Why do people just try to cram in as many saws as they can, go straight for the unison and cross their fingers hoping it will sound good?

The Virus doesnt work like that. For one, the attack and decay envelopes are linear by default, so you will have to recursively modulate them to change their curves to something non linear. Ill explain how to do that in a second.

What about the LFOs? The mod matrix? The raw virus waveforms sound shit until you actually do something with them. Also, you are just doing everything in a weird order and you are jumping straight for the unison effect before the sound even needs unison.

Try this in this order.

Load up the default sound at the end of bank C. It should be a clean sine wave.

Turn the OSC BAL pot all the way left so you can only hear oscillator 1.

Go to the Oscillator 1 panel and turn the OSC SHAPE dial to 12 o clock. Viola you have a monophonic saw wave. Sounds buzzy and sharp. It has too many harmonics at the moment but its ok.

Use the TRANSPOSE buttons to pitch it up and down in octave. Find the range where it sounds best for your purposes. i.e. if you want to make a Bassline like in Sunrise at Palamos you will have to pitch it down an octave for it to be in the right range.

For this example leave it in the middle. Turn OSC SHAPE 2 all the way left so that it is a sine wave.

Mix in OSC2 by moving the OSC BAL pot to the right. Notice how it becomes 'bassier' and 'warmer' the closer to 12 o clock you turn it. Turn it further and you start losing the buzzy saw and start moving more into a sine wave.

Turn OSC2 to 12 o clock and turn OSC BAL to 12 o clock. You now have 2 saw waves. mixed in 50:50 so you can hear both equally. They are identical at this point and it sounds quite annoying.

Turn the detune on OSC2 up to around 60 to bring out a 5th. Sounds a bit better and you arent stacking 2 identical saws together now. Now you have put one slightly out of tune.

Move OSC BAL left and right until you get the tone you are after - its very subtle but I am moving it to +8 to get slightly more of the detuned saw.

Ok. Switch OSC BAL all the way back to the left so you only have OSC1. Back to the buzz.

Go to LFO 1. By default the SHAPE is set to triangle (which is what I want anyway so leave it like that). I want you to press the AMOUNT button so that the OSC 1 led is flashing. The sub menu will now show you LFO 1 and you can use the VALUE pot to making it oscillate over time. Move it left and right. Sounds like a mosquito buzzing around right? You are now modulating the tuning of OSC1.

Change the LFO speed. Its too slow at this point. I moved the speed up to about 82 and set the the AMOUNT to about +6. you now have this wavering, pulsing buzzing sound.

Set OSC BAL back in the middle again. Notice how the sound is pulsing slowly and you get these subtle harmonics as the the 2 saw waves drift in and out of phase. Great stuff.

Keeping OSC BAL at 12 o clock press the AMOUNT button on LFO 1 again so that both OSC 1 and OC 2 are flashing.

Press PARAMETER > so that you are modulating OSC 2. I set the amount to about -10 because I want the second oscillator to modulate in the opposite direction as the first. It still sounds shit at this point. But its ok. I didnt like the detune at this point so I upped it to 90 on OSC 2.

The idea is to get the rough shape and the pulse right.

Press EDIT and scroll to ASSIGN 1. Set SOURCE to RANDOM. Press PARAMETER > and set the destination to Osc2Pitch. Set it to +63 and press a few notes.

See what it is doing? its changing the tuning of oscillator 2 every time you press a note. It sounds too chaotic so change the destination to Osc2Detune and lower the amount to about +15. It is now detuning against oscillator 1 randomly every time you hit a note. I tend to think this makes my sounds more alive and gives them a little subtle movement.

Right. Mix in OSC 3 as Slave. Starting to thicken up a bit. Go to the envelopes. Im thinking this is sounding like a pad/lead so increase the AMPLIFIER RELEASE envelope. I put it to about 67.

Now I am going to differ slightly from the norm and I am going to turn OSC 1 slightly to the right so I have a hint of Square wave. Try 72. Sounds about right. On OSC 2 I did the same but slightly more. Try 83. Notice how it sounds slightly hollow now because of the square. If it stays this way later we can always change OSC 3 to Saw and fiddle with the mix so dont worry about it now.

Now PWM those squares. I set PW 1 to about 24. and PW 2 to about 40. Can you hear what that has done? It has kind of made it gritty sounding and quite grainy. Good stuff.

The sound is beginning to take shape so now lets go deeper.

On LFO 1 press AMOUNT 4 times so you have OSC 1, OSC 2 and ASSIGN flashing. Set the destination of the ASSIGN to Osc1PlsWdh. Can you see what I am doing here? I am now modulating the pulse width of the mixed in square/saws whose tuning is modulated by the pitch LFOs. The result is quite alot of movement and a more interesting series of harmonics.

