Audio Damage Tattoo - Manual (Page 19)

19
Waveform
The tone generator in the TR-909’s kick drum is somewhere in between a sine wave (i.e a pure tone with no
harmonic content) and a triangle wave. While building Tattoo we found that a mathematically correct triangle
wave was too bright-sounding for a good kick sound, so we ended up creating an accurate reproduction of the
output of the TR-909’s tone oscillator.
On the other hand, the oscillator in the TR-808 kick is close to a sine wave. That familiar “booooomm” has
almost no harmonic content. Hence Tattoo has a switch, labeled Waveform, that lets you choose between the
wave shape modeled after the TR-909’s oscillator and a pure sine wave. Click
9-TRI for the 909 waveform,
and click SINE for the 808-style tone.
Amp Envelope and Pitch Envelope
The kick drum has two envelope generators. One controls the overall amplitude or loudness of the sound, the
other controls the pitch of the tone generator. The amount that the pitch changes in response to the pitch EG
is controlled by the Pitch Mod knob as described above.
Snare 8
The Snare 8 voice is modeled directly from the TR-808 snare circuits. We expanded the controls for our
version to give it a wider timbral repertoire.
Tune
The Tune knob controls the pitch of the snare’s tone generator. Turn it clockwise to make the pitch higher,
anti-clockwise to make the pitch lower.
Noise Color
The Noise Color knob controls the filtering of the white-noise generator in the snare synthesizer. Turning the
knob clockwise moves the noise higher in the frequency spectrum, making it sound brighter.