Nicolas
Group: Members
Posts: 208
Joined: Sep. 2005 |
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Posted: July 04 2007, 19:40 |
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On first excursion he certainly appears to be applying the string ensemble for the high/midhigh pitched strings. I owned a solina string ensemble myself, but a slightly different incarantion with a slightly different sound; I never could compare it 100% with the sounds MO got out of it. But that high, middle and middle low, quite silently mixed string certainly appears to be the solina string ensemble. As for the real lows, low sounds out of my solina sounded different, but these were of a really different kind than MO's ensemble anyway. (I had separate string sounds for bass pedals).
But I must say that on First Excursion, it sounds simply as low octave chords/notes on a grand piano to me, in some cases with the lower chords/notes of a distorted electric guitar playing together with these chords. Maybe with some extra chorus/reverb/short echo on it, but it does sound like a grand piano. The solina string ensemble also plays lower here than during the rest of the piece, where it most often blends perfectly with the guitar sustain unless it plays midhigh to high solo chords, but it does not play "drone low" even when sustaining the piano drone. I think you'll get a lot of the effect heard in First Excursion if you play a grand piano really low for the attack of the drone sound and sustain it with a string ensemble somewhere in the region between its first and second octave. And then some low notes of distorted electric guitar on it, solo high electric and right hand grand piano and midhigh to high solina notes/chords as well above it, thicken everything with some effects from the chorus/reverb family, and you're finished. I may be totally wrong though, don't take my word for it. But I don't think there's arp2600 or SSE involved in the First Excursion drone attack phase itself, that appears to be pure grand piano to me.
Just listen at the very start of the tune. brrrroing grand piano and whhiiiiiiiiiiiiii solina strings fading in at a midlow pitch in order to sustain the sound (after that, the high distorted electric guitar part starts, and quite a bit later in the tune the solina appears to be played also in an additional higher pitch, but that's hard to distinguish from the guitar sustain upto the point where it starts soloing in high and midhigh chords). Of course the very start of the tune doesn't sound like the full drone you hear later on, but IMO that is simply because here he's not yet playing fortissimo low chords on the grand piano, and no low distorted E-guitar chords are played over it.
Maybe I mishear one or all of the sections I identify as the string ensemble, where it actually is filtered noise or other string ensemble like sound from the arp2600 (like the one that gets cut of at 5:10 and then transfers into a choir like string, it doesn't really sound like a solina string ensemble but it's possible, certainly with external effects. it sounds like a VP-330 but that one is from 1979...). But in that case still the arp2600 or whatever noise/string isn't droney low, it's a mid to low pitched string/noise sound to sustain the low piano notes. So whether it's the 2600 or SSE, the reasoning stays the same. My money would be on an SSE rather than a 2600. I think he plays it polyphonical, which is a strong indication of it being an SSE, not a 2600.
Anyway, never forget that MO also used external effects (guitar pedals, echo tanks, etc) so an end result may be unrecognizable compared to the original sound source. And of course, David Bedford may also have had some synth like things from his own, so the choice is larger than SSE and ARP2600.
Do you have other specific examples than First Excursion? Maybe I can detect a synth in there.
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. Of course, in the software you'll miss some of the lovely analog oscillator instability and musical detunability that gives the 2600 its beautiful sound, but you should be able to get very close. 
. (well, unless he also has a grand piano sound, obviously)