucking badass. Shame you have to:

a) own a (rather expensive on the second hand market ) 303.

b) ship it off to Australia so that some crazy Ausland engineer can perform surgery on it so that it can become the synth that every analogue mono wished they asked out on a date at prom night.

i dont think its fair to compare other synths to the 303, yes its the original acid synth but i like to think of acid as being more than just the 303 sound

as said you can do it on most synths but dont bog yourself down trying to replicate the 303 100% because its just not possible
its actually nice to hear non 303(or abl) acid every so often. I like the supernova acid although i dont yet own one myself

sh-101, nord, virus or even reasons subtractor. all acid beasts!

saw\square wave, lpf 2,3,4 pole, med-high res, glide + monophonic, filter env decay and distortion (anything from light to extreme amounts)

set velocity to control the filter env amount, so that you can create the accents

its quite easy and lots of fun making acid