Hoover sound
Hoover sound refers to a particular synthesizer sound in electronic music, commonly used in gabber and hard house. Originally called the "Mentasm" or "Dominator", the name that stuck was the one likening the sound to that of a vacuum cleaner.
The sound
The Hoover is a complex waveform that can be created with three oscillators, each spaced an octave apart, a heavy use of pulse-width modulation and a thick chorus effect. The sound is characterised by its thick swirliness that stems from a fast LFO controlling the PWM and the chorus, It was originally created by Eric Persing for the Roland Alpha Juno, although the term 'hoover' was not introduced by him.
It is traditionally created with the Roland Alpha Juno-2, Alpha Juno 1, or rack mount version MKS-50 synthesizer using the built-in What the patch. The hoover sound generated on these synthesizers is unique for the use of a "PWM" sawtooth wave, which inserts flat segments of variable width into a sawtooth waveform. Where a Juno-2 is not available, Hoover sounds are sometimes produced by using samples of Alpha Juno-2 Hoovers and granular synthesis on these samples . The Hoover has become something of a fetishized item in certain circles of music production (not unlike the sound of the Roland TB-303 and the Reese bass).
