whats the best Syntakt “maschine” for creating Kraftwerk style ZAPs?
There are a few ways to make these. The classic way is to hit a filter with a pulse, and use an inverted envelope with a high pass filter.
Set the high pass fairly low, lots of resonance, inverted filter envelope response.
I bet the Carbon machine could do it, anything that gives you that kind of plucky sound, then tweak the filter to zap off of it.
Still, using the filter is probably the best way. Bandpass would work as well, (or even low pass for a more kick-y zap) but the bandpass will be a bit more fiddly to find the sweet spots with. Easy with the high pass.
You could probably also do it with one of the FM engines, like the Tone synth. You’d want low folding (modulation) low feedback, and set the modulation to a less tonal ratio, then use a one-shot LFO to make the sweep.
Or, you could use a pure sine, and envelope it into a snappy shape, then use an LFO to sweep the pitch down. Maybe even two envelopes. You could use one to do the sweep, and one to do a sharp pitch transient at the beginning. (kind of like how an 808 kick works)
One of the analog tone machines also allows you to put a sweep in right on the synth page, so that’s another option. You can do the sweep there on a sine or triangle (or maybe FM or RM version even for something different) then use the LFOs and filter envelope to shape it a bit more. This won’t be the same exact zap, but probably pretty interesting.
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I’m pretty sure some of the preset patterns had good electro sounds. Inc a zap.
Then just copy / tweak a preset.
The sound is probably called zap … but it’s been a while since I looked.
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I just go with track 12, because it’s not usually doing much else. Just impulse and filter.
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