Can I do this with my FM9?

Meat Head

Meat Head

Member
Hey all! I'm trying to create a patch for "Fame" by David Bowie. The guitar part is great, no problem.

What I would like to be able to do though, is run a mic into Input 2 and run the vox through the ARP for that epic two octave, "fame fame fame fame fame fame fame" walk down. I'm having a number of issues.

First it's a walk down the scale in about 24 setps and the ARP will only give me 16. The FM9 only gets one pitch block so I can't feed the first 12 into another ARP for the last 12. I figure, my vocalist could maybe pick up and finish the sequence at 17, so it could still work.

The main problem is though that I'm having trouble getting much output out of the mic. I did put a preamp block in front of the arp, which maybe wasn't the right choice. Maybe a full amp? The ARP only seems to want to work with continuous input. I get a blip out of it but it quits working once the initial signal has dissipated. Also, while I had imagined the word "fame" coming through the arp, it's just a generated tone.

I figure at this point I'm probably not using the right tool for the job. Any thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
 
If you just sing "fame" once, you'll need to use some kind of delay to repeat it. The arpeggiator won't do that part on its own. I probably wouldn't use the arpeggiator for this.

A dual or quad harmony block would let notes overlap a bit like on the album, and you could pan the voices. At album tempo the maximum pitch delay time of 2 seconds would be just enough to space out four voices. Also make sure it's set for local pitch tracking. (That might be labelled "block in"; I can't remember.) Before the pitch block, place a whole-note delay set to around 50% mix with feedback pretty high (possibly 100%).

Then you'd need to set up the sequencer on voice shift amounts. They only have to change once per measure if you use 4 voices. Because the shift is before the voice delays it's best if the values change on beat 3 or 4. Beat 4 should be fine. So the sequencer steps might look something like 100, 100, 100, 80, 80, 80, 80, 60... at a quarter note rate. Or you could begin with four steps at 100 and just start the sequencer on beat 4. (The sequencer's minimum 1 Hz rate is too fast to get less than 3 steps per measure at this tempo. Three could also work but there are enough steps for four in this case.)

The modifier ranges will depend on what note you want to sing, but let's say it's E♭ an octave below the first note heard. The modifier min-max ranges should be this, assuming you set delays to hear voices in the order 1-2-3-4.

Voice 1: -14 to 8
Voice 2: -15 to 7
Voice 3: -16 to 6
Voice 4: -17 to 5

You'd probably want to mute/bypass the delay in the last measure around beat 3 or 4, unless you set feedback low enough for the volume to drop quite a bit throughout these 6 measures.
 
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Ok, I went to the Quad Diatonic Delay and used a sequencer for the harmony controller on each of the four voices. I set the first 4 at 100, next at 80 and so forth as suggested. I have an Input2 block into an amp block set to Tube Pre. The input is a sure SM57.

I put a Digital Mono Delay block in front of the Diatonic Delay. For now, at least, I would prefer to work with mathematical delay times based on 95bpm which should be 632ms per quarter note or 2,528ms per measure. I set the incoming mono delay block at 2,528ms and the delays in the pitch block to 0 for V1, 632 for V2, 1264 for V3 and 1896 for V4.

There has to be something very basic that I'm missing because the mic only reads a very short signal and what comes out is a seires of blips. It doesn't read a long enough sample to produce the word "Fame" it seems like it's just reading the first ms of input from the mic and trying to work with that.

Sorry to be such a noob. I know it will be a total Homer headslap, like, "dude, plug into your amp" but I can't find any settings working through the chain that seem to help it any. Any help is appreciated.
 
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