Elemental planes is VERY inspired by Jean-Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream and Eric (hi Eric!) and the very special feeling an analogue sequencer gives a song. To emulate this I used the built-in sequencer in the S-50 running in pattern edit mode. Hence I got the "same" looped feeling with the ability to very coarse edit the pattern on the fly.
All these songs are recorded live with a minimum of preparations (usually pre-programmed drums, base and maybe a few synths) and then I only could fade in or out different things, play and (somewhat) edit the pattern. You can hear it's all live, all my errors are still there since I couldn't edit the recording at all (it was recorded "as is" on a compact cassette). When it sounds like I must have 3 hands, the answer is simply "sustain-pedal"...
There is one more song on a tape somwhere. I'll add it as soon as I find the bloody tape!
| Life patterns | 6:05 11 Mbyte | Not much to
say about this song, really. The drums are played by the S-50 to get
the "right" feeling, and thus I couldn't prepare much but had to
program them in real time during the very first seconds of the song.
You can hear my effect (REX-50) isn't really THAT great, it mutes the
sweeping noise in the beginning to hide the poor quality of the 12-bit
D/A...
The song ends rather abrupt, which is because I made a programming error when I was to add more drum stuff and instead managed to get a string-chord programmed. So I just called it a day and ended it. Gear used: · Roland S-50 (pattern sequencer and drums) · Roland D-50 (strings) · Yamaha CS-15 (lead synth) · Kawai K3m (base) |
| Esoteric - The void | 24:10 38 Mbyte | Two songs in
one!
Esoteric uses the feature that my Alesis drum-machine has 4 outlets. By connecting all of them to my mixerboard, I could program a somewhat complex pattern and then fade up or down parts of it separately. The sequencer also sends a program change to the D-50 so that every even and odd chord has a different sound. The void only uses the D-50 and is just a sudden experiment with chords. Turned out much better than I expected. Gear used: · Roland S-50 (pattern sequencer) · Roland D-50 (strings and stuff) · Yamaha CS-15 (lead synth) · Yamaha TX81-Z (base) · Kawai K3m (spacey synth) |
| Untitled 4 | 19:57 30 Mbyte | I never came up with a good name
for this song.
Gear used: · Roland S-50 (pattern sequencer, choir) · Roland D-50 (strings and stuff) · Yamaha CS-15 (lead synth) · Yamaha TX81-Z (misc) · Kawai K3m (base?) |
| Untitled 5 | 9:53 15 Mbyte | And now; without sequencer! This
is a song that uses the most out of my CS-15. CS-15 has 2 separate
chains of VCO, Mixer, VCF and VCA and in this song they work as
separate syntheseizers controlled from the same keyboard. The
high-pitched chain gets its VCF and VCA trigged from the LFO and the
low-pitched chain gets trigged from the keyboard, the rest is just
inspiration...
Gear used: · Roland D-50 (strings) · Yamaha CS-15 (lead synth) |
| Desolation | 1:12 1.7 Mbyte | CS-15 has a mic-input! Just to
try this out, I mixed down both VCO's into VCF2 and through VCA2 and
then I feedbacked the low-level output back to the mic-input and out
again through VCF1 and VCA1 and the sum of it all I connected to
mic-in to the mixerboard, which, of course, made the poor input-stage
distort the whole thing. Add echo, and voilá!
Gear used: · Yamaha CS-15 (distorted, feedbacked lead synth) |