Set Osc1PlsWdh to +63. I want to max this one out.

Now open LFO 2's ASSIGN by pressing AMOUNT on the LFO 2 panel until you get to ASSIGN. set the destination to Osc2PlsWdh and set it to -64 Increase the speed of LFO 2. See what its doing to the sound? You can get a fuzzier, machine gunning kind of sound by setting the speed very fast or you can set it slower and let it drift and waver. I liked it fast so I set it 100 - just before it starts to 'flubber'

Its starting to sound ok now so fire up Unison and set to UNISON 3. Starting to sound fuller. Not enough detune for this type of sound though so go ahead and push Uni detune up to about 105. Hmmmm. Sounding cliched now.

Set the AMPLIFIER ATTACK to about 59. I dont like the envelope attack so I want to change the curve. it sounds like it is obviously fading in. yuck.

Press EDIT. Scroll to ASSIGN 2 and set the source as AmpEnv. Set the destination to AmpAttack. See whats going on here? I am making the amplifier envelope amount, modulate its own attack. Without getting mathematical, it basically changes the linear curve to something more exponential or inverse exponential. You can even use an LFO as the modulation source and you will be able to hear the amp attack speeding up and slowing down in time with the LFO speed! Seriously the Access Virus is an insane synth like that. You can create any sound on it, if you think about.

Set the Amp attack to +63. Notice how it fades in really slowly and gradually swells. This is better. I started to lose the RELEASE at this point so I increased the amp RELEASE to 88.

You should always be balancing things and making sure that when you tweak one variable, it sometimes makes another less or more prominent.

The sound is also quieter now so increase the MASTER volume a bit to compensate.

I mixed in a little bit of the SUB OSC now but its square wave by default and sounded too 'separate' and 'solid' so I changed it to triangle and set the SUB OSC to about 8. Enough to slightly fill out the sound but not enough that the sub osc starts to overpower the lead and make it too bassy.

This is starting to sound pretty good now. You can make it slightly harder sounding by turning the OSC 2 FM AMOUNT to 1. Bear in mind this will make it sound more out of tune so you need to lower the detune to compensate.

I want to rectify this sound now so its closer to a string sound. So select EFFECTS. goto DISTORTION and select RECTIFIER. I set the amount to about 5. Not too much because our sound is already pretty harmonically rich. Dont want to add too much harmonics. I also increased the ANALOG BOOST to about 50. Not too much or it starts to sound kind of murky.

Stick a slight chorus on it by turning Dir/Eff to 4. Set the FILTER ENV AMOUNT to about 25 and sweep the filter. Nice but its not bright enough when the filter is fully open. So press EDIT to open the SATURATION menu and change the curve to HighPass. Set the OSC VOL to about +20. This will filter out some of the bass and make the highs appear to be louder. They arent in fact - its just a trick of the mind but it will make the sound seem brighter by removing some of the bass.

At this point I felt it sounded better at UNISON 4 so I upped that. I wanted to make the RELEASE tail seem more prominent so I added a REVERB in the effects menu. Set it to HALL. DecayTime to about 46 and set the REVERB EffectSend to about 54. Echoes out nicely now.

The sound is fairly complete now and the rest are just tiny subtleties. What I did was set ASSIGN 3 source to LFO 3 and set its DEST to Panorma. Set its value to -6. This makes the sound subtle drift left and right in time with LFO 3.

I then set up LFO 3 by pressing EDIT on LFO 2. I set the OscAmount to about +14. Dest to Osc1+2 and the Rate to about 20. I wanted the rate slow so that the panning was slow and more like a drift.

I decreased the AMP attack to 34 because I wanted the sound to be more responsive and decreased the AMP release to 76. I then set ASSIGN 2's source to modulate ChorusDly and set it to +63.

Also, I felt it sounded nicer as a 'darker' kind of trance sound so I dropped it an octave using TRANSPOSE and set it to Mono4 instead of Polyphonic playback. I left FILTER BALANCE at 12 o clock and upped CUTOFF 2 to maximum so that you could hear the sound faintly when CUTOFF 1 was fully closed. Then I stuck a fruity delay 2 on it because I cant have reverb and delay at the same time on the Virus B

As yoda would say about the Virus TI - '80 voices a phat sound does not make HRRRM?'

This patch uses the sum total of 4 voices.

This should be the result (no external effects or post processing other than Fruity Delay 2):

[[ LINK REMOVED ]]


With a few modifications of the patch I just described you can turn it into practically any trance sound. I turned it into this Candyman Lead in about 20 minutes and with a little post processing:

[[ LINK REMOVED ]]


That one uses 4 voices too...

Last edited by Derivative on May-22-2006 at 00:08