Isn't the Analog Four the most incredible and deep instrument from Elektron so far?

Finally finished this track. Klick for Hoover, Acid and distorted Kicks. (Special shout-out to @sezare56 for the tip to fm my squares with squares instead of sines for hihats and to @Fin25 because I like him so much, I printed a portrait photo of him onto a CD.)

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Banging

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Lol, I was doing something the same recently to relax after work.
Tuning a proper kick and hoover is a bit of challenge from scratch though.
Any tips for tuning osc to sound like Juno? Just square + pulse with no sub-osc and send to chorus?

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I’m a sucker for brutal hoover sounds like this. Well Done!

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This is sick as fuck

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The 106 has PWM for its square wave, a saw and a square sub-oscilator and noise per voice. They all have level controls, which you wont be able to fully replicate on the A4 as its sub has a fixed level (presumably that’s why you said “no sub”).

The filter goes very resonant if you push it all the way up. It’s bright, perky, not as creamy as a Moog, but not as screechy as an MS-20. It can key-track and is stable enough to play melodies with if you’re careful with settings. The high pass filter’s lowest setting is actually a bass boost/resonant bump. You can get the A4’s mixed mode filter to do this easily but I’ve not tried to replicate a close copy of it so I can’t suggest settings. Another quirk of the HPF is that it only has four fixed levels, which maybe you could replicate with the CV track if you wanted it to vary during a performance.

You can disengage the envelope from the amp (so it only drives the filter); you can invert the envelopes. The oscillators are DCO’s so you’d probably want to disengage the oscillator drift setting.

I’m not sure if mine has its internal levels set wrongly: I find I can distort going into the VCA if I use med-to-high levels of all the waveforms and play chords. I’m 50% sure it only started after I got replacement voice+filter chips. It’s crunchy and not always pleasant. I doubt you can get quite the same effect from the A4 (it seems to have more headroom internally). The Juno lacks oscillator sync and it only has one LFO, which is shared by pitch, PWM, filter and VCA. The A4’s LFO architecture wont replicate this limitation exactly, so you’ll have to copy values between LFO pages and time your PWM just so.

It has two poly modes, but I’m not sure which A4 modes they map to. Its unison mode sounds like garbage ;-). It has portamento (and I suspect the A4 might not have an equivalent porto behaviour).

My 106’s chorus hisses a bit :wink:

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Woah, thanks for so detailed explanation. I did some sort of hoover, but it’s quite off during the actual sequence

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damn good

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To everyone that ever stated that “A4 sounds thin”, this track is a slap shouting “TRY HARDER”.

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Thanks for all the kind comments!

Here’s how you actually do it:

  • OSC 1 set to Saw (not Square!!!), enable PWM. Tweak that until it sounds as close as possible to the famous sound. If you are satisfied,
  • copy those settings to OSC 2, set it one octave higher, but detune it a bit (around 10 cent lower or higher).
  • Now set the volume of OSC 2 to zero, and then slowly turn it up until you hear this octave above just very subtely. (If it’s too loud, it’ll sound like an ugly funfair organ.)
  • Usually we’d need a sub-osc that’s two octaves below OSC 1. The A4 can do that, but it’ll be too loud and grating and we can’t change its volume. As a compromise, we enable the 2PUL (because it’s the softest sounding) sub-osc of OSC 2. It’ll be different to the original, but at least not too loud since we gave OSC 2 a lower volume than OSC 1: Two problems solved with one shot.
  • Enable Chorus
  • Devour

The goal is to be as close as possible to the original on a technical level, and compensate for the differences, so we still end up with a very close representation.

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Sounds great, 1990’s vibe

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Nice! Yes, I did some detuning, but in different way and 2 sub-oscs were totally wrong (added mud).

What could be more relaxing than live gabber improvisation after hours… for yourself and your neighbours…

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coincidentally, I’ve used the second Filter as a low-cut on the acid line to make it thinner, so the overall lowend stays fat and uncluttered :wink:

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A post was merged into an existing topic: How to get square like this?