Super

In the Dark Ages of electronic music, the words “synthesized strings” conjured images of just one sound; the Solina String Ensemble and its closely related cousin, the ARP String Ensemble. They did one thing well, which was to crank out sustained sawtooth-wave approximations of a string section. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, fully programmable polysynths such as the Prophet-5 from Sequential Circuits and Roland’s Jupiter-8 made dedicated string synths redundant, especially when programmable polysynths became more affordable with the advent of the Roland Juno series and the Korg PolySix.

But squished somewhere between the era of non-programmable mono synths (Minimoogs, ARP Odysseys, and the like) and the revolutionary programmable polysynths were a number of “in-between” units such as the Moog Opus 3, ARP Quadra, and Roland Paraphonic 505. These weren’t truly programmable, but they had separate — and polyphonic — brass and strings alongside a “lead synth” section. The sum of the parts wasn’t ever really competitive with real programmable polysynths, but these faux polys were a little easier on the wallet than a $5,000 Prophet or Jupiter-8.

Most of the “in-between” synth ensembles have fallen through the cracks of synth history. None are particularly celebrated today. But as long as there are vintage synth freaks out there, someone will snatch these things from eBay on the cheap and put them back to work making an interesting noise or two. Will Alexander of Goldfrapp is just such a vintage synth nut, as you can tell from this month’s cover story on page 22. Our kind of guy!

This month we’re going to examine the track “Number One” from Goldfrapp’s new release Supernatural. The strings in the intro and throughout the track were created using a Roland Paraphonic 505, and have a sort of uniquely artificial Solina-like tone but imbued with a deep chorusing effect courtesy of the Paraphonic’s built-in Roland Dimension D effect. This is a thick chorus effect unique to Roland products and was marketed in a number of standalone Roland effects boxes in the ’80s. An especially cool feature of the Paraphonic 505 was the external input that allowed you to make use of the Dimension D effect by plugging other instruments into it. Cool, huh?

Here we’ll examine how to replicate this string sound on a virtual analog synth. I used Logic’s ES2 plug-in, but you could use just about any full-featured virtual analog synth.

We’ll start at the basic oscillator level. Characteristic of dedicated string synths, we’ll want to use a sawtooth wave. Since most of these “ensemble” synths were made on a budget, it’s safe to stick with one oscillator only. We’ll throw a little LFO vibrato by assigning a triangle wave to modulate pitch. It should be very subtle, but at a fast speed (I went with 5.9Hz). More thickness and motion will come from the chorusing and doubling we’ll get to in a minute.

Next comes the filter. This is really important to our tone, and you may have to experiment a bit with your particular synth to get it right. On Logic’s ES2 synth, I used the bandpass filter, which should be the right choice for getting the characteristic “nasal” string synth sound. You may want to try highpass filters as well, and either way, play with the cutoff and resonance controls. You’ll want the filter envelope zeroed out, as this is a constant kind of tonality. You might want to have a bit of keyboard tracking dialed in so that the filter gets a little brighter as you ascend up the keyboard.

Things are still pretty boring, but hang on! You might want to wait to do those fine filter tweaks until we sort out the chorusing situation, which will get us way closer to our desired tone.

Let’s not forget the amplitude envelope. Here we want a simple “sustain all the way up” envelope with a medium-fast attack (about 40ms), and a similar release time.

Now we need to replicate that great chorus sound. You can experiment with various chorus/ensemble plug-ins if you like. Not only did I use the built-in chorus effect in ES2, I “cheated” and used the unison mode, which doubles up and detunes the oscillators. This got me pretty close. But if you have a big enough chorus effect, you might not need to.

If you’re an Apple Logic user, you can download my ES2 preset at www.celebutantemusic.com/html/frappstring.html. There’s more info at the link, too. Until next month, enjoy the fakey string swirls, and think of how much money and hassle you saved by not buying and shipping one of those faux polysynth monsters from an eBay seller!