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 !.
We would like to welcome Alastair Symon to the current artist list here at Classitronic.net.
Alastair has been doing something really rather unusual and also very difficult, instead of taking the easy route (like me)and using a computer sequencer to play music though his modular system, he uses hardware step sequencers which interact with each other to build up and play classical pieces, so in essence the synthesizer is playing it’s self !, I seen this with basic sequences but not the same level that Alastair has taken it to.
This is no mean feat to achieve and takes a lot of time and patience to setup and get right, below is a rendition Erik Satie – Gymnopedie No 1.
He says that he will be able to make more complex works with the addition of a new Oberkorn 3 sequencer from Analogue Solutions.
This is both a novel and interesting method and to my knowledge that no one else uses and we look forward to hearing from you Alastair, Well done !
I found this on Youtube the other day which includes some snippets of music that I have not heard from Tomita before including an excerpt from the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky and few and couple others.
Something that is also shown in the video is a picture of the Sound Creature album from 1977.
Now this is something you don’t see others artists doing and that is giving a detailed breakdown of how they made their music. Not only did it give the listener an audio deconstruction of the sounds he made but it also came with a booklet albeit in Japanese (though I have found a couple of pages that have been translated in to English) telling the listener how he created his trade mark sounds with diagrams of the synthesizer modules required to do it, effects processing, even the stereo placement within the track, the example below goes through part of the track “Day Break” from the “Daphnis and Chloe” album. Initially this was released in Japan but I have seen it on CD.
And some sketches illustrating how he got some of the effects on his albums.
This was when synth’s like the Moog where the reserve of the few who could afford them and were much more of a mystery than they are now, much like the way he gave a listing of all the equipment he used to make an album though he stopped this after the release of Dawn chorus in 1982.
Mike has produced some excellent electronic classical renditions in the past and says he will be releasing more works under the creative commons license.
He says of this one “Winter, the second movement (Largo) of Vivaldi’s 4 season, performed on various synthesizers.
I was curious on how it would sound like, so i started to work on a synthesized version of that piece, inspired by the classical Synthesizer works of Wendy Carlos”
Nice work Mike, we look forward to hearing more from you.
Here’s something I came cross the other day, an album from 1972 by Mike Hankinson, an English guy who lived in South Africa though album was produced in the USA.
It’s called “The Unusual Classical Synthesizer” and was made entirely on a Electronic Music Studios “Synthi” VCS-3 as opposed the Moog Modular which was the weapon of choice for many of the “Switched on” also rans that came after Wendy Carlos.
The track listing is as follows
Side one:
1 Toccata and Fugue in D minor (Bach) [7:05]
2 Variations – Mein junges Leben hat ein End (Sweelinck) [3:29]
3 Sonata in D major (Scarlatti) [2:46]
4 Sonata Rondo (Clementi) [3:20]
Side two:
1 Concerto in A minor (Bach) [2:59]
2 Eine kleine Nachtmusik (Mozart) [3:37]
3 Italian Concerto (Bach) [3:37]
4 Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven) [5:08]
From VintageSynth.com about the VCS-3
“The VCS3 (nicknamed the Putney) is an analog monosynth housed in a distinctive angled wooden case, a truly classic synth. EMS (Electronic Music Studios) was created in England back in 1969. The VCS3 was one of their first synths and it is still a great, unique, funky little unit! Pictured above is the Mark I model. Pictured is another unit with the small wood-cased DK2 voltage-control keyboard required to play the VCS3.
It has three oscillators, and a unique matrix-based patch system. Instead of patch wires, the VCS3 uses a patchbay grid in which the synth components are laid out, and signal routing is accomplished by placing small pins into the appropriate slots. The VCS3 was, in actuality, a modular type synthesizer reduced down to an extremely portable size.”
Just goes to show that few things today are really that new, on the sleeve notes it says “It is recommended that you play this disc on a very good system and if you own a Quadraphonic synthesizer, listen to it through that – the sound will amaze you. Be careful not to damage your speakers playing the Bach Toccata !”
Mmm, sounds like 5.1 surround sound and sub-bass, mark my words, flares and platforms will be back in fashion at some point.
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