IntroAlmost every electronic musician is either familiar with these Roland drum machines, or has heard this whistle patch before.
The TR 626 and 727 were sample based drum machines from the eighties, the 626 was an extended version of the TR-505 with the 727 as the Latin drum kit version of the TR 707. Both used a ROM with lower-bit samples and unlike their 808, 909 brothers, shipped with very little options to tweak their on-board sounds.
One well known PCM sample from these rhythm composers is the whistle sound. Used in a lot of records and today found in probably just as many drum sample libraries. In this tutorial we are going to patch that specific whistle sound.
The originalBefore we start patching things, we will do what every sound designer should do whenever they're to trying to copy a sound, take a look at what our original sample looks and sounds like.
Download and listen closely to the following sample:
TR727 whistle wav fileYou can hear that the original wave in this sound was modified by some sort of modulation. Take a look at its waveform:
The bottom picture shows a zoomed in view. As you can clearly see, we're dealing with a sine wave.
TutorialStart by loading an empty Firebird preset, you can download one from here:
Firebird ini preset (use save link as)
So where do we start? Since we've already established from above picture that one of our building blocks in this patch is a sine wave, let's begin by setting up a sine oscillator. We'll use Osc2 for that and select the STA Sine from its wave selection box.
Another thing we can tell from the sample is the high pitch, tune Osc2 to octave +3 and we should be at approximately the same pitch as our whistle sample.
Before we continue, load a patch where our volume ADSR envelope is already set up:
Envelope patch (use save link as)
Modulating our sine wave would be the next thing to do, but what kind of modulation? It may seem obvious that it's not AM (Amplitude Modulation) we're hearing in the original sample, but let's try a bit of AM on our sine wave anyway.
Do this not by using an AM filter, but by using the LFO to modulate the volume. Just go into the LFO section and set the Destination to Volume, LFO type to SIN, Speed to BPM*16 and the Send Level to +100.
As you can tell, this is not exactly giving us what we heard in the original. Although the volume modulation tends to have that whistle like movement in the sound, it is obviously lacking complexity.
Reset the patch by reloading the TR Env patch:
Envelope patch (use save link as) and we will try another way of modulating things; Frequency Modulation.
Go into the Filter section and select the FM Sine filter, its default knob settings are a bit extreme, just lower the cutoff to 3 and resonance to 35. Now that sounds like what we're looking for!
By using a Sine wave to modulate the frequencies of our Sine oscillator, we get the same type of movement in sound that we hear in the original whistle sample.
It does still sound a bit muffled and low quality though, but we could get rid of that by using a modifier on our Sine oscillator, for example try the Mix: Layer modifier.
That should improve part of our new patch, but let's try to make it a little more complex and natural sounding, reset Osc2's modifier by switching it back to off.
We're going to get rid of that muffled sound by using Osc1 for the missing higher frequencies. Setup Osc1 like this:
SO Sines Mix:X2 Static Auto +1 +15 45
To improve the way our oscillators mix, turn up the volume a little on Osc2 to 60. It does sound a bit metallic due to using the SO Sines together with the X2 modifier, but we'll solve that by detuning the patch.
- Detune Osc2 by turning its Fine Tune to -6
- Set the fat knob to a value of 2x fatness 24
- Set up an LFO to detune our patch, do this by using Osc Detune as the Destination, Sin as the LFO Type, 6 Hz as the LFO Speed and the LFO Send level to -73.
and there it is! our new whistle patch. Load the Final patch from here:
TR-Whistle patch (use save link as) or experiment with different modifiers to create variations on this one.
Enjoy!
