How Jerusalem was made.

 

The drums and the pipe organ were recorded live.  My friend John Craft played the Roland V-Drums which we programmed to replicate the sound of Carl Palmers kit.

I played a stock pipe organ sound on a Korg Trinity midied to a Kurzweil K2500 which played a pipe organ sample from Sweetwater Sound’s Stratus collection.

 

The Bell, Timpani and Gong were added next.  These were all stock Kurzweil sounds.

 

My friend Mike Bond sang the vocal.

 

Then the Bass Guitar was added.  This was also a stock Kurzweil patch.  I recorded a midi track for the bass as well as the audio track.  I then used this track to play the MOTM synth bass track.

 

The MOTM synth bass was pretty much the standard miniMoog patch.  The midi to CV to an 820, the 820 to three 300s.  All three 300s were set to a pulse of about 30% duty cycle.  The first two oscs were tuned in unison, the third up one octave.  The oscs were intentionally left slightly detuned.  All three oscs were connected to a 440 then a 110, with both the 440 and 110 each controlled by there own 800.  The resonance was set to about 5 on the filter.

 

The first MOTM lead sound is a combination of two patches, one to get a sort of Moogish sound the other to simulate a sort of trumpet sound. 

 

The Moogish sound was done by going from the midi to cv to two 820s each with slightly different lag times.  Each 420 was patched into two 310s.  The sawtooth waveforms were used from all four.  They were tuned in unison, but again slightly detuned.  The mod wheel control signal from the midi to cv was attenuated then used to control two 190s.  Each of the 190s had its own 320 connected to its input with the 320s each tuned to slightly different frequencies, both using sine waves.  Each of the 190s outputs were connected to only one of the 310s.  This caused two of the four oscs to have vibrato controlled by the mod wheel, but at different amplitudes and rates.  All four oscs were fed into an 830 mixer then into a 440.  The output of the 440 fed a 110.  The 440 and the 110 each had its own 800 EG. 

 

I started out trying to do the trumpet with FM, but finally decided to use additive synthesis.  I looked at the spectra of a piccolo trumpet, then set up 7 300 oscs using sine wave outputs and sync.  No lag was used.  The oscillators were tuned to f, 2f, 3f, 4f, 5f, 6f and 7f.  Six of the oscillators were mixed using an 830 and fed into a 440, with the seventh being fed into the second input of the 440.  The amplitude levels of the oscs were f – 0db, 2f +6db, 3f -1db, 4f -8db, 5f –8db, 6f –14db and 7f -19db.  The 440 was controlled by an 800.  ADSR, Resonance and Frequency were tweaked to give a convincing sort of splat on the attack. The output of the 440 was fed to a 110 also controlled by an 800.

 

The second MOTM lead sound is also a combination of two patches.  I used the same Moogish sound, but I wanted a sort of percussive toy piano sound instead of the trumpet.

I used the same patch, but retuned the oscs to f, 3f, 9f, 18f, and 27f.  I couldn’t get the 9th or upper harmonics to sync so I tuned them by ear and ended up detuning them slightly.  I didn’t use the 6th and 7th osc.  The amplitude ratios of the oscs were f -19db, 3f -3db, 9f – 0db, 18f -9db and 27f -18db.  I used a sharper attack on the EGs for a percussive sound.

 

If I had more time I probably would have used FM for this sound as well.

 

Each of the synth lead sounds was recorded twice into ProTools, once panned hard left and once panned hard right.  On the second recording of each I adjusted the fine tuning of the oscs ever so slightly.  All the synth lead sounds were also processed with a slightly different delay for the left and right and the Reverb One plug-in within ProTools.