Warm Textures In the Making
Rather than simply making yet another virtual instrument, the arrival of a recently restored 310U was the perfect excuse to bring together a taster of a number of combined sound sources and techniques I’ve been working on to create rich, warm and complex textures. In particular I’ve fallen in love with the sheer musicality and magic of tube oscillators and wave shaping coupled with rediscovering classic analog synthesis and effects.
This has formed the basis of a new follow on to the recently released S-VX library and created very much with the idea of the two libraries being used in tandem to offer a very significant degree of opportunity for layering and blending new sounds.
The Orbitone Collection features the same proven 4-voice layering engine but operating on a brand new sample set made using a very different set of techniques to S-VX but with the similar timbres and textures in mind.
Like S-VX, Minimoog 7751 was both sampled directly and also washed through the Triple Tube Hybrid Phaser to form a number of looped textures with movement. Similarly, although the 310U was sampled in isolation, it was also passed through the rehoused resonator section of a Polymoog to magically turn brass formants into a choir!
Several tube wave shaping circuits, an L/C resonator based on the Novachord and vintage signal generators were utilised to produce deep vocal formant drones. The Tube Strings and were a blend of Novachord, ARP Omni and Discrete Tube Synthesis. The e-Piano was created by layering piano like timbres from the Novachord, the 310U and three tube oscillators mixed and tube wave shaped.