Here is a little present from me to get your creative juices going in 2025.
In the The Synths Of Space Rock thread, we were talking about the synth sounds and how they got them, and I offered to create a tutorial on the work I had done (a few years back now) to get the sorts of ambient sounds that Steve Hillage was using.
One of the tasks I intended to do over the Christmas break was to write this tutorial, and here it is.
An extract from the Guide
The idea for this guide came about because I spent a long time over Christmas 2022 decomposing Steve Hillage’s “Garden of Paradise” from “Rainbow Dome Musick” to figure out how he was getting these marvellous ambient sequences, and I wanted to use similar techniques in my own music.
I will show how I have this setup within Cantabile, and I will provide audio examples without delay and with delay, so you will hear the difference. As well as showcasing the delay examples, I will also describe the other aspects of the song that provide the complete package. I will also provide the patch files for the VST synths and effects that I used, along with MIDI files containing the sequences.
I cover:
The ambient synth layers used on “Garden of Paradise” from Rainbow Dome Musick
Guitar Glissando
And (not Hillage related) the sort of tempo sync delay favoured by David Gilmour
Hopefully that is enough to wet your whistle in 2025!
Amazing work, as always Derek!!! After learning some Floyd guitar awhile back, I realized the delay WAS the instrument…not so much the guitar.
The OGWT was one of the best series in it’s time. It brought the lessor known acts into the limelight, which was being shut out by the FM top 100 of those days. Thank goodness these rare videos were not discarded like many others.
I was blessed to be able to pick up a lot from Pete, our Gilmour clone, in the Floyd tributes I was in, as he was quite fastidious about getting the right sounds as well as playing it right. He used to refer a lot to https://www.gilmourish.com/ which is a fantastic resource for digging into how Gilmour got his tone
It was from Pete that I leant how much that delay was a vital part of Gilmour’s sound (and why playing to a click is essential when doing Floyd music unless you have a drummer who can play like a metronome to within a few BPM) and that even when Gilmour went for distorted tone, it was such a classy distortion.
And, yes, OGWT was the best, and it beggars belief that the BBC killed it. And of course we all know that playing the songs live sorts the musicians out from the lip syncers.
Hopefully what I have written will give the folks here some ideas. I was pretty stoked when I worked all of these Hillage tricks out!
