A week or so ago David posted his interpretation of Prokofiev’s vision fugitives opus 22 section 7 on the Classitronic soundcloud group, its only been today that I have finally had the chance to really listen to it, which i have done several times and it really grown on me.
This is what David says of the piece “Synthesizers used were an Arrick Modular, Oberheim Matrix6, Waldorf MicrowaveXT, Prophet8, Nord Lead2X & Yamaha TX816.
This track is a slowed down version of the seventh segment of the piano opus. The timbre are arbitrary and of course nothing like a piano. Purely straight out of my head.”
As David says it’s nothing like a piano and all the better for it, and excellent orchestration of the sounds gives it s whole new character (note to self, I wouldn’t make a good music critic as I find it difficult to describe in words how a piece like this sounds, I prefer to listen to the music and go on the journey it takes me in my mind rather than write about it).
Very well done and looking forward to hearing more in the future.
Yes, well we can see who’s been up burning the midnight oil again in front of a load of knobs and wires !.
Another amazing piece of programing from Alastair Symon and his modular synth, this time its Pavane by Gabriel Fauré and don’t forget folks there ain’t no computers driving this, just good old fashioned analogue sequencers, which is no mean feat.
Alastair summarises up the the set up like this “It uses three Analogue Solutions Oberkorn 3 and a Synthesizers.com Q960. There are also several sequential switches in use as well as the Moon Modular M563 Trigger Sequencer driving the Analogue Solutions drum modules.”
But other than the shear technical brilliance, it sounds really beautiful and haunting and sounds suit the mood of the music very well, well done Alastair !.
After a bit of a long wait I have finally got around the starting some new works. I have started my interpretation of Stravinskys The Rite of Spring, the first part, the introduction is here and hopefully (time allowing) the rest should be coming along in the not too distantant future.
It’s certainly an interesting piece and allows for a lot of creative sound design and placement, I’m looking forward to working on it and as soon as i have something it will be posted here.
It’s been a slow week with not a lot happening and I’m struggling over sounds for a new piece I’m working on and then comes along Alastair and just stuns us all this amazing piece by Satie and what is more amazing is that the synth is playing itself, no computer, no midi control just hardware step sequencers, gate and triggers.
God knows how long he spent setting up all the sequencers, gates and triggers but result is really really good and just goes to show what can be done with a lot of skill, patience and time. It also shows that modular systems are still amazing synths and not relics of a bygone era, you couldn’t do this on any other synth without the aid of a computer.
Its got a great feel to it, you’d would swear blind that a computer was behind it all but watch all the sequence lights and listen and you can see the parts playing along. Its very impressive and the sounds he used has already given me ideas for what I struggling with at the moment.
Anyway this is what Alastair says about the piece.
“This is another of Satie’s beautiful melodies done using just analog sequencers. It uses the Synthesizers.com Q119 and Q960 and the Analogue Solutions Oberkorn 3 as well as the MoonModular M563 trigger sequencer. It also uses MoonModulars M564 and Club of the Knobs C962B sequential switches. The M564 is used to switch the gate busses and the COTK is used to play the three rows of the Oberkorn and then 16 steps of the Q119. The M563 is used to control the timing of the bass and chords. Trying to synchronise the three step sequencers, two sequential switches and the trigger sequencer with the rows shifting at different rates proved to be very challenging. The only effect used apart from the Modcan digital delay is some reverb.”
I think even Iaso Tomita would be impressed by this, it certainly blows the rest of us away. What next from Alastair?, I don’t know but I think that it will be pretty amazing.
Just completed my latest piece, this time it’s my take on Sibelius Intermezzo from Karelia Suite Op.11
The style is well, I would call it Classitronic for want of a better word, it certainly is influenced by Tomita style I like very much, and like many of these projects I do it developed a life of it’s own, so now it’s time to let it out in to the wild and see what happens .
The gear used to make this included Malström, Thor, Minimoog V2, Jupiter 8V, Battery 3 and Omnisphere soft synths, and was arranged and mixed in Cubase 4 and took about 2 weeks of evening and weekend work to complete.
Just as the virtual ink on the virtual blog paper i’m writing on about Davids last post has dried, he sent me another little cracker of a track.
This time it’s Bach’s Bourrée #1 from Orchestral Suite no. 2. Short and sweet and sounding very nice indeed, being played on the Native Instruments Pro 53 soft synth.
This is what he says of it :
“For this fast-paced piece from Bach’s second orchestral suite, i chose the Native Instruments Pro53 software synthesizer (emulation of the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5) as the logical continuation from the Moog Modular on the Gavotte (suite #4 in Bm).
