How can I reproduce the choppy synth in “Come on Home” by Franz Ferdinand?

Question

I want to prepare a base so we can play with my band a cover of this song:

I have a Korg R3 and Garageband.

Can you hear the "choppy" synth at the beginning? How could I reproduce it well? Which kind of sound / effect should I choose?

Answer 1

The rythmic effect can be achieved by filtering some signal through a lowpass VCF (12 dB/8ve, little resonance) heavily modulated (~ 800 Hz down to 20 Hz) by a sawtooth LFO. That gives the basic "choppy" thing. Then you can try all kinds of stuff to get the actual sound; perhaps start with a PWM-square or sawtooth VCO and ring-modulate it with a triangle after the VCF, then a fixed bandpass filter with a little saturation.