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Synth sound in One Thing Leads to Another by The Fixx


Rockitman

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Ruppert loved his vocoders and talk boxes. My BIG GUESS would be vocoder and his PPG Wave. But it could have been a bunch of other stuff. Prophets, Chorma, DX, etc...

 

One of my favorite bands of the 80s. They sounded great on the Phantoms Tour.

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NEgative.

 

Prophet. He was a T8 user at the time, along with the PPG, DX7, Akai synth, and vocoder. Rupert's use of vocoder was primarily filter manipulation, and he might be using some of that here.

 

But that is a Prophet sync sound.

Hitting "Play" does NOT constitute live performance. -Me.
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I played this song in a cover band a few years ago, and was initially mystified as to how to create that sound. I ended up finding and tweaking a Virus TI preset that, in the mix, emulated the character "close enough for jazz." But it's a tough one, for sure.

Michael

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So, those that know me know that I strongly advocate the use of Google for stuff like this... so, did a quick Google search:

 

fixx one thing leads to another synth sound

 

One of the first results that pops up is for the Fixx fan website. Half a dozen posts down in that thread, here's a reply from Rupert himself:

 

The squeaky dissonant sounds were me trusty Sequential circuits Prophet V (rev2). Me PPG is all over it as well.

 

So... yeah. :snax:

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Yeah the Fixx are really hard to cover if you try to get close...just so many one-off sounds and dynamics/swells/filters. Red Skies at Night is one we did, I just had to try for the main parts and ignore a lot of the stuff going on there. I always loved that sound he got for Deeper and Deeper.

 

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[video:youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO6MhD55Rmo

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Way back in the '80s in high school, probably not much later than when that song came out, my HS band learned it. I used a sound on my Roland JX-8P called "Touch Sync" which was basically a copy of the iconic Prophet 5 hard sync preset. I bumped up the release time and used the mod stick to make it get a little bit more chaotic. It was far from perfect, but evoked the sound pretty well. Great song, I've always been a Fixx fan, even some of their deeper cuts are really good.
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After the double stab of the sync sound there is a short synth line that bends the last note down. That line has a subtle change in the sync sound that gives it a vocal quality. To pull off both parts from one keyboard the player needs to control the sync by mod wheel or pedal rather than programming it to an EG.

This post edited for speling.

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