My 70's synth music

C

Cloneboy Studio

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My 70's synth music (not dance or techno)

I figured I should share one of my own songs with everyone. The stuff I do these days is mostly based on 70's electronica like Gary Numan, Peter Gabriel, Kraftwerk and so forth. For the most part I even use 70's analog keyboards so the sound is authentic.

This is a song I recorded about six months ago. Unfortunately, when the studio got robbed we were unable to track the vocals and re-record the clean guitar parts in the bridge. Please excuse the continued lack of vocals and rather rough guitars in the bridge.

This song was recorded on an Alesis HD24XR at 24 bits/48khz thru a Mackie CR-1604 mixer (before I got my 24x8 A&H System 8). Instrument used: SCI Prophet 5 rev 3.2* (most of the synth), Korg Z1 (organ, resonant filter sweeps), Roland R8 Drum Machine (using the Power Drums Card), Fender American Stratocaster, Ovation Acoustic Guitar, Fender American Jazz Bass. Various effects were used while recording: Tech21 SansAmp RBI, ProCo Vintage Rat, Symetrix CL100 Compressor/Limiter, Boss CE300 Chorus, MXR Phase 90, and a MXR DynaComp.

The song was moved to Steinberg Cubase SX and mixed with primarily Waves plugins (C1 Compressor, C4 Multiband Compressor, MaxxBass, Doubler, TrueReverb, Renaissance EQ, Renaissance Compressor, Enigma--for the intro noise--and the Q10 Paragraphic EQ). Additional plugins used were DigitalFishPhones Blockfish Compressor and Endorphin (transient designer/saturation/exciter plugin).

For mastering the song went to Steinberg Wavelab and was processed with Waves plugins again. Specifically and in this order: S1 Imager, 6 band Renaissance EQ, C4 Multiband Compressor, L2 Mastering Limiter.

 
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Hey there... cool retro vibe. There's not a lot of actual recording in this, but you mixed it decently enough. You said you played an actual bass on this, but all I can really hear in the low end is a kind of morphing thing with the keyboards. I guess the bass is just playing the root all the way through...anyway, pretty hard to make out the bass, but the mix has plenty of low end, so big deal...

Yeah, the timing's pretty screwy in the bridge, but the guitar is a welcome lift there. I know ovations usually sound like ass acoustically, but they're even worse DI'd in my opinion. If/when you retrack that part, mic the sucker!!!!

The drums should be taken out back and shot, but I understand that you were going for a certain dated sound. Still, lol...some sounds just shouldn't be preserved, heheheheeee.

Nice mix man. Thanks for sharing.
 
Believe it or not there were about 18 tracks there. Most of it direct drum machine or synth. I want to re-record the high hat/cymbals with the real thing to add some life to the proceedings.

You guessed right--DI'd Ovation. Sounds terrible. I put it there to see if it guitars would really 'work' there or not. Since I engineer at a studio I was going to overdub it... then we got robbed. Dumb luck.

When I retrack the guitar it is going to be with a Martin I'm borrowing from a relative. The Ovation was just what was at hand (not even mine). To top it off it is a *crappy* Ovation... total bottom of the barrel.

The bass guitar is there (listen for the fills) but the bass synth line essentially doubled it. I wanted to blur the line between bass guitar and synth, so I meshed them together fairly strongly--not aiming for much seperation.

I *liked* the drum sounds. :)

I'll admit it, most of the sounds I like are pretty retro. Unfortunately I never get to do them in my day recording job, so I suppose I may go overboard on my own material. Heh. At least I nailed the sound!
 
Cloneboy Studio said:
Believe it or not there were about 18 tracks there. Most of it direct drum machine or synth.
Click to expand...
Oh yeah, it wasn't a slam or anything...I just meant that it's a very "plug and play" kind of mix in terms of sounds (synths and drum machine)...not a lot of acoustically recorded sounds. There's plenty of stuff in there all right, lol.

Have a nice night.
 
It's weird what you can do without microphones. :)

If I had a halfway decent recording area at home I'd have mic'd some things (acoustic guitar definately, the electric guitar definately, probably ran the cymbals thru a PA and mic'd the room, etc...) but my recording area acoustically stinks.

Hence the reason I work out of a studio. :D
 
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