Dear bnote

I just happen to be working on Soft Cell - Tainted Love. It’s for a future commercial set, but I can tell you some secrets!

There is one wonderful thing which is how the sounds stack up for the chorus. This is simply genius, which I had not appreciated all these years. I never cared for it much, but now I love that chorus.

But first, the no.1 secret is that the sounds are mostly not analog - I was very surprised when I researched this.

The original sounds actually come from an 8bit Fairlight (a very expensive, ground breaking, top end sampler/production computer back in the very early 80s). There are very crude orchestral string sounds, layered up to sound big, which somehow in the song seem cheap and cheerful. First the simple stuff:

- That famous stab is an orchestral stack, tuned octaves apart.
- The “Beep Beep” is of course analog (a square wave).
- For the clap, tune the PC3 909 Clap up and down in layers
(It doesnt work on the PC4, K2700 etc because they renewed the sample), you will need to make white noise claps).

The strings are where the real secrets are:
One way is to make a layer e.g: a viola, apply a filter, and then duplicate the layer several times. Swap out the viola for different orchestral instruments, change the octave ranges etc, and have fun. This is used for that famous verse line, G, A#, etc.

Another secret of sorts, is that the sounds are re-used across the song in different combinations. This is what makes the chorus magic:

1) You take your filtered string stack, and simply play the chorus as normal. G, then A# etc
2) You take the same string stack, switch the keymaps, open the filters, and play the same an octave lower.
3) Now take an ordinary string sound and hold a high D. The dissonance with 1 and 2 is what creates the magic. For the 4th chord, you add a D# and a G. Its such a great chorus.

Malc

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