Uploaded July 2016 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Yeah, I'm at it again. By now most people know that Vangelis really only used the presets on his Yamaha CS-80, to great effect of course! There is one sound that he seemed to favor though which was NOT a preset, nor could it have been tweaked from one..... as you couldn't do that on a CS-80. You were either in preset mode, or live panel... so he must have programmed this sound himself and saved it, because he certainly used it a lot!
I'm talking about that synthy-saxophone lead sound that's all over his "Spiral" album and here, in the Blade Runner blues. It's a very trick sound to program, as you need to get the interaction between the High and Low pass filters juuuust right. He also lowered the VCF output and raised the Sine wave to give the sound a thick middle, and bright, buzzy high end. As you can see, I've managed to replicate it pretty faithfully so I decided to demo it for you all!
PS: Remember kids, just because 99% of MIDI keyboards don't feature aftertouch (let alone polyph
Yeah, I'm at it again. By now most people know that Vangelis really only used the presets on his Yamaha CS-80, to great effect of course! There is one sound that he seemed to favor though which was NOT a preset, nor could it have been tweaked from one..... as you couldn't do that on a CS-80. You were either in preset mode, or live panel... so he must have programmed this sound himself and saved it, because he certainly used it a lot!
I'm talking about that synthy-saxophone lead sound that's all over his "Spiral" album and here, in the Blade Runner blues. It's a very trick sound to program, as you need to get the interaction between the High and Low pass filters juuuust right. He also lowered the VCF output and raised the Sine wave to give the sound a thick middle, and bright, buzzy high end. As you can see, I've managed to replicate it pretty faithfully so I decided to demo it for you all!
PS: Remember kids, just because 99% of MIDI keyboards don't feature aftertouch (let alone polyph
