Creating a simple 303-ish line using free software

We all know that sound, it’s been iconised and canoninesed way before I opened my first can of beer. There were numerous replicas of that little machine, and later Roland itself returned to the market with a new upgraded version of that magic box.

Lately, someone asked me, how he can recreate that kind of sound with software.

In my opinion, there are three main components, that make the majority of this sound’s characteristic. Saw oscillator, hight-resonant low pass filter, short sequenced lines with portamento and accents.

So, what would be the steps of dialing-in this components? Well, kinda depends on your time and budget. I believe FL Studio had an emulation of these, but it got deprecated in the later versions. Roland cloud offers software emulations as well. There is even a browser app, that does the trick http://errozero.co.uk/acid-machine/ . However, if you want to get your hands dirty, general guideline will be the following:

Part 1. The sound

1. Grab any kind of subtractive synth. I’d go with freeware U-he, but if you have access to something like Massive, go for it. Anyway, It should have 2 envelopes (amp and filter), 24db-sh resonant low-pass filter, optionally, pulse-width modulation (PWM).
2. Select the saw oscillator, if you have an additional saw oscillator in your synth, bring it in too, and slightly detune it.
3. Crank the resonance knob on the filter till about 3o’clock (about 80% if it is a slider)
4. Keep the freq of the filter fairly low, about 380hz (20% if it is a slider). Later when you start tweaking it, the most important thing is to find that sweet spot, where is starts to screech of squeal, as filter will go into self-oscillation
5. For amp envelope: no attack, medium/long decay, no sustain, no release
6. For filter envelope: no attack, medium decay, medium sustain, long release
7. If you synth has a build-in distortion/saturation - crank it!
8. If not, grab any kind of distortion pedal and run the signal through it (Mercurial metal area is freeware)
9. You can experiment, changing the oscillator shape to pulse and tweaking PWM
10. Dial in the glide/legato mode, so the notes, that are held toughener “slide” into each other
11. If synth’s interface allows, try assigning a velocity curve to filter frequency, so the filter will “open up” more on higher velocity notes (accents)

Part 2. The riffs

Since original TB-303 had a build-on sequencer, it is a part of it’s distinct sound. Try to make a simple 16-note pattern of short notes, some of them should have portamento slides. Also, throw rests and some accents. Then just loop over those 16 notes and tweak the filter slider as well as all the knobs on your distortion pedal. Have fun!