The patches with names on them

The previous recipe built the three-oscillator voice. This one drives it at four records — a blue-eyed-soul hook, the bassline that retired a bass player, a singing art-rock lead, and the one-take modular solo that started it all — and, along the way, answers a fair question: if "Lucky Man" was played on a Moog modular, does the kit need a modular object?

The provenance rule from the part opener applies double here, because gear folklore is a genre of its own. For each patch the chapter says what is documented about the record and what is reconstruction. And the standing disclaimer stands: these settings chase the sound; the hands, the tape, and the mix stay on the record.

Every patch below is a delta against the wiring and tables of Three oscillators into a ladder — build that voice first. Two performance tools recur, so here they are once:

• Vibrato is the oscillator's own now: @vibrato (depth in cents, so the musical width holds in every register), @vibrato_rate (Hz), and @vibrato_delay (ms) — the onset fades in through that time constant and re-arms on every new note, which is most of what makes a lead "sing." ±10 cents at 5.5 Hz with a few hundred milliseconds of delay is the classic setting. (This chapter's first draft had to print a scaling formula into the Hz-calibrated FM inlet here; that formula became the improvements plan's §2, and §2 became these attributes — the audit worked.)
• Sequenced lines: tap.303.seq~ emits pitch as a MIDI-note signal and a gate at 1.0/2.0 — mtof~ turns the pitch into Hz for the oscillators' signal inlets, and the gate drives tap.adsr~ directly (it opens above 0.5). The Moog voice sequenced this way is the classic synth-line scaffold, slides included.

The Winwood hook — "While You See a Chance" (1980)

What's documented: Winwood played essentially everything on Arc of a Diver himself, synthesizers included; accounts of the rig put Moog monosynths at the center of it. The reconstruction: the opening hook is a brassy, open-filter lead with a fast attack and just enough glide to round the corners — a patch that sits between horn section and organ, which is very much a keyboardist's lead.

Deltas from the lead patch:

The brass illusion is the filter contour's sustain sitting high (−6 dB): the filter opens and stays open, so the tone holds its brightness through the note instead of wah-ing. Play the hook in clean detached eighths — the 40 ms of glide only speaks when notes touch.

The bassline that retired a bass player — "Flash Light" (1977)

What's documented, and gloriously so: Bernie Worrell built Parliament's "Flash Light" bassline by stacking Minimoogs — the story is told with the number three attached — playing the line keyboard-style under Bootsy Collins' guitar. This is the patch where the previous chapter's "the stack is most of the sound" rule gets its funk citation.

Deltas from the bass patch:

The rubber is the filter contour: near-instant attack, short decay, and a sustain low enough (−24 dB) that every note is a squelch that immediately ducks. resonance 0.6 puts a vowel on the squelch; drive 12 into the tanh stages is the fat (the ladder chapter measures 16.5 % THD up there — that's the point). Play staccato sixteenths with octave pops; let the 35 ms glide smear only the connected passing notes. If the low end blurs, this is the one patch where comp earns its raise: 0.2 keeps some droop-era character while returning enough passband to anchor the root.

The singing lead — "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" (1975)

What's documented: Richard Wright's rig in the Wish You Were Here sessions included a Minimoog, and the singing synth lead lines in "Shine On" are credited to it. The reconstruction: a nearly clean patch — this lead's beauty is restraint, a barely-driven filter, and vibrato that arrives late.

Deltas from the lead patch:

Then spend all your effort on the vibrato: @vibrato 10 @vibrato_rate 5.5 @vibrato_delay 400 — ten cents, arriving late, re-arming on each new note so held phrase-endings bloom while passing notes stay plain. The patch is deliberately close to the ideal oscillator — imperfect 0.2, drift at the polite end — because the expressive load is carried by the hands, and everything the analog section adds here it adds to sustained exposed notes.

The one-take solo — "Lucky Man" (1970), and the modular question

What's documented: Keith Emerson's solo on "Lucky Man" was played on his Moog modular system and famously kept from an improvised take — one of the first Moog solos on a rock record, and for a generation of listeners the first synthesizer they ever heard. The sound: a huge unison lead whose actual melodic content is mostly portamento — sweeps and dives across octaves, the glide circuit played as the instrument.

Deltas from the lead patch:

At 280 ms of smooth, pitch is a place you travel to: hold a note, strike one two octaves up, and the voice draws the line between them. That is the solo. The filter stays essentially open (sustain −4 dB) because the record's drama is in pitch, not timbre.

So — does the kit need a Moog modular object? No, because you are holding one. A modular synthesizer is oscillators, filters, envelopes, and amplifiers with no fixed routing; the panel of patch cords is the product. In this package the modules are tap.vco~, tap.ladder~, tap.svf~, tap.adsr~, tap.vca~, tap.noise~, and the sequencer pair — and Max itself is the patch panel, with the routing freedom no hardwired monosynth voice (and no single "modular object") could offer. Everything Emerson's system did on that solo — voices summed to one filter, one loudness contour, glide on the pitch source — is the previous chapter's wiring diagram; what the modular added was the freedom to have wired it otherwise, and that freedom is the patching environment you are already in. The one genuinely modular idiom worth calling out is the sequenced line: tap.303.seq~ → mtof~ → the stack, gate → tap.adsr~, is the Moog-sequencer scaffold of the Berlin school and "I Feel Love"-era disco — no new object required, slides included.

What separates the four

The instructive part of putting these side by side: the signal chain never changed. What moved:

1. The filter contour's sustain. High and it's brass (Winwood), open and it's drama (Emerson), low and it's rubber (Worrell). One attribute spans the genre map.
2. smooth. 15 ms is articulation, 40 ms is rounding, 280 ms is the melody itself.
3. drive and resonance. The funk patch is the only one leaning hard on both — and it's the one imitating three stacked instruments.
4. The hands. Delayed vibrato, staccato versus legato, when not to play — the parts of the record the recipe honestly can't ship.

When to leave the recipe

• You want the record's whole arrangement. The hook was never alone: Winwood's is doubled, Worrell's sits under a live band, Wright's floats on tape-delayed guitars. The patch is the voice, not the mix.
• You want polysynth-era sounds. Prophets and Oberheims are a different architecture — per-voice envelopes on real polyphony — and imitating them with mc. stacks of this voice flatters neither.
• You want the sequenced-modular genre. Start from the scaffold above, but that recipe deserves its own chapter — it lives in the plan file's backlog with "I Feel Love" written on it.