Vangelis Brass, how to?

You know, that sound that’s in the intro of Chariots of Fire, or
So far I’ve come up with 3 qualities I can think of
It’s a sawtooth osciliator. There’s a long release, and I’m guessing that when the note was released, that’s when he did a lot of pitchbend that made the notes go down in pitch on Bladerunner.

It’s a really good sound, has anyone else recreated it? I know a few people have, on all sorts of equipment, but I haven’t found any modern guides. There was a video done years ago about how to do it on a microkorg but the quality was terrible, I could barely make out what knobs he was twiddling when a screenshot or just a list of settings would be nice.

I’ve heard something about “4ms ensemble.”
I don’t know much about that, I have an NTS-1 that groups Ensemble, Chorus, Flanger & Phaser together, and I’m guessing that a similar feature would be L/R stereo delay, so I’m guessing that 4ms means 4 milliseconds? What is an ensemble? I’ve heard chorus turning a simple waveform into something that sounds “bigger”, is it playing a chorus of frequencies that are slightly out of tune, or phase?

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Ensemble Oscillator from 4ms Company?

https://youtu.be/6JeZR13dLLI Exactly.

Well, that was a bit confusing. There I was thinking it was describing a quantity of ensemble, and not a module.

My Hydrasynth has a factory patch named BladeTitles, which sounds very much like the original CS-80 patch (using after touch you can open the filter) and my XVA-1 DIY FPGA synth has a patch that sounds a bit like it, so I didn’t have the need for recreating the sound myself, but I can try to decompose the patch to see how it’s made and.

The first item if the webpage below describes how you can make the brass sound of blade runner:

was it the CS-80…

f so one of the guys here has a “Deckards Dream” which should be able to do it. Can’t off hand remember who has the little beast

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Yes, I believe it was…

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Here’s a video of the Hydrasynth patch (first part). This video was one of the main reasons I bought the Hydrasynth.


Pick a sawtooth waveform over two oscillators; detune them and reduce the filter to taste. Adjust the amplitude envelope to affect the filter (so the filter opens as the note’s amplitude increases and decreases). Add reverb and you’re there. If this sound isn’t at least used in the sequel, then we’re marching with pitchforks to LA to protest…

So, I did that, and yeah, it sounds like a sawtooth, and that’s about as much as I can detune (-1.09) before it sounds bad. I can see where reverb is needed, but I’m not sure. It doesn’t sound right somehow. Maybe something to do with the filters? Or the ADSR envelope into the filters?

Just as an experiment I was thinking about band pass filters and I reckoned if I took the output of both the LPF and the HPF and fed that into a mixer, that’d be like a band pass but I could then control the amounts of LPF and HPF.

Edit: I can’t upload VCV rack patches here but that’s pretty straightforward I hope.

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Here is the “Chariots of Fire Horn” for the CS80.

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I should have shared the video first off.

Modular does a lot of interesting things, the one that I want to try is auto (or semi auto) generated music. His vangelis brass is playing random notes, and those note sequences switch on and off with long (10 or more seconds? Haven’t been counting) delays inbetween new notes playing.

Edit: SWTPC PSYCH TONE - Rare 70's DIY Programmable Synthesizer. - YouTube This is pertinent to what I was thinking of. Even in the early 70’s there were semi random sequencers that you could dial in a plethora of different patterns in, which to me means if that selector dial were instead a CV input you could have random voltages sent in to trigger random sequences randomly.

Back to the first video, There’s a bass in that, and I think I’d done a similar thing with my patch where I had a long LFO, which I can’t find now as apparently I didn’t save it, and that’s annoying as I had detuned it just enough so it sounded proper dark and scary, ominous even.

Then he’s got samples of rain playing in. I have rain samples. I have a beautiful 2 hour long recording of rain when I was last on holiday and you can hear muffled voices of my family and I eating dinner, having conversation, whilst there’s the hard patter of fat raindrops on hard terracotta tiles. I too, want to have rain samples going into a patch.

This morning I was talking to a friend, he’s a welder but has a degree in graphic design and animation. He’s told me how he’s moved on from autoCAD to solidworks as I was saying how I want to make a banister for my grandmothers garden as I’ve seen her struggling to walk up the steps to the kitchen. He told me that he could design it in that so there’d be a drawing. I told him not to bother, as;

1: Autocad/solidworks is really complex, and unintuitive. I tried to use those programs to design a staircase years ago, one I saw in a dream with a bookcase on one side as it curves around the wall of a house. In the end I bought some modelling clay and in less than an hour I had sculpted it.

2: Ideas in my head, when translated by my hands, take on a life of their own. I ended up with a staircase, but the bookshelf was in the middle, and the stairs ran either side of it. Quite unlike what I had seen in my minds eye. Likewise when I wake up and hear a composition in a dream, I can even dit-dah-dah hum it and then play it (frustrating as a few months ago I had a melody played on piano and I have no piano and couldn’t even find a semi decent midi piano sample) but then my hands will play something alien to me.

He then went onto describe the platonic ideal of forms, something like idealised shapes, but then I said “so there’s a platonic ideal of a sheep, or a drystone wall?”. It was a fun concept. I have the platonic ideal of a banister, or a melody, in my head, but then translating it into the real world, real world limitations and quirks transform it into something that can be quite different. It’ll still be the same function, i.e; it’ll be a banister, or it’ll be a song, but it won’t be the one you saw in your head.

What’s this got to do with a vangelis brass? Well, the vangelis brass is a pretty good example of “that sound what I want.” (Maybe even the platonic ideal of a sawtooth brassy sound?) but there’s certain key concepts about making music that I just do not know yet, and it’s nice when others help me out. Also I felt like telling a story, especially when I’ve just learned something and want to share it with others incase they don’t know it yet.