Use Negative Envelopes For Drum Sounds; Noise Techniques For Analog Snares And Cymbals; Colin Describes His 808 Sounds - Alesis Andromeda A6 Tips And Tricks Manual

The mod buttons run slower than the hardwired modulations such as the filter envelope - by how
much Mike? (ed: 2ms updates fast mods, 10ms slow mods)
In any case I've had good results taken advantage of the slower speed :) Why waste an envelope
when you can use the natural curve of the mods. For example -
You can crank the resonance of Filter 2 to max, and then use a mod button with OFFSET only of
-100. Sounds great. You get the intial spike of resonance to punch the attack up, before the offset
modulation kicks in to slam the resonance back down to zero - real zero that is! Remember there is
some lingering resonance in the filters! :) Turn resonance back to zero, and it sounds dead in
comparison
In this case the atatck will be slighlty lower in volume due to Filter2's characteristic volume drop with
high resonance. Set the AMP enevlope to spike the attack levels. Ie set Decay 1 to 30ms, decay to
2ms and set sustain to a lower level

17.8 use negative envelopes for drum sounds:

Colin wrote:
I just noticed this today. I was trying to use Env 1 to control the noise level, so I would have a quick
noise burst for on the attack of the note. Ay, carumba that's some delay!
one way around is to invert the envelope so it reduces the volume as opposed to increasing the
volume of the noise. So the noise starts at the volume you want and then the inverted (negative)
envelope kicks to drop it to zero. I use this technique a lot for pitching sounds for drums.
You'll having to make the sustain at 100% and set the release to max. then just use the attack to set
the release. adding some envelope delay is good too.

17.9 noise techniques for analog snares and cymbals:

There' s some good techniques, involving modulating VCOs with noise via FM, and other
methods. These are described below.
Colin wrote:
A lot of drum sounds need narrow band white noise
With software its easy to provide this :) But not so on the A6. But browsing through the VCO menus,
I found just the thing for this.
Under the WZEXT menu, if you modulate a sine wave by setting the EXPFM1 to 100
Turn 1pitch mode on for the VCO, and voila you have something that sounds close to a resonant
band passed filter noise.
Good for all types for drum sounds :)
If you then hipass this already narrow band, you can get some nice hihats Etc
Further more, since you now have 2 sources of louder noise. You don't have to use the Noise,
allowing one to use the feedback to drive Filter into Self Oscillation! So you now have 2 VCO narrow
band noise sources, and 2-3 Self oscillating filters to do some nice analog drums! :)
Mike adds:
And you can also use the oscillator sine waves alone from the post filter mixer in parallel with filtered
noise from the pre filter mixer, and also note that modulating a sawtooth wave with analog noise
creates nice, ratty "pitched noise" at it's extremes.. :-}
Zon used linear FM to create his hihat sequence; "8-step" or something close was the name (it's the
best hihat, just look for that).

17.10 colin describes his 808 sounds:

(at http://www.code404.com/a6/)
Thanks