Would You like some Cheese With That Whine? Adding a 4th oscillator in Thor with E.Organ 5

Previously in the Celeste patch, we see how taking it easy and using plain sine waves every now and then can result in very open-ended kinds of patches than can be hybridized or repurposed for a variety of musical applications. While we generally want to stay away from sine waves, they are still useful for additive sounds in which we aren't concerned much with timbre-variation via filters. Most often these will crop up in electromechanical organ sounds--the most notable of these being the hammond B3. Today, however, will be a slight departure from what we expect from organ sounds since we'll be exploring the cheesy/psychedelic timbre of the Farfisa.

No patch collection is complete without an emulation of the Farf. You'll need this for the 60's organ sound and New Wave styles. Proceed with caution if playing this live, though. It's really cheesy, and your band members may beat you if overused!

Before I forget, I should probably publish my "default" patches. I always start with one of these, and it saves so much time since i don't have to clear out default values or individually load oscillators, etc. My amp EG's don't stray far, and sometimes I don't even bother with setting AEG. I'll save those details for another blog, but you should always have a default patch for different instrument types. I also find that certain instruments, especially the ones I'm working on now, become templates for other sounds. Much of my collection will end up being variations and variations of variations of patches that appear in my blog.

I digress. I have my default sustained instrument patch loaded and ready to go. We all know what a Farf sounds like. Looking at FM8's FM Matrix, we can see ops A/B and C/D are the only mod/carrier pairs. E and F are standalone sine oscillators and are liable to create problems for us when we get close to finishing the patch. For now, let's start with the easy, obvious stuff.

Setup osc. 1 with a 1:3 ratio. The original patch has a feedback loop, so let's effect this in the router. Routing to FM frequency causes for instability than we want, so route Osc. 1 to Osc 1 pitch instead. This sound should have a slightly nasal but full reedy sound. Set FM amt to 8. In the router, set amt to 24 and scale with key note, amount 56.

Now we have a basic organ sound. Let's cheese it up. Route Osc. 2 to filter 1. Set ratio 3:3. This sound has to be really bright to work, so set FM amt. to 79. In the mixer, adjust the 1:2 balance to slightly favor osc2, about 78.

You're almost there. You have some really high, bright partials but not enough fundamental. You need an octave and a sub oscillator. But there's a problem: You only have one oscillator left. So how do you fix this? You can compromise one for the other--say, you think the sub osc. is more important or you'd rather keep the octave. You could use one as a modulator and the other as carrier, experiment with different setups this way until you come up with a sound you like. This is fine except you have to consider that, while you aregetting sum-and-difference signals of both, you're still faced with the problem that one is still modulating the other, hence altering the timbre--however slight. If you can, you need to find another oscillator. It can be done in one instance of Thor.

Activate Osc. 3 routed to filter 1 bypassed. Also route it to filter 2 and plug in a LPF. Make sure the filter signals are running parallel and you have output from both. Change filter type to Type I. Set res. all the way up to self-oscillate. Back off the env. and vel. all the way to 0. Turn keyboard scaling all the way up. Now you have your 4th sine wave. All you have to do now is make sure your cutoff frequency is 2 octaves about the oscillator frequency. Change the Osc. 3 octave to 3. I find the proper cutoff frequency by first matching filter cutoff to the osc frequency, which I find at 130 Hz. That's not frequency you actually hear, of course, because keyboard scaling is all the way up. Now adjust for 2 octaves. By doing simple math, you find this occurs at 520 Hz, except the closest you can get is 521 Hz. This is actually ok because we want to allow for some degree of anomalous tuning--makes the timbre a little more natural-sounding.

Final step: We've got cheese, but not quite the kind you can smell. We really stink it up by adding obscene amounts of vibrato. Route LFO1 to Osc 1, 2, and 3 pitch with amounts 22, 22, and 19 respectively.

One think I like about this patch is how it actually sounds better without effects. I firmly believe in avoiding effects if you can get results inside the tone generation, such as detuning you find in so many DX7 patches. This patch could also go the way of so many B3 patches in which you'd want a rotor or chorus effect. You certainly don't want to overuse this patch. But every now and then, feel free to cheese it up!