Need a synth IDed from WAV file

http://www.sonicbits.com/products/synthone/default.asp

The very beginning screech sounds a great deal like ring modulation. They only use it a great deal in the beginning, and then they lower the amount.

The later part of the sample could be anything from Subtractive to FM synthesis, but it strikes me as being analogue or vitual analgoue from the timbre. If I were going to recreate this sound, I would probably use a modular software synth like Reaktor.

The way I would go about it would be to set up a two oscillator patch with a lowpass filter. I would set up the cutoff to 60-75% with just a bit of resonance. I would modulate the oscillators with a random noise generator and run them through an overdrive and then a ring modulator to audio out.

The main thing would be to make sure you have control surfaces set up to mess with the ringmodulator and the amount of modulation the RNG is sending to the oscillators. This is assuming the this is just a patch being played and not sequenced.

If it is sequenced, do not worry about setting up the RNG's and just set up a midi-in to the oscillators and write an atonal sequence.

Did you make this, or is this just something you found on the web?

Can you explain what cutoff and res are?

Cutoff is declining amplitude over the course of a note?

I'm supposed to play live with more additional noise filters/makers and possibly record it?

The easiest and most common filter would be your basic low pass filter. A low pass filter is just that, a filter that allows the low frequencies of a signal to pass through while the higher frequencies are filtered out. The cutoff refers to where in the frequency spectrum you begin to filter out high frequencies. If the filter is at 100% or all the way open, all the high frequencies are allowed to pass through. The lower the cutoff, the more the filter blocks high frequencies.

Probably the most obvious example would be the filter house that Thomas Bangalter (aka Stardust/Daft Punk) does. When you hear a loop that sounds like a couple bars of disco and as time passes it sounds like somebody started eq'ing out the high end out that is a perfect example of low pass filtering. Disco house is an entire genre of dance music that depends on this one sampler trick.

Resonance is the other part of a low pass filter. What resonance does is it adjusts the "Q" of the filter and allows certain frequencies to pass through and not others. In plain english, resonance determines just how wide the filter is. If you crank the resonance way up, it will only allow a very narrow spectrum of sound to pass throught the filter. The spectrum will be determined by where the cutoff is set. If the cutoff is set high, it will only allow the very high frequencies through, and if it is set for lower ferquencies, it will only allow a very narrow band of low frequencies through. The lower the resonance, the more frequencies the filter will pass.

A good way to think of a filter is as a very controlable form of EQ.

With a LPF it would be more accurate to say that the cutoff is the point in the frequency range where the filter begins to have an effect. Frequencies above the cutoff point are filtered, those below are allowed through.

If you crank the resonance way up, it will only allow a very narrow spectrum of sound to pass throught the filter.

Incorrect. If you turn the resonance up what happens is that the frequencies around the cutoff point get boosted.

If the cutoff is set high, it will only allow the very high frequencies through, and if it is set for lower ferquencies, it will only allow a very narrow band of low frequencies through.

The above is nearer to a description of what a bandpass filter does, not a lowpass.