Greetings, fellow musicians! Doing some of my research, I've sorta found out, through both online forums, as well as said online forums referencing publications of Steely Dan's "Gaucho", that the synth harmonica sound was produced by a Prophet-5. Having accepted that as fact, I was wondering if anyone would be willing to help out on what preset or modification of a preset best, or at least closely resembles the sound like in the song. I primarily use Arturia's Prophet-5 V for my Prophet-5 needs, however, seeing as it has relatively the same parameters as the real deal, as well as other emulations of the P5— I wouldn't mind your presets borrowed from other plugin emulations, so long as I can manually transcribe them by hand!

Below I shall provide the song. Though, I'm sure you've heard this plenty of times. Hella catchy song!

Here's the song segment:

Any and all help on this endeavor is greatly appreciated, and I look forward to any of your commentary!

 

holy shit that was more annoying than i thought it would be. after a lot of comparisons, i realized the pitch wheel is like a major part in the sound; some mod wheel too. you gotta slide between pitches like how a harmonica player would slide between notes on a harmonica

 

I just recently discovered this after revisiting some Fagen and man hella catchy is a proper definition

 

Legendary album! Iirc, some the songs on Gaucho -- including Hey Nineteen -- were the first commercial songs that used the digital drum replacement technique. Roger Nichols, the producer and engineer of Gaucho, invented the sample-based drum computer Wendel a while before recording Gaucho, but he never finished it properly (or something like that). When Fagen and Becker said they wanted to change out the drums on some songs for whatever reason, Nichols said that he could do it if he had the budget. He got the money from Fagen and Becker and returned a couple of weeks later with a heavily modified early computer with a completely custom operating system and all. Roger Nichols was truly a one-of-a-kind genius in the music industry! Nuclear scientist, DSP scientist, audio engineer, producer, inventor, plugin developer and many more things.

Can't help you with the harmonica sound though. Sorry!

 

So this is a screenshot of your P-5 configuration to achieve that sound? Pretty close, I think. Awesome. Thank you.

 

Funny you say that, I just so happened to have contributed, through PiRAT, the entire Wendel drum library, seen here on the sister site!

 

I'll likely take a crack at it sometime today! Thanks, man!

 

Nice! I never check the endless supply of samples on the sister site so I must have missed it. Thanks for sharing! Now I'm off to record some smooth yacht rock

 

@audiol0ver yep and glad i could help. it is tricky trying to replicate an analog synth sound with a software synth, since no hardware P5 would actually sound identical to another in the first place - but yeah i think its pretty close, how you play it is another thing though lol

 

Maybe that is one of the reasons why i always prefered Royal Scam and Aja ( although Gaucho is still great for my taste as are all the other ones) . Interesting , I did not know all that , thanks for the info !

 

nice one Grape Ape! I suspect Fagan and Becker said the same thing after finishing most of their stuff great patch work!

 

fantastic instrumental! Thank you, sick post! Let us know how the P5 fits your tune


..skate a little lower now

 

Yes, and they had Jeff Porcaro (the definitiom of tight groove) on druma, too! I recall him being partially puzzled and annoyed at the fact that they pretty much changed his parts to sound like grid-quantized MIDI drums.

 

Thanks for the link. Although, 60MB for the whole package... sounds like just one hit on a cymbal.