Even though the Pro53 only has two oscillators, a single filter, I was able to coax some very nice sounds from it, naturally tuned in Werckmeister III-tuning for maximum authenticity.
The continuo (improvised chordal and ornamental line, typically played with a harpsichord) is one of my finest yet, I believe. And it was fully improvised in one go to guarantee that taste of synthetic authenticity you just don’t find these days ”
We would like to weclcome our latest artist to our current list, David Kristensen from Denmark.
David has produced several great renditions such as the one below of W. A. Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik which was done completly on a Novation XioSynth in a W. Carlos style, which just go’s to show you don’t have to have a huge amount of equipement to product great sounding work.
David has since expanded his synth range and produced more pieces, his latest being J. S. Bach – Gavotte from Orchestral Suite no. 4 in D.
You can see more of Davids work on his Youtube account here http://www.youtube.com/user/syntesen, he has been busy recently and has several new pieces available there.
Just in case your new to the Electronic classical music, this is a look at just where it all started with the Classic Album “Switched on Bach” by Wendy Carlos back in 1968.
This not only put Wendy Carlos on the map, it also popularized classical music which to many of the younger generation of the time had been seen as stuffy and old fashioned. It also did wonders for the Moog synthesizer which Wendy had played the music on and brought forth a flurry of similar works by other artists including being the main influence to Isao Tomita.
It was the first classical album to sell over 500,000 copies and went on to over 1 millions sales, it went into the top 10 and stayed in the top 40 for 17 weeks and in the top 200 for a year. It also won 3 grammy awards.
The music, is as the title suggests composed by Johann Sebastian Bach and consists of 12 pieces with the track listing shown below
Side one
“Sinfonia to Cantata No. 29″ – 3:20
“Air on a G String” (from Orchestral Suite No. 3) – 2:27
“Two-Part Invention in F Major” – 0:40
“Two-Part Invention in B Flat Major” – 1:30
“Two-Part Invention in D Minor” – 0:55
“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” (from Cantata No. 147) – 2:56
“Prelude and Fugue No. 7 in E Flat Major” (from Well-Tempered Clavier) – 7:07
Side two
“Prelude and Fugue No. 2 in C Minor” (from Well-Tempered Clavier) – 2:43
“Chorale Prelude” “Wachet Auf” – 3:37
“Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major – Allegro” – 6:35
“Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major – Adagio” – 2:50
“Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major – Allegro” – 5:05
There is also a an audio commentary by Wendy Carlos of the initial experiments that went in to creating the album.
As this was the first of a kind, the whole album was recorded by hand, there was no midi or computers to help play the parts like we have today, each track was over dubbed on to an 8 track tape recorder, a process that took a long time and a lot of experimentation to find suitable voicing to match the sounds to the music.
Wendy Carlos worked closely with Robert Moog suggesting many improvements that could be made to the Moog synthesizer.
Robert Moog gave a paper at the annual Audio Engineering Society conference, where he played one of Carlos’ completed recordings and said this of what happened at the meeting.
“At the end of the talk I said to this fairly big audience, ‘As an example of multi-track electronic music studio composition technique, I would like to play an excerpt of a record that’s about to be released of some music by Bach.’ It was the last movement of Wendy’s Brandenburg No. 3. I walked off the stage and went to the back of the auditorium while people were listening, and I could feel it in the air. They were jumping out of their skins. These technical people were involved in so much flim-flam, so much shoddy, opportunistic stuff, and here was something that was just impeccably done and had obvious musical content and was totally innovative. The tape got a standing ovation.”
The album received a mixed reaction at the time of its release. Some critics reviled it for trivialising the work of one of the most revered classical composers of all time, but others were excited by the sound and the virtuosity that went into its creation. Regardless of the negative reviews, the album caught the public attention and sold better than anyone had expected. This had a welcome side effect to Moogs business as it was suddenly found itself inundated with requests from record producers for Moog systems, and a rash of synthesizer albums were released to capitalise on the popularity of the new sound.
Wendy Carlos followed the release of the album with a number of other classical Moog albums including
Please welcome on board to Classitronic.net, Paul Glover.
Paul has built his Moog 3C replica over the past 15 years and is now turning his talents to recreating pieces from the baroque period as demonstrated by his Sinfonia to Cantata 35 ‘Geist und Seelle wird verwirret’ by J S Bach.
Another excellent piece by Paul, well done.
Paul says that will be putting out more works on to Youtube until he has a CD’s worth of material, just don’t stop there that’s what I say !.
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