Archive for August, 2009

Eric Satie’s Gnossienne No 1 for Modular Synthesizer – Alastair Symon

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

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.


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Sibelius Intermezzo Karelia Suite Op.11 – Paul Shillito

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

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.

I hope you enjoy it.


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Bach’s Bourrée #1 – David Kristensen

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

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 ;)

Nice work David,  keep it up !.


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David Kristensen joins Classitronic

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

We would like to weclcome our latest artist to our current list, David Kristensen from Denmark.

David Kristensen

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.

You can read more about him on his bio page here http://www.classitronic.net/david-kristensen/

Keep up the good work David.

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k5unp3xdy8

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

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