First the story:
Once upon a time, long long ago, lived a guy with a Korg 700, Korg 700S, Elka Rhapsody String Synth, an electric piano that wasn’t even velocity sensitive and an organ that was simply awful. In terms of effects, it was all routed through a guitarist’s battery powered, foot operated, phaser pedal and a Wem Copycat.
There was a battery operated mixer with only 4 knobs (one for each keyboard volume input – really it was that sophisticated) and into an amp. Yes, there were 5 keyboards and 4 mixer inputs so he twisted the leads together (times were hard).
This was in the days long before Cubase, Pulsar, Midi, digital audio and even computers, when men were men and drummers were ….. well, that’s another story!
This guy had a love of the newly emerging electronic music but he also loved other music such as Gregorian Chant or Plainsong.
His wife’s granny had given them her old stereo tape recorder (and I mean old and we’re not talking Tascam here either – Dansette I think!). So this composer decided to split the stereo signal input and record from the keyboards on one side of the input signal, and from a Gregorian chant MONO Vinyl LP on the other input.
Wow, monks and synths and filter sweeps – this was going to be great.
Wife was on hand to move the filter sweep slider when he told her to and, being a great studio assistant, she even pressed record on the old tape deck too!
After 3 seconds the tape deck blew up with smoke everywhere – end of project.
This is a true story – I kid you not.
Years later someone else had a similar idea of using Gregorian Chant to synthesised music and drum tracks. I cursed them. “It was my idea”, I shouted, even though there were no drum machines in the ancient days.
Anyway, back to the present time. I found some (poor quality) Gregorian bits recently and decided to do something with one of them. The resulting track is attached, although it bears very little resemblance to that original idea.
So this 2 minute idea wasn’t even on a hard disk – it’s been in my head for 25 years!! The question is, should I have simply forgotten about it? I’d appreciate all positive, negative and any constructive comments please, so I can do a final version.
I’m still getting my head around all this audio mixing stuff and it’s the first time that I’ve really used Recycle in earnest and it’s definitely the most I’ve ever done in terms of effects processing, channel routing, mixing and mastering.
Yes, there is still lots to learn – so any comments and advice about any aspects of the track will really be appreciated.
Trackname: Hell 5 Mins:07 Secs)
Filename NeilB_Hell_V1.MP3 Size: 4.85 Mb
Recorded at 32 bit and mixed down to MP3 at 16 bit, 44.1 @ 128 thingies.
Equipment:
Pulsar 3.1, Cubase VST 5.1/32, Recycle 2.0 and other odd little gadgets and tools
Kenton Control Freak
Pulsar Sample Players F & Z
Pulsar Synths: DubSub, Prisma, Inferno, 303
Choir samples courtesy of Spectrasonics “Symphony of Voices”
Gregorian wave file from somewhere I can’t remember – translation is “Lord have mercy”.
Vocal speech courtesy of evangelist David Pawson, from a tape recording of his “Hell” tour of Britain (although I forgot to ask if I could use it, thus breaking the 8th commandment “Thou shalt not steal” and condemning myself to hell).
Thanks also to my wife’s (dearly departed) granny for original technical contributions (the tape deck).
Neil B
