Would anyone be willing to help me recreate a synth patch I accidently overwrote?

Hey everyone,

I was composing some music on my OP-1 and I accidentally overwrote one of my synth patches that I used for part of the song. I tried to recreate the patch but I can’t seem to recreate the sound like I was hoping to. The patch is too sharp and the original was much softer. I think I used the string or the phase synth engine and the cwo filter, but I can’t remember all the settings. Is there anyone here who might know the OP-1 better than me that might have a good estimation of the settings?

I’m not sure if this kind of post is allowed on this forum, so I apologize in advance if it’s not allowed. If I can’t recreate the patch it’s ok, I’ll just have to live with that. I just kind of liked the sound of that patch and wanted to save it. I attached a track sample of the synth patch and my best estimation of what the synth engine settings might have been.

Thanks for any advice or help you guys can provide!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yyB-iDjkoCOyTT0TdN3oYq1PZeR-0Cro?usp=sharing

Do you still have it recorded on your op-1 anywhere on the tape?

I have the track sample in the google doc and my attempt at recreating it in the google doc, but unfortunately I seem to have overwritten the original patch.

ok, took a stab at it. my thought process:

Basics: the sound clearly has a long release, and is playing a arpeggiated sequence of B, E, G#. A little tricky to pick out, but it’s a 9-step sequence, B-E-B-G#-B-G#-E-G#-E. (that’s the order, at least. i dunno which step was your original first step)
At first, my ear thought it was 18 steps, but this was just some modulation that made it sound different every other loop. More on that later.
Somewhere around 90BPM, 16th note steps.

The soft tone of it does rule out some options, except if you had a Punch or Nitro FX to roll off the highs. But it sounds like there’s some modulation or delay going on, so I don’t think you used up the FX slot with just a filter.

Phase can’t get this softness. String sounded plausible, and I tried for a bit with that, but you just can’t dampen the initial “pluck”, no matter how “taut” the blue parameter is, how low the “tinny” red parameter is, etc.

I also wasn’t convinced that CWO was at play. In my head, it just doesn’t do the subtle kinda chorus-y modulation you can hear in your patch. More in-your-face. So where does this modulation come from?

DR WAVE and Pulse both have a built-in modulation, red parameter. (DR WAVE is some kind of chorus/phase modulation, and Pulse has a chorus-y thing in one direction, and a pulse-width mod in the other direction).
I assumed you didn’t use DR WAVE. Pretty distinctive, hard to forget. Plus, it’s a static waveform on its own. Your patch has a slightly brighter attack, then a softer decay.
And Pulse does exactly that!

Select Pulse, dial in Blue, and we get the softness we want. I increased the envelope attack, so that we don’t get as strong a pluck from the Pulse engine. Dialing down Green also softened the tone some more. Dialing in White gives the right sort of timbre (kind of a hollow tone? but not nasally). And finally, dialing Red to the left gives some nice modulation.

Then the FX. I tried some Delay first, and it sounded OK. But then I went back to CWO. With the softness of the Pulse patch, CWO could give more subtle results than I expected (it can go wild with brighter synth engines). I dialed in Blue to a few notches above zero; there’s one tick (without having to fine-tune with Shift) that ends up at about half the rate of the 9-step sequence. That’s what fooled me at first into thinking it was an 18-step pattern.

The modulation in your patch is subtle, so the White feedback parameter is somewhat low (less than 40). It sounds like it’s “rising”, so Red (like the polarity of feedback or something?) is up. To my ear, not quite 100% up, but close.
I was debating between a super-short Green delay parameter (3-6), and a long one (79). I think it’s a shorter one, because the effect sounds more like it’s doing some phasing (audio-rate delay) than an echo (longer delay).

Pretty close, I think. There’s still a bit of “hollowness” to your original patch that I couldn’t quite get, and the CWO tuning in my attempt sounds a bit too “flanger-y” to me.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1v5K0mLEd7LQXtk_wgAuUSe7gFxGVDZlX?usp=sharing

this was a fun problem, absolutely this type of question is allowed here!

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Wow, that sounds pretty close to the original. Thank you so much! It didn’t have to be an exact copy so I really appreciate this. I was thinking I was going to have to go with another synth patch if I couldn’t recreate this so this really helped a lot. I made that patch, recorded that section and began work on another couple of synth patches. When it was getting time for exporting my data I was pretty sad to find out that I had overwritten it so that was pretty disappointing. Thank you guys so much for your help!