The Synths Of Space Rock

Just got this in my inbox from Reverb. Thought there would be a lot of forum members who would be interested

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Thanks for sharing. I have a great interest in this area

I thought there might be one or two hundred of us that would be :smiley:

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Over Christmas I spent a lot of time trying to get the sounds I was hearing on Steve Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Musik. I need to pick that back up again (when the nights start drawing in again), but I had the sounds you hear in the first five minutes or so on a combination of Arturia Mini and 2600 and my Novation Summit.

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I’m one of them, thanks!! :+1:t4:

Didn’t Whatshername, Hillage’s keyboardist girlfriend, have a little modular system? Maybe an expanded EMS system? Now I have to find an old Hillage video.

Miquette Giraudy used/uses a VCS3. Was still in use when I saw them in 2019 - last gig I went to before lockdown. Gong and Steve Hillage (with Gong backing Steve). The gig was awesome, although I came to the conclusion I had become a little to old for standing gigs - I couldn’t walk the next day after standing for more than three hours!

VCS3 is the box to the right in the picture below.

It was Tim Blake who had the expanded VCS3. Two put together in a single case, called the Crystal Machine, with custom mods, including interwiring between the pin matrixes, buffering of signals, oscillator sync…

It is the inspiration for XILS-LABS XILS4.

I guess that Miquette leant a lot whilst Tim Blake was supporting Steve (they were both in Gong together and Tim was on Steve’s Fish Rising album.

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Cool, there you go!

Funny, this thread just popped up linked to another one. Was it really last June we were discussing this!?

Anyway, I thought I would resurrect it and say I have had reasonable excess emulating the style of the “Garden of Paradise” synths. Not 100% facsimiles but that would probably be hard.

It was really hard to try and work out what was played notes and what was delay, but got there with a lot of analysis using Spectral Layers in Cubase of all things - being able to see the spectrum visually was actually a huge help.

If people are interested, I will post what I have done so far and maybe write a small tutorial.

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@Derek,
count me in. I am interested! Thanks!

Gabriel

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Ok, I will write up my adventures. May be a little while, but I will post it here when done.

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@Derek I would be so very grateful if you and I could discuss your findings on Garden of Paradise. In fact, to really make it worth your while (and no disrespect is intended), I would gladly pay you for your time. I have a bit of a learning disability, so it’s difficult for me to parse out these sounds on my own. Thank you very much! You may reach me at OldVoltageMusic@gmail.com and I am very much looking forward to speaking with you on this subject

Hi,

I never did get around writing the guide that I said I would. It looks like I started, but since then I have been stupidly busy on many things.

It would still be worth doing, so I will commit to doing it. I will post any links here to it as a public resource.

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I certainly appreciate it. And again, if it’s any incentive, I’d gladly compensate you for your time and tutelage. I have a few of the things that Miquette would have used, including a vintage ARP 2600, various tape echoes, hardware sequencers, and an Eventide H910. Might make it interesting to apply it to those things.

I would not take money for it as one of the aims about supporting forums like this is to spread knowledge; and whilst I have been giving advice on forums for 25 years now, I equally have benefited so much over the years from the time and expertise of others. So that is karma. :slight_smile:

I cannot guarantee when this will be ready, but what I might do is release it a bit at a time instead of waiting until everything I intended writing is complete

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