battlestar galactica & star wars blasters / cannons

The Moog Forum Moog Music General Topics Forum
1

Does anyone know how to make these sounds on a Moog? How about on a digital polysynth? Primarily I’m interested in making these sounds on a Moog.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks. :mrgreen:

2

Start with a sawtooth wave, add a LOT of filter cutoff and resonance, and you’ll want to experiment with modulation settings and ADSR settings. That should get you close. Also, reverb…lots and lots of reverb. :slight_smile:

3

Thanks voltor… that’s a good start. Any reason why saw is best?

4

I guess you could do triangle, as well, but sawtooth waveforms have more harmonics in them, which is ideal for blaster type sounds.

5

Which Moog?


I don’t know about specific phaser/blaster sounds, but it seems to me that it’s all in the filter envelope. A highly resonant CCW sweep of the cutoff with a fast envelope is a good place to start, not necesarily utilizing the oscs persay.

I used to do this with the 1130 percussion controller and the Micro. Since there really wasn’t any osc pitch, its more about the frequency of attacks. Multiple burst blasterfire.

I suppose that if you patched the filter sweep to the oscs pitch ( simultaneously decreasing) you could add a little more tone to the sweep and make it more authentic. I think the filter cutoff sweep is the most important part though. Maybe add a little tiny noise in there also.

Eric

6

Thanks for the replies guys.

Erick, I’ll be using either a minimoog voyager, LP, oberheim sem, or any combination.

Adding noise is a great idea, btw. Any other ideas everyone? :mrgreen:

7

There was an article that I remember reading regarding the CP251, and doing something to the beginning of the note like a “chiff” that simulated the initial onslaught of air in a brass instrument. I wish I could find that article because that might increase the blasters attack.

Edit:
It was the Voyager’s manual:

  1. Envelope to Noise level for noise component at the attack of a note.
    Some sounds have a burst of noise at the beginnings of a note or “chiff ” – for instance a flute or a pipe organ. This configuration digs a little deeper into the Voyager to achieve this effect.
  • Initialize the Voyager’s parameters. - Set the OSC1 WAVE control to Triangle wave - Set the FILTER ENVELOPE controls to the following settings:
    ATTACK: 1 msec DECAY: 100 msec SUSTAIN: 0 RELEASE: 0
  • Using a patch cable, connect the VX-351 Filter Envelope output (ENVS FILTERS) to the CP-251 MIXER 1 input.
  • Set the CP-251 MIXER 1 Input and the MASTER level controls to 10. Set the OFFSET control to –2 (about 10 o’ clock on the dial).
  • Using a patch cable, connect the CP-251 Mixer Output (OUT +) to the Voyager’s MOD2 Input. - Set the Voyager’s PEDAL/ON MOD BUSS controls to the following settings:
    SOURCE: ON/MOD2 DESTINATION: LFO/PGM SHAPING: ON/PGM AMOUNT: 10.
  • In the Edit menu select menu 2.4, ‘PGM PEDAL DEST’ and press ENTER. Scroll through the programmable destinations and select ‘NOISE LEVEL’
  • In the Voyager’s Mixer section, set the NOISE switch to ‘ON’, and adjust the NOISE level control to 5.
  • Set the Voyager’s AMOUNT TO FILTER control to +2. - In the Edit Menu select menu 3.4, ‘TRIGGER MODES’. Set the trigger mode to ‘Multi-triggering’.
    Page 106
    Now when you play a note, you should hear a noise component at the beginning of the note. Playing with a combination of filter envelope times, filter cutoff, noise level, and Pedal/On Mod Buss amount will make this effect more or less perceptible. Selecting ‘OSCILLATOR LEVELS’ as the Programmable Mod Destination can yield some interesting effects as well.
8

Thanks for all the help guys. I’ll take your advice and try it out. Let’s see what happens!

(btw, any other ideas are welcome!)

:mrgreen: