Beginner producer here, these are some fantastic breakdowns. I can't convey how amazing and informative these sound design breakdowns are, please keep up the good work.
you all probably dont care but does any of you know a way to get back into an Instagram account? I somehow lost my login password. I love any help you can give me.
@Alijah Quentin thanks for your reply. I got to the site on google and Im trying it out atm. Takes a while so I will reply here later when my account password hopefully is recovered.
I have been chashing this sound for over 25 years! Thank you sooo much! You are the man!!!!!! I would love to see you do a video on Turbo synth. Explaining what it was/did , and what modern plug-ins can accomplish the same tasks. Thank you again!
Turbosynth is an amazing piece of software. I just left a comment on this video about why I like it so much, although I didn't go into detail as to what it can do. I think even the NIN guys will tell you that there are easier options out there today, but for what it's worth, I can't get enough of it. I'm not quite familiar enough to give a complete run through, nor do I think it would be appropriate to describe in a comment due to the length that would require. However, I will try to explain a few of its features to give you an idea. Incidentally, you can still find original reviews of it online, as well as the program itself if you wish to try it via emulation (which is what I have done so far). One of the main features of Turbosynth is to download samples from a hardware sampler, edit them, and then upload them back to the sampler. I think this is probably what Trent did when using it for PHM, as SampleCell wasn't available for Mac until around 1991 or so. Regardless, it essentially serves as an awesome, albeit now rather outdated, method of editing the sounds contained within a hardware sampler via computer. That alone would be pretty cool, because the software includes lots of useful functions like pitch shifting, time stretching, sample rate conversion, etc. However, you can create samples from scratch if you want thanks to the oscillators that you can add to a sample. You can also convert a sample into an oscillator. You can even take a sample, add an oscillator, and run the two into a mixer to balance the sound as you like. The beauty of Turbosynth, aside from its power, lies within its intuitive interface. Everything is represented by a graphical object, and you simply connect the output of one thing, say a sample or an oscillator, to another thing (like a mixer) as if you were physically plugging one thing into the other. If you're at all interested in it, and don't mind the limitations of old hardware, I suggest you give it a try, as it's not that difficult to get set up in an emulator, and I've only barely scratched the surface of what it can do. Even better is if you have an old G3 PowerMac or something similar laying around, it'll run on anything that supports Classic Mac OS. I believe it'll even run on OSX in Classic mode, although I haven't tried it yet to confirm. It's truly an amazing piece of software and one I think will become very popular for users of vintage hardware.
Omg just stumbled across this channel. Amazing. I see there hasn’t been any activity in a year but I do hope you return as this is really great stuff you’ve made.
Amazingly informational! Please continue these rundowns in the future. Personally, I would love to see a breakdown of the synth sounds in A Warm Place.
I’m so ready for you to dive into the Fragile. I really want a Fragile series… I could listen to it forever. Always find something new on every listen. Love your channel.💜
I have to admit, Turbosynth is an absolutely BRILLIANT piece of software. It's like a cross between a sampler and a modular synth. To think that they were pulling off such stuff so long ago is incredible. What blows my mind the most is how it is simultaneously powerful and intuitive. I entirely blame this on the limitations of the hardware at the time, the basic nature of classic Mac OS, and some brilliant programmers who just needed to make a piece of software that does what it's supposed to do. There's even a version of it for the Atari ST. Turbosynth is a prime example of great software that does amazing things with an extremely minimal, but functional interface. It's got graphical representations that sometimes confuse me, but once I familiarize myself with them, I know exactly what I can do and how to do it. The graphics are very minimal and only serve to indicate functions without words. The process of using those functions is super intuitive and even the complex stuff becomes easy to grasp in very short time. It's an absolute blast to sit there and just draw things on screen to see how far you can mangle a sound. I totally get why he and his collaborators used it so much. In my opinion, it stands in very stark contrast to software plugins today. While software implementations have grown so powerful, and technology has processed so far, I find myself more drawn towards the simple, functional interface of Turbosynth. Fancy graphics do nothing to make a plugin more usable! Yes, it is a lot more laborious and time-consuming. But the effort of loading a sample into it, mangling it, and spitting it back out into hardware is part of the fun.
Thank you so much for breaking down this sound! I've been wondering for years how to recreate it. After watching your video I was able to get pretty close following your instructions. I bounced a wav file of an EMU Drumulator cowbell sound from Arturia Vintage Drum Machines (close enough to an EMax) after running it through a Tube Screamer emulation. Then I imported it into the Arturia Emulator V plugin and pitched it down. I used Logic Pro X's tuner and fine-tuned the pitch of the sample so it was in tune with the notes of the keyboard. Then I added some more layers of distortion using Izotrope Trash, NI Dirt and NI Bite (bitcrusher). I added a couple of final tweaks that got me even closer to the original sound. First, I looped the cowbell sample by zooming into the waveform and adding loop points at the zero crossings somewhere in the middle of the sample. This meant that I could sustain the notes longer and gave me the tremolo-like growl at the end of each note that you also hear on tracks like Heresy (NB. if you don't loop at the zero crossings you get weird clicks). Secondly, I added a resonant low pass filter within Emulator V and added envelope modulation and keyboard tracking (like in your first video). I think that the cowbell is just a starting point, but that by the time you've added all the distortion, aliasing noise, artefacts from pitching down the sample, etc, you are essentially playing key-tracked noise.
Well, sir-- that just blew my mind. I read the same interview on the NIN Wiki and couldn't grasp how that process would be actually look in practice. What you have done in this video really made the process Trent used very clear. I thank you so much. I am just learning this kind of production for my own music and I am trying to learn just how to go about making these kinds of sounds with today's gear. Of interest, I think Type O Negative may have used a similar sound... I can't recall which song it was, but it was off the "Bloody Kisses" album. I will have to go back and listen to the album to find which song it was. Any way, thanks for doing these two parts of recreating that "Terrible Lie" woodblock sound. Really, without this video, I just couldn't visualize just how to accomplish this from just going from what was said in Trent's interview. I am a guitarist and I am completely new to sound design and the world of synths.
I've got something close using a Roland SH01A by taking a sawtooth wave and modulating it with a noise-shape LFO turned way up and then adding noise underneath it. Any synth with a noise LFO wave shape should do the trick - it's almost like cross mod (in fact you can get the same sound using VCO2 on a Jupiter 8 (or any emulation) as noise and then increasing cross mod until you get the right pitching across the keyboard. I've even tried the same trick on the JV series ROMplers by using the "chaos-wave" LFO on the pitch of a saw wave.
Recently attempted a similar experiment in Logic. Exported a Clave hit as a WAV, imported it into Alchemy, added a couple of Logic's distortion effects as well as a bitcrush. Not quite perfect, but it does get you close :)
Bravo!! Loving these synth detective type breakdowns / journeys!! Especially with my fav band, NIN of course. Keep up the great work, it’s appreciated.
Nice work man. I always thought it was a Prophet VS for a lot of these sounds without thinking too much further. I've got some PHM multitracks, can't remember from where but those are awfully helpful to do a postmortem on a track. Now that I listened to it I realize it's a common transposition trick we use all the time thanks to having lots of audio samples (probably less common today, but I used it when I was learning to program and it's fun. We have so many options in the digital domain that Turbosynth doesn't really need to be resurrected unless someone wants to run it an emulator. Anyway, I took some dry samples from an Akai drum machine (the XE-8) and proceeded to mess around; normally I like the XR-10 sample set (very good rock set). I achieved the result from Terrible Lie with XE-8's woodblock-y sample. I enjoyed myself and made some new sounds in my daw. : ) Cheers!
Nice work. I always wanted to recreate that sound, but never got around to it. I used to read those Keyboard Mags cover to cover back in the day. It was a bonus whenever they interviewed Trent.
I want to note that this little 2 Part Breakdown of the Terrible Lie Sample also shows, how sounds can sound similar when they originate from a completely different sound source. Trent basically did the same thing that you did with the noise, taking the resonance part of the original source, in order to get a Synth like sound out of it, which does sound very similar and would totally have the same effect.
Hey man, good job, thanks for such a deep dissection, I heard to this album back 1992 and I didn't think I could still be surprised by the creative process of it. Keep on making videos, we will be here to watch and learn.
I remember reading an interview with Trent where he talked about this sound. He mentioned it was a sampled wood block where he dropped the bit rate way down.
Yea I "studied " this as a 16 year old seeing them open w this, then w my band as we covered it, and now as i am looking to duplicate it w my band. Lovely job. You got the sound pat, not pitch, but that's nit picking. Love this. I'm in DC. Do you collab. I'm a guitarist, singer, and keyboard Messer arounder
I cant get it to sound like yours, yours and trents sounds like an electronic instrument with nice pure pitch tone changes, mine sounds like a dull flat , out of tune, fuzzy buzzing woodblock. Is it because i'm using Serato? When you dropped yours in the sampler the tone totally changed to an electronic sounding instrument or something from an old video game? How does that work? The tone of mine stays the same when i put it in serato, a buzzing flat woodblock
I've got a question about this sound, and also 2 requests from a song from someone other than NIN. Is this also the same sound as in "Down In it" (starting at 0:14 on the album version), or do you think that's a different sound? Personally I think it sounds like an FM sound, but I don't know if Trent ever used FM, and I haven't looked at it under a spectragram yet. My synth breakdown request(s) are from "Information society"'s "What's on your mind / Pure energy" and the two sounds are That bass drum they made. It's a pitched bassdrum, a tiny bit saturated, but there's some other effect(s) in there that I don't recognize. The other is that synth solo (the very staccato one)
If Trent were to use FM back then, the obvious choice would have been the DX7, but I can tell you for a fact that he never used the DX7 (other than on stage) because he hated the thing. Most likely it was done using some manipulated sample played by the Emax. In his own words, almost every sound on the album is the Emax. The Emax uses 12-bit samples at up to 42 kHz sample rate, so by default, any sound it plays will have a bit of lo-fi grit. Having said all that, it does sound similar to me, in the way that a lot of the sounds on the album sound similar, but it still sounds different. It's got much more of a ring or a clang to it. I imagine Trent employed the same kind of tricks to whatever sample he was using, like pitching it down via the Emax. But it's definitely a different sound.
Can you do a video on how to get this sound? ua-cam.com/video/RCiOYGcHALU/v-deo.html time 0:18 -Depeche Mode. You're videos on NIN are great! Can you do Depeche Mode as well (the dark stuff)? Thanks!!!
Great work man. I wonder if u could breakdown an interlude part for a "Dissapointed" tune ua-cam.com/video/bOXXayxeSlY/v-deo.html. And i also wonder if u interested in alan wilder's music.
Beginner producer here, these are some fantastic breakdowns. I can't convey how amazing and informative these sound design breakdowns are, please keep up the good work.
Glad you like them! I wish the best on your journey!
you all probably dont care but does any of you know a way to get back into an Instagram account?
I somehow lost my login password. I love any help you can give me.
@Dakota Layne Instablaster :)
@Alijah Quentin thanks for your reply. I got to the site on google and Im trying it out atm.
Takes a while so I will reply here later when my account password hopefully is recovered.
Same here!
I have been chashing this sound for over 25 years! Thank you sooo much! You are the man!!!!!! I would love to see you do a video on Turbo synth. Explaining what it was/did , and what modern plug-ins can accomplish the same tasks. Thank you again!
Thats exactly my next episode
Sent you a PM @ your Gmail account, thanks :-)
@@PhotonVideos i am excite.
Turbosynth is an amazing piece of software. I just left a comment on this video about why I like it so much, although I didn't go into detail as to what it can do. I think even the NIN guys will tell you that there are easier options out there today, but for what it's worth, I can't get enough of it.
I'm not quite familiar enough to give a complete run through, nor do I think it would be appropriate to describe in a comment due to the length that would require. However, I will try to explain a few of its features to give you an idea. Incidentally, you can still find original reviews of it online, as well as the program itself if you wish to try it via emulation (which is what I have done so far).
One of the main features of Turbosynth is to download samples from a hardware sampler, edit them, and then upload them back to the sampler. I think this is probably what Trent did when using it for PHM, as SampleCell wasn't available for Mac until around 1991 or so. Regardless, it essentially serves as an awesome, albeit now rather outdated, method of editing the sounds contained within a hardware sampler via computer. That alone would be pretty cool, because the software includes lots of useful functions like pitch shifting, time stretching, sample rate conversion, etc.
However, you can create samples from scratch if you want thanks to the oscillators that you can add to a sample. You can also convert a sample into an oscillator. You can even take a sample, add an oscillator, and run the two into a mixer to balance the sound as you like. The beauty of Turbosynth, aside from its power, lies within its intuitive interface. Everything is represented by a graphical object, and you simply connect the output of one thing, say a sample or an oscillator, to another thing (like a mixer) as if you were physically plugging one thing into the other.
If you're at all interested in it, and don't mind the limitations of old hardware, I suggest you give it a try, as it's not that difficult to get set up in an emulator, and I've only barely scratched the surface of what it can do. Even better is if you have an old G3 PowerMac or something similar laying around, it'll run on anything that supports Classic Mac OS. I believe it'll even run on OSX in Classic mode, although I haven't tried it yet to confirm. It's truly an amazing piece of software and one I think will become very popular for users of vintage hardware.
Playing around with format. Let me know how you feel about it!
Love it man! The variation of format seems apt, I like the deduction and such too. Glad you made a follow up:) Keep it up dude, hope you're good
Yup, like that format. Keep at it :-)
Omg just stumbled across this channel. Amazing. I see there hasn’t been any activity in a year but I do hope you return as this is really great stuff you’ve made.
Amazingly informational! Please continue these rundowns in the future. Personally, I would love to see a breakdown of the synth sounds in A Warm Place.
Its a really clean sound, great for staccato leads. It never ceases to amaze me how these sounds a re produced.
I’m so ready for you to dive into the Fragile. I really want a Fragile series… I could listen to it forever. Always find something new on every listen. Love your channel.💜
I have to admit, Turbosynth is an absolutely BRILLIANT piece of software. It's like a cross between a sampler and a modular synth. To think that they were pulling off such stuff so long ago is incredible.
What blows my mind the most is how it is simultaneously powerful and intuitive. I entirely blame this on the limitations of the hardware at the time, the basic nature of classic Mac OS, and some brilliant programmers who just needed to make a piece of software that does what it's supposed to do. There's even a version of it for the Atari ST.
Turbosynth is a prime example of great software that does amazing things with an extremely minimal, but functional interface. It's got graphical representations that sometimes confuse me, but once I familiarize myself with them, I know exactly what I can do and how to do it. The graphics are very minimal and only serve to indicate functions without words. The process of using those functions is super intuitive and even the complex stuff becomes easy to grasp in very short time. It's an absolute blast to sit there and just draw things on screen to see how far you can mangle a sound. I totally get why he and his collaborators used it so much.
In my opinion, it stands in very stark contrast to software plugins today. While software implementations have grown so powerful, and technology has processed so far, I find myself more drawn towards the simple, functional interface of Turbosynth. Fancy graphics do nothing to make a plugin more usable! Yes, it is a lot more laborious and time-consuming. But the effort of loading a sample into it, mangling it, and spitting it back out into hardware is part of the fun.
Thank you so much for breaking down this sound! I've been wondering for years how to recreate it. After watching your video I was able to get pretty close following your instructions. I bounced a wav file of an EMU Drumulator cowbell sound from Arturia Vintage Drum Machines (close enough to an EMax) after running it through a Tube Screamer emulation. Then I imported it into the Arturia Emulator V plugin and pitched it down. I used Logic Pro X's tuner and fine-tuned the pitch of the sample so it was in tune with the notes of the keyboard. Then I added some more layers of distortion using Izotrope Trash, NI Dirt and NI Bite (bitcrusher). I added a couple of final tweaks that got me even closer to the original sound. First, I looped the cowbell sample by zooming into the waveform and adding loop points at the zero crossings somewhere in the middle of the sample. This meant that I could sustain the notes longer and gave me the tremolo-like growl at the end of each note that you also hear on tracks like Heresy (NB. if you don't loop at the zero crossings you get weird clicks). Secondly, I added a resonant low pass filter within Emulator V and added envelope modulation and keyboard tracking (like in your first video). I think that the cowbell is just a starting point, but that by the time you've added all the distortion, aliasing noise, artefacts from pitching down the sample, etc, you are essentially playing key-tracked noise.
Well, sir-- that just blew my mind. I read the same interview on the NIN Wiki and couldn't grasp how that process would be actually look in practice. What you have done in this video really made the process Trent used very clear. I thank you so much. I am just learning this kind of production for my own music and I am trying to learn just how to go about making these kinds of sounds with today's gear. Of interest, I think Type O Negative may have used a similar sound... I can't recall which song it was, but it was off the "Bloody Kisses" album. I will have to go back and listen to the album to find which song it was. Any way, thanks for doing these two parts of recreating that "Terrible Lie" woodblock sound. Really, without this video, I just couldn't visualize just how to accomplish this from just going from what was said in Trent's interview. I am a guitarist and I am completely new to sound design and the world of synths.
I've got something close using a Roland SH01A by taking a sawtooth wave and modulating it with a noise-shape LFO turned way up and then adding noise underneath it. Any synth with a noise LFO wave shape should do the trick - it's almost like cross mod (in fact you can get the same sound using VCO2 on a Jupiter 8 (or any emulation) as noise and then increasing cross mod until you get the right pitching across the keyboard. I've even tried the same trick on the JV series ROMplers by using the "chaos-wave" LFO on the pitch of a saw wave.
Recently attempted a similar experiment in Logic. Exported a Clave hit as a WAV, imported it into Alchemy, added a couple of Logic's distortion effects as well as a bitcrush. Not quite perfect, but it does get you close :)
Nice work!!
Bravo!! Loving these synth detective type breakdowns / journeys!! Especially with my fav band, NIN of course. Keep up the great work, it’s appreciated.
Nice work man. I always thought it was a Prophet VS for a lot of these sounds without thinking too much further. I've got some PHM multitracks, can't remember from where but those are awfully helpful to do a postmortem on a track. Now that I listened to it I realize it's a common transposition trick we use all the time thanks to having lots of audio samples (probably less common today, but I used it when I was learning to program and it's fun.
We have so many options in the digital domain that Turbosynth doesn't really need to be resurrected unless someone wants to run it an emulator. Anyway, I took some dry samples from an Akai drum machine (the XE-8) and proceeded to mess around; normally I like the XR-10 sample set (very good rock set). I achieved the result from Terrible Lie with XE-8's woodblock-y sample. I enjoyed myself and made some new sounds in my daw. : ) Cheers!
Nice work. I always wanted to recreate that sound, but never got around to it. I used to read those Keyboard Mags cover to cover back in the day. It was a bonus whenever they interviewed Trent.
Please make more of these!!
I want to note that this little 2 Part Breakdown of the Terrible Lie Sample also shows, how sounds can sound similar when they originate from a completely different sound source.
Trent basically did the same thing that you did with the noise, taking the resonance part of the original source, in order to get a Synth like sound out of it, which does sound very similar and would totally have the same effect.
Yeah, greatly appreciated the amount of dedication put into this one song! The format is great too.
Wish you made more videos!
Can you dissect the main synth lead and/or the (aaahhhhhh!!!!) sound after each line in the chorus from Down in it at some point please??
So interesting, I get so inspired listening to NIN
a request for the synth sound from the song " while im still here " at around 1:16
Doing it!
Hey man, good job, thanks for such a deep dissection, I heard to this album back 1992 and I didn't think I could still be surprised by the creative process of it. Keep on making videos, we will be here to watch and learn.
