Patch 009 - ADK Clap

I've had a lot on this week so apologies for the lack of patches (I had promised four and you're getting one at the end of the week).

I must admit I didn't have a clue how to start with a clap sound and had made a number of aborted attempts of one before now. Initially I started with a burst of noise shaped via an amp envelope with fast attack and decay / release with no sustain and basically found myself with a hi hat. A low pass filter made the sound duller but listening to a clap from my sample library there was more tone to it than a low pass filtered burst of noise. I turned to google and found a very interesting site - Advanced Programming Techniques for Modular Synthesizers which was written for the Nord Modular hardware synth. Still a lot of the techniques were valid for any synth (hardware or software) and on the page relating to Percussion Synthesis a synthesized clap was discussed.

According to this site, the key element I seemed to be missing was the delay added to the sound to simulate the "echoes and reverberations produced in an enclosed environment from the slapping together of the hands". That made a lot of sense so I added some onboard delay over the top and I was almost there. The sound still lacked a bit of interest so I turned to Reason's Subtractor synth and checked out the clap sound in the Factory library. The Subtractor synth is very similar in terms of architecture to the microKORG so I basically ripped off the filter settings (BPF with cut-off of 81 and resonance of 42) and I was finally getting close.

I realised that I could use two filters with noise if I used the noise oscillator in Osc 1 instead of just adding noise in the mixer. This meant that I could filter out the higher frequencies and add a BPF on top. The level was a bit low so I boosted it a bit by adding distortion. The level is still a bit low but I am happy with that for now (I guess you could add an identical patch on timbre 2 if you wanted).

Here are the settings (starting from init, shift+3):

Voice: SYT, SGL, PLY, ---, --- (unchanged)
Pitch: 0, 0, 0, 2, 5 (unchanged)
Osc 1: NOS, 63, 0, ---, ---
Osc 2: SAW, OFF, 0, 0, --- (unchanged)
Mixer: 127, 0, 0, ---, --- (unchanged)
Filter: BPF, 81, 42, 0, 0
Filter EG: 0, 64, 127, 0, ON (unchanged)
Amp: 127, CNT, ON, 0, ---
Amp EG: 0, 25, 0, 25, ON
LFO 1: TRI, OFF, OFF, 10, --- (unchanged)
LFO 2: SIN, OFF, OFF, 70, --- (unchanged)

Patch 1: LF1, PTC, 0, ---, --- (unchanged)
Patch 2: LF2, PTC, 0, ---, --- (unchanged)
Patch 3: LF1, CUT, 0, ---, --- (unchanged)
Patch 4: LF2, CUT, 0, ---, --- (unchanged)
Mod FX: FLG, 20, 0, ---, --- (unchanged)
Delay: STR, OFF, 20, 18, ---
EQ: 320, 0, 6.0, 0, --- (unchanged)
Arpeg. A: 120, 1.16, 80, UP, 1 (unchanged)
Arpeg. B: OFF, 0, ON, 8, --- (unchanged)