The Robots bass sound

  • Hi,


    Title says it all: is it possible to get The Robots bass sound from Virus TI? Anybody willing to try?


    Krafwerk introduced this type of sound on Man Machine album and of course The Robots is the most famous example but you can hear very similar in Spacelab too.


    Anyway those of you having better ears and better sound design skills, can you give any hint what are the basic elements of this sound?


    Thx

  • I am afraid there's little more than having 1 osc and tweaking filter. As I said, I am sure they found something new (idea or technic) at that time, on Man Machine album where they used this kind sound at least on 3 tracks. You don't hear it on earlier Kraftwerk records..


    The Robots bass has a special, percussive crispy attack...

  • The way I would go about recreating it would be (1) Parallel filters, one LP closing as with traditional bass sounds, and the other BP with a fair amount of resonance and cutoff controlled by an LFO or a softknob, (2) The "click" of the attack can be achieved using the punch knob, and also by using OSC2 and testing various positions of the osc sync knob that are not 0, until you find the best sounding one. Further emphasis can be acheived by lowering the sustain level of the amp envelope, and adding a short burst of noise, controlled by an LFO in ENV mode.
    Good luck!