How To Make A Bleep?

I Am trying to figure out how to duplicate the Bleep that you hear during communications between NASA and orbiting spacecraft or like when the Eagle landed on the moon. It's very high pitched with an instant attack. Where to start?

Thanks for any help you can give.

Ring modulation is probably one of the best ways to start, its good for bell like sounds (and ergo good for bleeps as well), and yes it would make a good exercise in learning how to program a basic sound.

Where to start?

You're in the Instruments forum, XH, so I'll give you the Rapture version. Except for the 'periodic' part using the StepGen, you could follow the exact same process in one of the Dimension flavors. I just played back a transmission archive, and this particular one sounded like about a D8 + 50 cents (the D three octaves above middle C). I added the 50 cents in the Tune parameter.

Alternately, if you want any key to trigger the core pitch:
Keytrack - 0
Transpose - 38
Tune - 50.

The choice of wavetable can be variable. It's not quite as pure as a sine.wav, but one of the triangle wavetables, or sine cube would be a good choice. It will depend on how much filtering you'd want to do 'downstream', but don't start with anything too 'brassy (like a saw).

Using a wavetable with low harmonic content, you may want to only add some distortion. A little bit of Decim or BitRed (<20%) will go a long way here. If it gets too upfront, tame it on down by following it with a LP1 filter. State-of-the-art was eight-bit, and you've got the distance of transmission & cosmic influences to consider here.

As far as the Amp EG goes, you're all set without creating one. Instant-on; instant off. You may want to create a little releasing envelope on a second Element, loaded with a noise.wav. There's often a little garbled crunch at the trailing end of the 'beep', as a switch is opened or closed. I'd make that subtle: barely audible, and then turn it down a notch. This is more of a subliminal effect.

If you'd like the 'beep' to be periodic, turn on the Amp StepGen, raise the first step, and drop all of the rest to zero (level). Then adjust the Freq / Sync / Steps settings to taste for the overall timing and length.

I added a very brief Pitch EG; one-shot, without a sustain point. You could do the same with a one-shot Pitch LFO or Pitch StepGen. In the envelope, I set the Depth to no more than 100 cents. Then I drew an erratic set of nodes & segments which eventually settled down to zero level. The 'beep' pitch has trouble locking to a specific frequency before it settles down. This is another subliminal effect that adds to the realism.

Years ago I had to do the soundtrack for a slide show for floural (sp?) carbon emissions (back when this was cutting edge and before the global warming crusade). I used a moog's filter turned up to feed back resonance. The only problem was it took a while to get the sustain right (I had to play it manually since I couldn't midi trigger it and some of the bleeps were a bit longer than others - it was also put down to tape).

My suggestion would be a sine way with a set frequency and amp legnth. Maybe a hint of envelope attack and release if you want to smooth it out. Once you get the timing right, then you could see if Tom's triangle way, etc. might better the sound. A bleep is a bleep except when you are creating it.

Good luck and trust your ears with all the above advice.

Yes, that's called a Quindar tone, and it is essentially two sine waves, both very close to 2500hz, for 1/4 second. (Google Quindar tone for the exact specs). This is doable in any of the Cakewalk synths, and in Rapture for instance, you'll get some practice using the amplitude wave modulation, and tuning a couple of sine wave elements.

I recently made my version of the 60's NASA bleep, using Reaktor. It has instant attack, and is basically like a sinewave with a bit of bandpass-filtered noise. It's important to play it at the right pitch.

cool Dave.

WOW, DC.

Thanks for the time and effort.

There may be a few new Major Tom spinoffs.