Access Music User Forum

Sounds like a modulated vowel filter...

I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you. Although other instrument tracks may be from the Virus, the pad is a generic Roland D-50 type choir sound, meaning, it's a sample. How can you tell? When you play different notes through the Virus vowel filter on 'ah' all the notes sound like 'ah'. When you play a sample based instrument, since the original sample is re-sampled to play slower or faster, the spectral content also becomes lower or higher, so, if you play a series of descending notes, 'ah' gradually becomes 'aw' which in turn gradually becomes 'ough' and so on. Listen again and you'll see that lower notes don't say 'ah'.

Which brings me to a possible feature request from Access people who may be reading this - is it possible to add an "offset" control to the vowel filter? Its function would be to take the vowel's spectral response and linearly "re-spread" it across the spectrum so it would be narrower (percieved as lower) or wider (percieved as higher). This way, if the offset is modulated to be key following, it would be possible to emulate that D-50 choir behavior. And when used out of context... many cool things can happen...

It's sounds to me like a layered vocoder and formant filter pad.

Try Keyboard Follow on the filter...

OK, I see some clarifications are in order:

• Regarding key follower, I was talking about the vowel filter, not the regular filter.
• Regarding the sound we are discussing, I said "a generic Roland D-50 type choir sound", because since this sound has become such a staple, many other synths feature immitations of it. Could it be the A-67 choir? Then again this sound could have been made on the virus using vowel filter or vocoder, and then re-sampled into a wavetable synth.