Fairlight sounds

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Over on the Sound On Sound Forum there was an investigation into some of the sounds on Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love album. Poster desmond managed to figure it all out. So I dug in myself and did a few tests with Fairlight sounds, adding the Linn 9000 drums that desmond was unable to nail:

Under Ice

Watching you without me

Running Up That Hill (A deal with God)

Two 1982 Quantec QRS units (as used by Kate Bush) and the 1987 QRS/XL.

Except for Watching you without me all of the sounds in these tracks were achieved by processing simple single note samples of a cello, specifically Cello 1 and Cello 2 from the Fairlight IIx library. The wonderful airy droning sounds are created by playing a chord into a reverb set to infinite decay. It appears that Ms. Bush used the Quantec Room Simulator for this. Mike Oldfield used this machine for the same effect on his Crises album, as well as the Fairlight.

I haven’t got the chord progression quite right on Running Up That Hill, but it’s sufficient to see how the sounds were put together. What amazes me is that, dry, this pitch modulated Fairlight cello sounds unusable. Goes to show what a creative lady she is.

Kate with her Fairlight

Going Under

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Here’s a track from our forthcoming album. The song celebrates the heroes of Chernobyl.

After the explosion it was determined that all the water that was being dumped into the reactor area to quench the fires was in fact pooling in rooms below the now molten reactor core. If the core melted into the chambers below the steam explosion would kill everyone on site, and render an area of hundreds of miles around completely uninhabitable from fallout. The radiation within the buildings was immense.

Three divers volunteered: Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov, and Boris Baranov. Their light failed almost immediately, and they were forced to procede underwater, through the dark. The sluice gates opened some time later, and the water was drained. The men never left the lower chambers, and were entombed when the Sarcophagus was built around the site.

Fun with synths

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First, the Roland V-Synth. Totally unique abilities, and intuitive to use:

The V-Synth does an exact replica of the Roland D-50, an early sample playback synth with some bizarre but useful compromises. Classic sounds:

Then the Kawai K5. Additive synth, interesting in theory but in reality not productive. Some good sounds though:

The K1r, another severely compromised sample playback machine. The poor man’s D-50. But again, the compromises are musically useful:

And finally, the Korg EX-800, a strangely compromised analogue subtractive synth:

In theory, the V-Synth can make any sound that the others can make. But the peculiar design compromises that were made in order to get these synths into the market place, can lead you down some interesting avenues in the quest for new sounds.

The summer

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Mike Shipley reminded me that I haven’t updated my activities in a while. It’s been an exciting time! For the last few months I’ve been:
Producing Polly Barrett.
Producing Mike Lyons.
Producing a great band called deBurca down in Claycastle studios.
Taking loops off the multitracks for live performances by Butterfly Graveyard. I mastered their album earlier this year.
Designing and building acoustic treatment and a patchbay for my studio, and adding MIDI to a Casio SK-5 sampler.
Recording Aideen Crowley Dynan’s marimba repertoire for a CD to raise funds for the Cork Cancer Society.

So we’ll have some new music to show for it soon!