ARP 2600: Droids, Blips, Drones & more

The all-time classic ARP 2600 was a synthesizer that was an immediate hit with musicians and sound designers when it was released in 1971. Most famously, it’s the very synth that sound designer Ben Burtt used to give R2D2 his unmistakeable voice.

Semi-modular in nature and with many handy features like voltage modifiers, lag control, ring modulation, a comprehensive noise generator, sample & hold, and 3 independent oscillators, it comes equipped with more features than you’ll find in many of today’s analog synthesizers.

Thanks to the Alan R. Pearlman Foundation and the non-profit studio The Record Co. I was able to access an original, mint condition ARP 2600 that is beautifully maintained and lock myself in a studio with it to capture nearly 7 hours worth of raw sound design material.

Putting the 2600’s immense sound design potential to use, I created this library to help you give robots a voice, create otherworldly ambiances, score computers with the obligatory “bleep bloops”, and craft larger than life weapons with a distinct retro SciFi flair.

I also captured the physical, mechanical sounds of patching cords and moving faders on the synth using a pair of LOM Uši Pro. These sounds are included in a dedicated subfolder.
Infinitely tweakable Source Material with plenty of ultrasonic Content.

The resulting sounds range from droid chatter at various root pitches, impacts, drones, noise, and lots of other sonic source that begs to be pitch-shifted and mangled. In fact, the ARP 2600’s pristine analog circuitry and my high-end recording chain capturing it at 192 kHz means that most of the final material features high-frequency content ranging up to nearly 90 kHz!

This means that you can pitch-shift most of these sounds down by up to 2 octaves and uncover new harmonic content along the way. By recording at 32 Bit with the ultra low-noise Zoom F6 and Rheingold Music cables, these recordings are extremely clean and hold up well to intense processing.

While highly abstract in nature, these sounds are a great basis for building:
-Futuristic Weapons
-Retro SciFi Spaceship Sounds
-Droid and Robot Vocals
-Anime Sound Effects
-Otherworldly Ambiences
-Drones
-Wavetable Synth Patches
-and more.

Ultrasonic-rich SFX and Source Material crafted on the legendary Synth that voiced Pop Culture’s most famous Droids.