SYNTHETIC PERCUSSION

Another quick and easy thing to do with The Best Preset Ever is to make synthetic percussion.

Start out by making the volume envelope of oscillator A fast and percussive:

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You’ll probably want to crank up Operator’s volume control at this point (it’s in the lower right hand corner).

Now, get oscillator B into the action, but set it up to look something like this:

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The key here is to turn on the Fixed switch.  This causes the oscillator to generate a fixed pitch, regardless of the incoming MIDI note. The effect of this is that oscillator B now modulates oscillator A in a way that generates strange inharmonic results. You can get a fantastic variety of sounds just by experimenting with Freq and Multi. These two controls work together to control the oscillator’s pitch. (In the above example, 532 * .1 = 53.2Hz). Holy Minimal Techno, Batman!

Also, synthetic percussion loves it some distortion:

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