You deserve a millions subs.
Determination is a great friend and a great enemy. Wow .
He is back!
I remember reading an interview with Trent where he talked about this sound. He mentioned it was a sampled wood block where he dropped the bit rate way down.
that's amazing
Amazing work! Could you do some synths from Massive Attack's Mezzanine album? I was never able to do the Mezzanine or Group 4 synths correctly ...
Nice one. Many thanks!
You're welcome!
Incredible videos. I love this discussion. Not sure if you did the turbosynth one yet or not, but I can't wait to see it to learn more.
Impressed! Thanks for sharing!
this is dope
Great job!
Yea I "studied " this as a 16 year old seeing them open w this, then w my band as we covered it, and now as i am looking to duplicate it w my band. Lovely job. You got the sound pat, not pitch, but that's nit picking. Love this. I'm in DC. Do you collab. I'm a guitarist, singer, and keyboard Messer arounder
Can you ppplleeeaasseee release these as samples/one shots!?!?
You should take a stab at the synth in The Only Time.. I have been trying to figure that one out for a while now. Great work!
Great stuff, keep up!
wow wow wow this is amazing, thank you so much
I bet its the Kurzweil 2000 w sampler
That wasn’t released yet when this song was made.
oh wow!!
are there any modern alternatives to Turbosynth?
it looks really interesting
I cant get it to sound like yours, yours and trents sounds like an electronic instrument with nice pure pitch tone changes, mine sounds like a dull flat , out of tune, fuzzy buzzing woodblock. Is it because i'm using Serato? When you dropped yours in the sampler the tone totally changed to an electronic sounding instrument or something from an old video game? How does that work? The tone of mine stays the same when i put it in serato, a buzzing flat woodblock
I've got a question about this sound, and also 2 requests from a song from someone other than NIN.
Is this also the same sound as in "Down In it" (starting at 0:14 on the album version), or do you think that's a different sound? Personally I think it sounds like an FM sound, but I don't know if Trent ever used FM, and I haven't looked at it under a spectragram yet.
My synth breakdown request(s) are from "Information society"'s "What's on your mind / Pure energy" and the two sounds are
That bass drum they made. It's a pitched bassdrum, a tiny bit saturated, but there's some other effect(s) in there that I don't recognize.
The other is that synth solo (the very staccato one)
If Trent were to use FM back then, the obvious choice would have been the DX7, but I can tell you for a fact that he never used the DX7 (other than on stage) because he hated the thing. Most likely it was done using some manipulated sample played by the Emax. In his own words, almost every sound on the album is the Emax. The Emax uses 12-bit samples at up to 42 kHz sample rate, so by default, any sound it plays will have a bit of lo-fi grit.
Having said all that, it does sound similar to me, in the way that a lot of the sounds on the album sound similar, but it still sounds different. It's got much more of a ring or a clang to it. I imagine Trent employed the same kind of tricks to whatever sample he was using, like pitching it down via the Emax. But it's definitely a different sound.
I would love to know how this lead sound was created. ua-cam.com/video/3_Pj7SHZSR4/v-deo.html
Could you do the sound during the part after the second chorus of Heresy? I've always wondered what that sound is
That kind of windy sound?
@@PhotonVideos The more prominent mechanical sound (unless you mean the same thing), maybe its not a synth but I wonder it is
I'd have assumed he started with an DX FM sound
Can you do a video on how to get this sound? ua-cam.com/video/RCiOYGcHALU/v-deo.html time 0:18 -Depeche Mode. You're videos on NIN are great! Can you do Depeche Mode as well (the dark stuff)? Thanks!!!
I feel like you told a "Terrible Lie" with your first video on this, but then got much "Closer". Hahahaha.
Great work man. I wonder if u could breakdown an interlude part for a "Dissapointed" tune ua-cam.com/video/bOXXayxeSlY/v-deo.html. And i also wonder if u interested in alan wilder's music.
🙇♂️
Sounds like you recorded the narration in a closet haha. Cool video though!