Producers... lets talk disco

[sm00sh]

greetings djtt,

My last few music projects seemed to have naturally progressed into some really stripped back disco tunes. (i know nothing new)

however im looking to improve on creating my own disco stabs that syncopate against my samples and percussions...

example,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kQ5iHrTa5w

at around 1 min those very disco sounding stabs really define the groove.

my observations : seems to be tons of reverb and delays going on which seem to carry the sound across the mix. seems to wobble a bit (lfo ?)

any tips regarding creating synth patches that give that sound would greatly be appreciated. I found some decent presets with Sylenth 1 (VST). but im kind of picky about using my own patches.

also feel free to comment on ANY aspect of disco/house/tech house _insert genre of choice...I love talking shop about producing.

[Filterkat]

just sounds like a supersaw synth to me, played in chord stabs, with some modulation on the filter and some mid to high resonance. shouldnt be too hard to recreate. Dont think they used an lfo, probably just the modulation envelope and routed it to the filter.

try getting a basic saw synth, setting the filter to low pass, resonance about mid way, and route the filter to the modulation envelope. and it seems to me like they either used the decay or sustain/release to program the timing on the filter drop. You might have to invert the modulation envelope depending on the synth aswel, because otherwise it will do a reverse of what thats doing... meaning, instead of the filter going down at the end of the stab, it will start low and go up. (this sounds pretty good anyway aswel for disco stuff, but if you want that sort of sound where it goes down, try inverting the mod envelope)

make sure the synth is set to polyphonic so u can play chords.

obviusly its played up in the higher octaves aswel :P

[Filterkat]

o yeah and they would have used a gated reverb for that echo effect that cuts off aswel :P

[sm00sh]

cheers for the reply.

i got some pretty funky results by detuning two saw waves and adding a bunch of voices. the filter envelope can be a bit tricky. having a hard time getting the attack of the stab to sit perfectly. seems too early at some parts yet late at others.

little bit of delay seems to mask it better.