Classic leads – the Minimoog in your VA

If your VA synth has two or more independant voices i.e. with independant portamento rate etc. or is a multimode synth, you could use this feature to make leads and basses react in a much more “analogue” way to performance controls. For instance, instead of using two oscillators within one voice, use two voices containing one oscillator each. Copy your simple patch to the second voice and VERY SLIGHTLY detune the following parameters against each other…

• pitch (of course)
• portamento rate
• vibrato depth (also via mod wheel)
• pitchbend range (same integer value, but a bit of offset in one of the voices)

Don’t detune vibrato rate – in fact you should make sure they are in perfect phase by retriggering them – those old synths used a single LFO for vibrato. Allowing vibrato phases/rates to drift apart makes it sound too lush. By the way, I’ve looked at a lot of “Minimoog” patches on a lot of synths, and have never seen this kind of thing done properly. Not even by me until recently! (on MicroKORG XL)

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