OT: THX Movie-Opener "Deep Note"

Thought you guy might be interested in this, it describes how the audio engineer created the "Deep Note". That's the name given to the sound you hear when the THX logo comes up before Lucasfilm movies and DVDs.

http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2005/05/tiny-music-makers-pt-3-thx-sound.html

The funny thing is that the site I got this link from was a tech site but they seemed to think the audio ideas behind it were difficult to get their heads around. As a "reaktor guy", however, I foudn the whole thing to be a very simple concept. It also sounds like it wouldn't be too hard to duplicate in Reaktor (it took "big mainframes" back in 1987 to do it, but of course, today's average laptop probably as more power than those machines).

The real guts of the article is this part:

- CList

 

I never really listened to the original closely before now so I was convinced by Rod MacQuarrie's web that it was produced by a OB-X. http://www.isatellite.info/oberheim-ob-x.html
He never said anything about it but there it a mp3 demo that is called THX.

Maybe the sound itselfs not quite right but the OB-X has two features that are important: each voice can have it's own stereo pan position and the glide it time constant, not rate constant as the ordinary LP filter glide usually is.

Tangerine Dream uses the OB-X on their Exit album to a similar effect. You can recreate it by pressing some random notes all over the octaves, then activate unison mode, set a suitable glide time and press one note. You can try it on the OB-Xb or OB-Y (comming soon) in the user lib.

 

In '87 that whole aproach might have appeared quite revolutionary - it was the time of the 12bit AKAI S-900, with 750kbyte sample RAM... still today, people that don't use /know Reaktor refuse to even listen to what I might tell them about it, simply because they think they wouldn't understand it anyway. "You know... one-pole smoothers on BOTH amplitude and frequency." "Wow. Really?"

 

Er... I don't get it - what would be the difference between time and rate constancy? BTW, nice upload!!

 

Rate constant would take longer time to glide two octave than one. Time constant wouldd take ... er the same time regardsless how many notes you glide.

 

Ah, ok... now that I know, it sounds quite logical. ]