Patch: Diging to deep

This SY-300 patch is inspired by Mick Gordon’s talk at the 2017 Game Developers Conference about his work on the Doom (2016) soundtrack. The soundtrack is mostly of a genre which I would call ‘progressive industrial metal’, or as my partner calls it ‘unpleasant noises music’. So this is not your typical 80s’ish synth patch.

In his talk, Mick Gordon described his first idea for the Doom soundtrack: Low frequency sinus modulated white noise with some distortion. This patch is somewhat a projection of his approach to the possibilities of the SY-300. So here is how I created it:

So how do we get sinus modulated white noise? By multiplying a sinus signal with a noise signal ((amplitude) modulation is basically multiplication), of course. However, there is no obvious option for multiplying signals in the SY-300 until you find that multiplication is also called ring modulation. And for THAT, there is an option on OSC2 and OSC3. So I set OSC1 to a sinus wave and tuned it two octaves down (pitch -24). OSC2 generates the broadband noise signal with sharpness set to 0. Here we see one of the limitations of SY-300: It’s noise is never really ‘white’, as even with sharpness 0, the noise somewhat reacts to the pitch you play on the guitar. While I find the pitch controllable noise quite interesting, at this point is was kind of a hindrance. I managed to create a ‘whiter’ sounding noise by raising the pitch of the noise oscillator two octaves (pitch 24). In his talk, Mick Gordon mentions adding the base sine wave back in (due to the multiplication is gone from the spectrum), so I configured OSC3 identically to OSC1. The resulting sound is quite interesting, however, due to the different noise properties, it’s different from what we hear in Mick Gordon’s talk. Now for the distortion… it turns out, the noise becomes a hellish scream when you feed it through the distortion models in the SY-300, probably because it is modeled after guitar effects which are WAY hotter than your typical synth distortion. So I reduced the output of OSC2 significantly… and that’s basically it:

Well and because this is inspired by Doom after all, it put the inverse of OSC2’s level to the expression pedal, so you can open the gates of hell by pitching the pedal up ;). Also, CTL3 is mapped to freeze (halt) all three oscillators and CTL2 silences the main output momentarily so you can do some nice chopped rhythmy stuff. Bass players may also what to raise OSC1’s and OSC3’s pitch to -12 to move the base frequency back to the somewhat audible range.

Have fun!