IGOR’s Bass

IGOR’S THEME opens the album with 22 seconds of sustained synth bass to set the tone for the rest of the album.

The sound no doubt came from Tyler’s Roland JX-8P; I tried to create the sound on my Juno but without the cross-mod/ring-mod and the 2nd oscillator, I couldn’t quite get it to sound right. The patch can easily be created in the free PG-8X software synth, which is a tribute to the JX-8P. From the initial setting, set DCO-1’s waveform to the narrow square wave, and set DCO-2’s range to 16’. Set Cross Mod to 3, which sets DCO-2 to be ring-modulated with DCO-1, and then raise the volume of DCO-2 in the mixer section. You may need to lower the VCA level to prevent the sound from clipping on the way out of the synth.

You want to put the synth into unison mode, which will set all of it’s voices to double the same note, effectively making the patch monophonic and much thicker sounding. In PG-8X, you set full unison mode by pressing the Mono button in the key mode section at the top of the interface until it’s yellow. In the VCF section, lower the cutoff frequency to 94 to remove some of the harshness from the high-end, then set the Chorus effect to mode 1 to add some stereo width to the patch.

The bass in IGOR’S THEME also sounds like it was layered with a sub-bass track, to create a thicker low end. I used Ableton Live’s Bass synth (from the Max for Live Essentials) set to double the MIDI notes an octave below the PG-8X bass track. For the sub-bass patch, I used only the sine oscillator, set Sub Tone to 10%, Analog to 50%, turned on Sub Thru, and raised the amp envelope’s sustain to 100%.