Liquido - Narcotic

This one might be ranked pretty high on the German list of banned songs. So let’s give it a shot! :wink:

My demo uses the original drums and bass (extracted in Logic):

Did you know this was a preset called „Mondo Poly“ on the Roland D-70? The keyboard has nothing to do with the D-50 and doesn’t exist as a plugin, either, unfortunately. So I bought the synth from 1990 really cheap to analyze this preset. It’s a bit tricky because the modulations are programmed very cleverly but the synthesis part is rather simple.

The signal chain:
The sound consists of 4 oscillators: 2 saw waves (detuned a little), 1 saw wave one octave up, and a bell sample.
Velocity controls filter envelope (a little less for saw 2 and 3)
After touch controls filter cutoff (a little less for saw 2 and 3) and LFO pitch modulation (but only for saw 2 and 3)

I decided to build the 3 saw oscillators in DUNE 3 which I love - so little CPU for so many voices and good modulation capabilities. It could also be done with the Triton VST but that seems to have phase problems with singe cycle waveforms.
Much more important, in my opinion, is the bell patch! It doesn’t sound right with any other sound, so I sampled the waveform „I-16 LITE WAVE“ to use it in DecentSampler.

The digital chorus of the D-70 is pretty good with a lot of predelay. The combination of a Dimension D and a simple KORG MDE-X chorus is the closest I could get.

The intro is in mono and as soon as the band starts it becomes stereo. I use the MDE-X delay with delay time, spread, and feedback all turned to 0 and mix turned to 100 % which I then bypass as soon as the band starts.

No fancy scripting going on here, except for 3 things:

  1. For the intro you need a velocity of almost 1, for the rest constantly 127. I didn’t like that for live use. Instead a scriptlet helps me to output the right velocities depending on the song part. Also the after touch for the filter sweep isn’t reliable on stage so I use the (gigantic) pitch bender instead.
  2. When you try hard to get those high velocities you might accidentally trigger the after touch for pitch LFO (so did the original artist!), so I randomly trigger that effect with a scriptlet.
  3. The CPU of the D-70 was pretty weak resulting in noticeable latency when playing many voices. I just simulate this with two simple scriptlets delaying the note messages.

Liquido - Narcotic (Florian).rackspace (115.3 KB)
D70 Lite Bell 1.zip (3.6 MB)

:metal:

5 Likes

You are living on the edge with your song selection :laughing:

Well done! I like the results!

Just because I’m curious, and I’ve dialed through your other contributions in the last days

You are often using Arturia Effects, which provide quite high latencies. Is this OK for you in a live situation? Do you feel comfortable?
I personal felt a little bit ‘disconnected’ while playing :no_mouth:

Here a screen shot of your Runaway

with additional 4.2ms from the following DimensionD and Rev LX-24 :thinking:

Thanks!
I use the Arturia plugins because I own the collection, they sound OK - and they look good. That sounds stupid but for some reason the eyes and the ears are connected by something small called brain and that really has an influence on me personally.
Gig Performer even automatically opens the vintage plugin panels for me on some songs because I like to look at them.

I think you’re right. But let me add some points:

  • Now I suddenly also feel the latency of the compressor. :rofl: I would probably change that to the “DIODE-609” model which only reports 32 samples of latency.

  • In my gig file for live use I use chorus and reverb as send effects in combination with this trick that saves me their added latency.
    It’s just not convenient to share a rackspace that relies on outside effects so I included them in the rackspace.

  • If the overall latency has been optimized to a decent level, a couple of ms can be tolerated more easily for some songs. I’m at 64 samples/48 kHz.

  • And last, in some special cases (special songs) I seem to tolerate a little higher latency anyway because it makes me feel like sitting in front of a huge signal chain. :wink:
    But again, you’re right and in general, I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that an entire gig.