That Enya pizzicato/plucked sound from Orinoco Flow

[Peter C]

......and a few other of her tracks too. It's driving me round the twist trying to come up with an approximation of what is a really full sounding staccato pizzicato thingy which is used extensively in the track. I'm not trying to reproduce it exactly, just want something approximating to it. Tried different combinations of pizz and spic and agitato strings along with accoustic guitars, bags of reverb of course. But I'm nowhere near it.  Anyone got any ideas?

[Colin Nicholls]

Well, basically it is the Roland D50 factory patch 44 - pizzagogo.

This video shows a guy using a sample to re-create the sound - might give you some hints.

[Peter C]

Cool. Thanks man. That's a decent attempt at it, must have something on my Fantom / Halion  / Kontakt that will do the job. It's almost like a pizzicato trancey sound.

[InstrEd]

3 hours ago, Colin Nicholls said:

Well, basically it is the Roland D50 factory patch 44 - pizzagogo.

This video shows a guy using a sample to re-create the sound - might give you some hints.

Thanks Colin I always wondered what Enya used for that sound

[Sonarman]

Just play from 8:10, Claudio plays the pizzagogo patch and the enya song. ? D50. The whole video is totally worth watching.  

Edit: Just noticed Colin already posted the same video. btw I tried the same patch in roland cloud D50 its very close and almost identical, you can try it if you badly need the same sound without buying a D50.

Edited January 2, 2019 by Sonarman
Video already posted buy Colin

[Toddskins]

Complete ripoff.

The original was by Andy Williams, "Can't Get Used To Losing You."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZgW8T2IIqU

 

Edited January 3, 2019 by Toddskins

[Peter C]

Interesting. I seem to remember (and that's giving my age away) a number of 50s and 60s songs used the pizzicato strings sometimes with guitar chop. e.g. Carol King's It Might As Well Rain Until September. But these were essentially accoustic string sounds. The D-50 sound has similar characteristics but with added bite - I'm not sure that's the word I'm looking for but you get the idea. I've come across a Roland Fantom-X patch called Memory Pluck which when mixed with a string pizzicato seems to work quite well. It's interesting Roland Cloud doesn't include a Fantom VST. Possibly because many of the Fantom sounds were a mixture from other synths? As for being a ripoff, isn't everything now derivative! ?

Many thanks for everyone's input.

[Toddskins]

7 hours ago, seadude said:

Interesting. I seem to remember (and that's giving my age away) a number of 50s and 60s songs used the pizzicato strings sometimes with guitar chop. e.g. Carol King's It Might As Well Rain Until September. But these were essentially accoustic string sounds. The D-50 sound has similar characteristics but with added bite - I'm not sure that's the word I'm looking for but you get the idea. I've come across a Roland Fantom-X patch called Memory Pluck which when mixed with a string pizzicato seems to work quite well. It's interesting Roland Cloud doesn't include a Fantom VST. Possibly because many of the Fantom sounds were a mixture from other synths? As for being a ripoff, isn't everything now derivative! ?

Many thanks for everyone's input.

Perhaps.  In this case not only is the similar sound used, but also the chord progressions.

Edited January 3, 2019 by Toddskins

[Leizer]

Daryl gets it close in this one:

 

[msmcleod]

Here's a sample of the preset from my D550:

• Soundfont format:  D50Fact-028-Pizzagogo.sf2
• Sfz : PizzagogoSfz.zip

Note that there's no release samples, so you'll need to set the decay accordingly.

[Peter C]

Many thanks. I'll have a play around.

[PhonoBrainer]

I likes me a Daryl tune.

 

If you have Kontakt, there's some nice pizzicato strings in 8dio's  Adagietto.

 

cheers,

-Tom

[Peter C]

First of all a huge thank you to msmcleod for sharing that, managed to create a Kontakt instrument and yep, it's definitely that sound. Haven't quite got anything like that on Fantom. I owe you (I suspect a few others do too....)

Initially I tried creating a multisampled instrument in the Fantom but that made me realise how dated the Fantom software now is. Pretty easy in Kontakt once I got correct assignment of notes. Haven't done that before, learnt something new. Really impressive from the d-50 that the sound holds up so well now after many years.

Emeraldsoul, likle your pic, will try that.

Going back to play......