Electro Pop Tutorial – Part 9: A Pitched Wood Block Style Synth

Hi, I’m Dave from boyinaband.com and on this Reason 4 tutorial, I’ll be showing you how to make a simple pitched wood-block hit effect.

This is a very nice and quick patch that will simply use one instance of Thor.

Okay!   Let’s begin.

Create your combinator and name it “Wood Block”.   Create an instance of Thor in the combinator and initialize it, then open it up.

We’ll need two analog oscillators (Don’t forget to send the second one through with the “2″ button) – one as a saw wave taken up one octave to emulate the high pitched striking of a wood block, the other as a pulse wave taken down an octave, with the pulse width taken closer to the middle – this will be an emulation of the hollow resonance of a wood block.   The closer to the middle the PW is, the hollower the sound will be.

In the low pass filter, take the frequency down to around 100hz.   Now, take the envelope amount to about 90 – we want this filter to be noticeably affected by the envelope.   Then, take the decay on the envelope to about 250ms – this will emulate the sharp attack of a wood block being hit.

This is pretty close to the right sound, but a wood block wouldn’t have that much of a bassy resonance, as you can hear – so we need a high pass filter to remove the extreme low end.   Turn filter 3 into a state variable filter and set it to high pass mode.   Turn the frequency to about 100hz.

Lastly, for this effect, I’ll add a delay to make it a bit more electronic sounding – turn on the Delay, set the dry wet to just under a half and turn the tempo sync on and the time to 3/16ths, though obviously you can change this to suit your song!

And there you have it!   A Synth effect more wooden than Keanu Reeves’ acting.   Except in Bill and Ted, that was a masterpiece.

Be sure to check out all the other tutorials on how to make this Electro Pop Song.

See you next time!