A recent spacey bassy synthy cue
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A recent slinky synthy cue
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A recent funky synthy cue
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Omnisphere Demo: “Nevelig”
A quickee demo I whipped up using Spectrasonics’ new Omnisphere instrument, the successor to Atmosphere, with an incredibly broadened palette.
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My Doepfer Modular Synth Recordings 2000-2004
In the fall of ‘99 I fulfilled a dream I’d had since junior high, of acquiring a modular synthesizer. I started off with a medium size 5-oscillator system chosen from Doepfer and Analogue Systems modules, including AS’s brilliant RS-200 analog sequencer. Over the next few years the systems mushroomed to about 115 modules, including 13 oscillators, a couple of sequencers, all manner of filtering (including analog vocoding), envelopes, clock division, and electronic switching, mostly Doepfer but also including modules from Analogue Solutions, Plan-B and Blacet.
I adored the system and recorded with it constantly. It was (and is) an incredibly musical machine, always meeting my efforts at least halfway, sounding better at everything than any synth I’ve messed around with before or since. My approach was 100% wag-the-dog, finding the music inherent in the modules, with all kinds of Rube Goldberg interlocking synchronizations, led by the analog sequencers.
At its peak, it was one of the larger modular synths I was aware of. There were definitely some behemoths way, way beyond it — John Duval’s “Fist of God” and Bakis Sirros’s giant Doepfer system among them — but it was pretty insane. In the computer world, of course, it’s trivial to have 13 oscillators, or 78 for that matter. But the sound — nothing like that sound was ever going to come out of a software app. More than that, the pleasure of patching sounds and controls with patchcords was unbeatable.
Below is an example of the kinds of rhythmic/chordal things I was doing with my analog sequencers at the time. I had a page of these up in an earlier version of this site. I’ll add other clips from that page soon.
Like most of the recordings I did, this is simply the live output of a patch, with outputs from various stages mixed by VCAs or faders.
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Cue From “Z.E.R.O.: War Of The Dead” - “Fatally Infected”
EWQL SO Gold XP Pro, Kontakt 2 (various libraries), Vienna Instruments Solo Strings, Atmosphere, Absynth 4, StormDrum.
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Cue From “Z.E.R.O.: War Of The Dead” - “Impromptu Caesarian”
EWQL SO Gold XP Pro, Kontakt 2 (various libraries), Vienna Instruments Solo Strings, Atmosphere, Absynth 4, StormDrum.
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Cue From “Z.E.R.O.: War Of The Dead” - “Save My Baby”
EWQL SO Gold XP Pro, Kontakt 2 (various libraries), Vienna Instruments Solo Strings, Atmosphere, Absynth 4, StormDrum.
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Cue From “Z.E.R.O.: War Of The Dead” - “Taunted Psychopath”
EWQL SO Gold XP Pro, Kontakt 2 (various libraries), Vienna Instruments Solo Strings, Atmosphere, Absynth 4, StormDrum.
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