Reverse Engineering Rob Hubbard's sound
2000-09-08 by shifty@gweep.net
If you have the HVSC a good song for demo'ing some "typical" Rob Hubbard sounds is "Phantoms of the Asteroids." I've been running Sidplay in Original mode and using the mixer to isolate SID Channels, trying to re-create some of the techniques Rob used in such stellar songs as "Chimaera." So far, I have learned quite a bit. For starters, he's not really tweaking the Sid registers very complexly, but he is using some simple wavetables. Want to learn more? Then start your own mini-project to figure out and recreate some more of Rob Hubbard's songs. In Song #2 of "Phantoms", several very classic Hubbard-sounds are employed. There is a pleasing, swiftly-changing melody played with two voices on Voices 1 and 2. Below is "how he did it." Hopefully you will be inspired to try some of these simple but effective techniques yourself: The first sound is in seconds 0-7 of the song. It is quite simply two square waves played at different intervals (G against B-Flat). At 7 seconds comes a classic sound from "Chimaera." It is quite simply two high-pitched square waves with identical wavetables that go like this: +00 +12 +12 +12 +12 +12 +12 +12 the time for the individual steps is 20ms and the whole table is 160ms. They're separated by an interval I haven't yet found out. At 12 seconds comes a particularly beautiful sound. It is two simultaneous arpeggiations! It's pretty hard to tell exactly what's going on here, but it seems like Voice 1 is playing the Note E briefly, then sliding up to F then a two-note arpegg E/B begins. As this arpeggiation happens, the Pulse Width is varied from 25% to 75%. This has an exceptionally cool effect of making the pitch seem to increase! On Voice 2, it's a similar story: base note G (minor 3rd up from Voice 1), brief slide, then alternating rapidly between G and B-flat! Plus, there is a more complex pulse width modulation sequence. It begins at around 25%, up to 50%, down to 10% then back up to 50%. Then at 18 seconds is the lovely Hubbard drum sound from many songs. in this case, it's actually two sounds superimposed. One is a kick drum sound, the other a snare sound. The kick has some wavetable action at the begin, but is basically a square wave (with some filtering?) with decaying freq. The snare/white noise has some subtleties to it that you can see using the spectral view. First of all, there is a notch filter killing the narrow band from about 1500 Hz to 2KHz. On top of that, a wavetable is used at 20ms periods to swap the notch filter to between 2KHz and 5KHz, once again, at 1/8 of the steps in the table. This gives a sort of echo effect! brilliant!