I recently stumbled upon the original sheet music for the THX Deep Note and knew that I had to recreate it. I had an hour to kill over the weekend so I decided to take a stab at it. The only equipment used in the recording was my Moog Sub Phatty direct into Logic.
In the score, it mentions that each note should be played with three voices per note. Since the Moog only has two oscillators, I decided to hard sync the two together and add de-tuning later in the DAW. Another creative liberty I took was that instead of having the starting note in a tight cluster and gliding to its ending pitch, I arbitrarily picked starting notes that were several octaves away, making the glide even more dramatic. On the higher notes, I added a little bit of modulation with the Sub Phatty’s LFO section.
When attempting this yourself, you really only need a synthesizer with some way to slide between notes smoothly. This may be called many things, depending on the manufacturer. On Moog synths, this is called “Glide,” Roland and Korg call their’s “Portamento,” and I’ve seen other’s use “Glissando.”
After recording a take of each of the notes. I used the Micro Shift plugin by Soundtoys to detune the notes and create the “3 voices per note, slightly detuned” effect mentioned on the score. Besides that, I also used some light bus compression, a low-pass filter sweep at the beginning, some reverb, and a fade out at the end.
If I were to do it again, I probably wouldn’t choose to use a sawtooth oscillator, as the really low notes were playing below audio rate and sounded more like a LFO when solo’d. It’s not immediately obvious when listening but I know it’s there.
If this inspires you to try it yourself, I’d love to here what you come up with! You can contact me here.