I am a music producer and I get hired to do a lot of karaoke work…covers of hit records. I am in the midst of doing some hits from the 70s, and am up against a wall here.
The song is called “IF” by a group named Bread. It was a big hit, a ballad, and the unique feature in the song was that the guitarist in the group played his guitar into a Moog Modular. They ended up with a very cool sound and I have no idea how I’m going to duplicate or even come close to this. I downloaded a demo of Arturia’s Moog Modular, which does have an eternal input (for something like guitar) but I have no idea where to begin to patch this thing to come even close to this sound. I am wondering if any of you programming whiz guys out there might take a listen to the sound in this song and give me some ideas on what I can do. I have an mp3 of the song, or you can hear the effect up on iTunes for free by finding the track “If” by Bread. In an interview they said one oscillator was modulating the other one or something but I doubt they really knew, they had Paul Beaver program it. Interestingly they used a similar effect in another song later on, so it must have been something they could recreate again reasonably. Any help appreciated.
No it was through a Moog modular. It does have filter thing going on that sounds a bit like a wah. Here’s the quote from band leader and singer David Gates:
“Paul Beaver came in and set them up …I played a plain old Fender Telecaster through a voltage controlled amp and that was put into these two oscillators that triggered each other in random fashion.”
Do you have any idea where I would start wiring/patching wise for trying to approximate this? I’m really new at this so if so be verbose;) Any help appreciated!
when using the external audio in, you still need to hit a keyboard key to activate the gates which control the filter and VCA
unless you software includes the use of an instrument interface (which amplifies the guitar signal up to and over 1000x), you are probably out of luck.
Well I’m trying the demo of the software…when you buy the program it comes with a separate EFX plug in that will see your external input and let you use the filters, etc…it’s this plug in:
I think you can get this effect with a Low Pass Filter, an expression pedal, and an LFO. You’ll need a way to mix the expression pedal and the LFO to control the cutoff frequency of the filter.
Basically, the LFO controls the fast changes in the fiter’s sound and the expression pedal controls the slow opening/closing of the filter.
An MP-201 and the Low Pass filter could do this pretty easily.
I’ve always loved that song and while I assumed the guitar sound was some combination of effects (wah, phaser, flanger, tremelo, vibrato, Leslie, etc) I never thought about it too hard and I never suspected that a Moog was used! Cool!!
Maybe a Bode frequency shifter was used? Does the Arturia emulation have a Bode?
