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sound on Steve Winwood's "Valerie"

Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 8:01 am
by KarlSutton
I'm not up on my synth history too much, what was the synth he used for the lead on that tune? Is there a way to emulate that with mx4?

Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 6:52 pm
by stretta
I'm not up on Steve Winwood tracks, but after listening to it, the entire thing seems pretty synth-drenched. If you're referring specifically to the lead sound, I'll bet two doughnuts that the lead sound is the tried and true minimoog.

Pull up a default patch.

Change the wavetable of an active osc to 'vintage mini' and slide the wavetable index all the way to the right so the waveform looks like a narrow pulse.

Enable a 24dB low pass filter. Pull the filter cutoff to about 44 semitones.

Add some resonance - about .33

Set amp release to about 130ms

Set mode to legato, add a little portamento

If you like, enable stereo, and stereo detune and a little delay.

That should get you most of the way there.

Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2005 9:10 am
by VitcoMusic
I think Stevie Winwood used a Prophet 5 during that era (as I recall the video) - and it does have that Prophet 'sound'.

DV

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 7:17 pm
by BradLyons
Hmmmm would be interesting to know. Years ago from "Mike and the Mechanics" on "All I need is a Miracle", I swore the sound was from a DX7. In a conversation I had with Adrian Lee back in ooooh 1998 or so, he said it was an SH101! Yeah, I was way off :-)