Waldorf Edition - Manual (Page 29)

Waldorf Edition
User Manual 29 Waldorf
Roland TR-909 Snare Drum
The TR-909 Snare Drum was made with two oscillators and two filters for noise. The
two oscillators started in phase but were slightly detuned, and one of the oscillators
was modulated a bit by a pitch envelope. The "Tune" parameter controlled the basic
pitch of the two oscillators. The noise was split in two parts: there is always some
low pass filtered noise during the whole snare drum sound, while a high pass filtered
sound is routed through another envelope whose level can be controlled by the
"Snappy" parameter.
One Attack sound doesn't feature as many different modules as the TR-909 snare
drum had. One solution can be to use two sounds, one emulating the first oscillator
and the low pass filtered noise, and the other emulating the second oscillator plus
the high pass filtered noise. You will have to play the two simultaneously in your
track, but this shouldn't be a problem because the Attack has sample-exact timing.
However, you can re-create the TR-909 snare drum with just one Attack sound in-
stead, by doing the following:
Set up Oscillator 1 to play a sine wave, modulate its pitch slightly with Envelope 2,
and add a little FM to it - around 0.1 to 0.5%. When you set the second oscillator to
produce noise, you will hear that the sine wave gets smeared, which means that you
are not hearing an exact tone any more. This already sounds very close to two slight-
ly detuned oscillators and a low pass filtered noise. Now you only need the "Snappy"
part, which is added simply by using Envelope 1 to modulate Oscillator 2's mix le-
vel. You can high pass filter the noise with the Pitch control, but in fact the result is
already quite similar without doing so. If you want a little more punch, use the Drive
control carefully until you can hear a slight distortion at the beginning of the sound.
Another variation can be heard in the sound library that comes with the Attack. This
one uses a very low noise signal level that is boosted greatly behind the high pass fil-
ter. The reason for this is that Oscillator 2 plays the tone of the snare drum while the
high pass filter dampens this tone heavily. To raise it back up to a good volume,
Drive boosts it to a normal level.
Simmons SDS-5 Snare Drum
The Simmons SDS-5 Snare Drum module was laid out identically to the Bass Drum
module. However, a number of parameters were set in a different way internally to
create snare drum sounds.
When you want to create Simmons snare drum sounds on the Attack, just keep in
mind that you should use a very short envelope to frequency modulate the first oscil-
lator, set the envelopes to almost linear shapes, and use the "Vel" control for all en-
velope modulations.
TR-808 Side Stick
The TR-808 Side Stick (called RS on the 808, which stands for Rim Shot) sound is
very tricky: although it consists of only two oscillators running through an amplifier
and a high pass filter, the sound is very complex. This comes from the fact that one
oscillator seems to “cut” the other oscillator and that the VCA is used to add high