Creating the CS 80 sound?

Has anyone tried to create the Yamaha CS 80 sound in VCV?

Any Deckard’s Dreamer here?

Hello, not sure if this patch is trying to Recreate a Yamaha CS80 but Paul Piko has covered Blade Runner Opening Title here in Aug 2020. I would be very interested in seeing what you come up with.

Song Covers made in VCV Rack - Music & Patches - VCV Community

My Music - Paul Piko - Music & Patches - VCV Community (vcvrack.com)

Bits & Bots | Patchstorage

Vangelis Runner - VCV Challenge 56 (part 3) | Patchstorage

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Yes, but I cheated and used the Arturia V Collection CS-80 VST instrument via HOST in Rack.

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It’s amazingly good, isn’t it? Arturia is really knocking it out of the park lately.

I don’t have the latest V Collection, but I like what I have. I also like my Pigments. And Analog Lab. They work great via HOST in Rack.

I don’t think anyone really knows why the CS-80 sounds so good. It just does :wink: Inside are a ton of custom chips that all say “yamaha”, so they must have made their own analog ICs for it.

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Honestly, I do not know what is meant by the CS-80 sound. There are so many possibilities. To a lot of people, it probably means “sounds like Blade Runner”.

IMHO, there would be no way to model the CS-80 without providing for extensive presets.

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IIRC it had a bunch of presets, and you could only “program” a few extras with these four banks of controls. When my company used to do repairs we would get everything through. Everyone loved the CS-80. It just always sounded great. Last time I played one it was Elton John’s in for repair. Maybe in 1983?

It took me a few minutes to put together and record this Arturia V Collection CS-80 song with 4 HOST instances and 4 CS-80 presets. Meander is composing and performing generatively in Dorian B

Edit: This is another one of those “Stay on I” songs where Meander is only playing the Bm chord of the “I” position. The melody is a mixture of Bm chord notes and Dorian B scale notes. The drone is a B.

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Yes, the Arturia V CS-80 has an overwhelming number of presets.

What about the ME80 VST?

I have no experiences with the ME80. It looks interesting.

My first attempt with only Fundamental modules (except my MIDI MPE module), played on a LinnStrument:

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How about using Audible Instruments Macro Oscillator 2 (aka Mutable Instruments Plaits)? The first synthesis model is designed to be a pair of classic waveforms. With a bit of modulation and polyphony you get very, umm, Bladegelis. :slight_smile: Add a big reverb to this patch (Eventide Blackhole is on sale right now) and you’re on the way…

blues2.vcv (7.3 KB)

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I think one could pick any track in Blade Runner(s) and eventually do a reasonable job of duplicating the sound reasonably closely. It is difficult for me to approach this as “creating the Yamaha CS 80 sound” as there are so many settings and presets in the CS-80. Some of the tracks would either require sampled sound or HOSTed VST instruments, or external hardware synths.

Here is my Blade Runner intro effort from 4 years ago with the following description “(Arturia) Microbrute + iPad soft synths + Eventide H9 reverb”. This predates (my) VCV and is an example of one of my previous hybrid iPad softsynths and MIDI hardware setups. In this case, I am playing the melody on my Microbrute, which is rare for me to do (play live). I was probably using the Korg Gadget app on the iPad for background sounds. Sorry for the poor sound. I forget how I recorded this from my studio monitors; it may have been with my iPhone.

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That was a lot of fun! Thanks for posting it. Of course I still have to ask, tongue in cheek, “Which is the CS-80 sound?”. Brass1 and Brass2? and Flute, at least for Blade Runner, maybe.

With tons of reverb :wink:

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I think it lies in the combination of all elements, especially the ring-modulation and the reverb.

I fiddled a bit with the Arturia VST and the ME80 VST and I find the ME80 has more that CS80 “lushiness”.

@LarsBjerregaard thank you for posting the video. It really explains a lot to me.

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In the latest V collection Arturia gave the CS-80 a big overhaul. Could be interesting to try again.

I run a demo of the Arturia CS40 V4.