Mostly Analog Synthpop - Behringer Crave / Cat / Roland JX-08 / Volca Bass

This is a synthpop jam featuring a trio of analog synths and the digital JX-08. It's short and simple and, I hope, fun.

The Behringer Cat is in the bass role this time, alternating between a sustained bass and a punchy bassline. Almost all of the the waveforms are up in this patch, with a little extra emphasis on the sub generators.

The Behringer Crave plays a plucky sound here, outlining the main melody. I have both the noise oscillator and the sawtooth wave patched to external audio, so I can blend both with the pulse wave. Also a bit of key tracking to the filter cutoff.

The Korg Volca bass is playing a sort of pulsing mid bassline with a little sidechain compression in the DAW, to add to the groove. Originally I had a different synth in its place and I was going for more of an acid sound, but it just felt like too much going on. This is more of a background element to add some subtle excitement.

The Roland JX-08 is handling big pads/chords here. Sorry for blocking it with my shoulder while I'm tweaking! My studio is undergoing a bit of a reorganization right now and I have limited space to place my tripod. I'm mostly tweaking the filter envelope attack to control how the sound swells from section to section, and also tweaking the filter cutoff to adjust where it starts and the mod amount to control how much it swells.

I'm using Magic Switch (Chorus) and Baby Comeback (Delay) from Baby Audio and Raum (Reverb) from Native Instruments. All are free. I'm also using Echoboy (delay) from Soundtoys on the Crave, which is not free. My workflow on a lot of tracks is to write in my DAW with soft synths and then replace the sounds with hardware. In this case the pluck I started with had a double delay on it and I wanted to keep that in the final, so I pulled in Echoboy. I usually use mostly free plugins, but I still have all the paid ones too!

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#behringercrave #behringercat #rolandjx08 #volcabass

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