Vectorman

I think it's fairly early in the chain for me, too. But indeed, compression surely does accentuate it. I think the biggest godsend plugin I've found in recent times is oeksound soothe 2. All the excessive resonant peaks I used to tame with manual EQ band automation (like those pesky "e" vowels), that plugin clamps them down to the point that I hardly ever have to use EQ automation on a vocal now. Also can work a trick on other potentially harsh things like guitar solos.

 

Apologies to the Cowboys for going off on a vocal production tangent in the new album announcement thread, btw. Nice job on the new release, guys!

The new Trevor Rabin...

 

 

fwiw, when it comes to de-essing, I've never found a plugin that can control sibilants entirely to my satisfaction as an automatic process. While I found switching to a ribbon mic lessened the issue, that also didn't completely eliminate it. So I at least partly do it the tedious way - separating each sibilant that's still too loud (which is often a lot of them) and manually reducing its gain.

Just listened to the album! Very nice job with the production.. Congratulations on the new release!

I think probably nothing before or after the '80s would have drawn me in quite as effectively. I guess I'm an atypical Rush fan in that I was never really into hard rock as a genre before Rush and it's still not a large portion of my listening (I think Rush and Porcupine Tree are the only hard rock currently on my in-the-car music shuffle). Prior to developing an interest in Rush, from what I can remember, I think a lot of what I liked in my early teens was more synth-heavy. That being the case, 1985 was, I guess, a good point for me to board the train after reading that Keyboard Magazine interview with Geddy and listening to Grace Under Pressure probably 20 or 30 times that summer. My fascination with all the synth sounds and Geddy's keyboard setup was the initial hook, and once ensnared, I quickly developed an appreciation for the bass playing, the lyrical content and everything else.

 

I still like the PoW/HYF-era best in terms of Geddy's bass playing. Really digged the more hyper, funky, inventive lines he fired off on almost every song. I felt like bass parts that really jumped out and grabbed you were never as plentiful on any albums that followed.

Behringer Pro 800, a $399 8-voice VCO analog poly which is a sort-of remake of the Sequential Prophet 600, is getting into some users' hands now. Sounds like it might be a bit yet before it's readily available in the US, though. Pretty much unheard of to get an 8-voice dual-VCO synth for anywhere near this price. I was waiting to make sure it turned out decently before pre-ordering, myself.

 

 

We've been on a Netflix documentary series kick lately. Meltdown: Three Mile Island, Challenger: The Final Flight, and most recently Pepsi, Where's My Jet?

 

Strangely, despite it apparently having gotten quite a bit of news coverage in the '90s, I have no memory of ever hearing about the legal battle over the Harrier jet from the Pepsi commercial when it was happening.

On 2/11/2023 at 2:08 PM, Entre_Perpetuo said:

Is that Geddy’s actual Mini Moog?

I don't believe so...from the description, it sounds like it's a different specimen from 1974 that's been restored.

 

Moog themselves have of course recently reissued the Minimoog Model D for the second time, so you can get a brand-new one with MIDI for a mere $5K.

Yep, when I saw that, of course I had to comment about it to my better half, and then I had to roll the video back because I'd missed a few lines of dialogue while I was babbling about the shirt.

And now that cool and surprising announcement is followed by completely unexpected sad news.

 

https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2022/06/01/sequential-founder-father-of-midi-dave-smith-has-died/

It definitely is a cool and inspirational thing to see a new entry in the Oberheim OB series for the first time in SO long. A few years ago, I probably wouldn't have bet $10 on it ever happening.

 

Hard to say how long the wait could be for those looking to buy the UB-Xa. According to what was stated by Behringer, the only holdup now is getting sufficient quantities of components for a big enough batch to justify starting production, but that might be a while yet. I'm in no big hurry for any of these, though. Leaving aside sentimental factors, my occasional desires for an Oberheim-like texture in a new song are probably, in all honesty, satisfied by software solutions like Synapse Obsession.

The new synth has aspects of the Oberheim OB-X, OB-Xa and OB-8 all rolled up in one. The oldest of those three, the OB-X, was of course the source of the "Tom Sawyer" filter sweep, as well as the poly sounds on "The Camera Eye" and "Subdivisions", etc. Not cheap at $5K, but I guess it's a bargain compared to original OB-X's which are now going for close to $20K.

 

www.oberheim.com

 

 

 

I had posted about what looks like a forthcoming new Oberheim OB-X (or OB-X-inspired synth), but I think the post was lost when there was a glitch with the board. Another short teaser has come out in the interim. Looks like it may be another project done in tandem with Sequential (like the OB-6 from a few years ago). No word on any specifics or expected release schedule.

 

 

American Horror Story (on season 1, had never watched it before). And also Lost in Space, season 3 on Netflix. The latter made me physically jump when they suddenly threw in "Tom Sawyer" - on Lost in Space, of all things. I think it was episode 6?

Had no idea there had been new PT available for the last week. This is SO much more instantly engaging than Steven's last two solo albums (especially TFB which, even though I'm very fond of a lot of electronic music, just didn't really grab me). Granted, this track or at least the core of it probably dates back to the earlier 2010's when Steven was still doing (IMO) great solo work. It is rather interesting to see this happening after Steven said that he had become bored with doing guitar-driven music.

 

It's really been a year of things one had given up expecting to see happen...happening. Geddy and Alex announcing a new album in the works with Stewart Copeland is surely right around the corner, LOL.

The first thing that popped into my mind in pure stream-of-consciousness fashion was Misfits of Science, of all things. One of Courtney Cox's first TV roles, I believe.

The Colin Farrell version of Fright Night. October is always "slip in as many horror movies as I can" month.

Thanks for posting! I thought I remembered the full length version maybe having been played on MuchMusic back in the day (whereas it was definitely just the shorter edit on MTV), but I can't remember for sure now. (Of course, that was 36 years ago...)

This is actually something I wonder all the time and would love to ask. Once they come up with a synth patch for a sound they like, how do they go about archiving it and recreating it later?

 

Like you said, I would expect for the old analog synths they would write down all the patch settings somewhere and keep it in a vault (later digital stuff could exported to floppy/computers). But I wonder in reality if they take it that far. Maybe just knowing what synth made the sound, they just shoot for 'close enough' later if needed. Seems hard to believe though, especially since some of the digital stuff (like PPG Wave programs) can be so tough to make again from scratch.

 

I'm obviously a big nerd about getting the historical record down for synthy stuff, I'd love to know more details on this process. Maybe we should start a petition to get a synth chapter in his memoir? ;)

 

PS - One thing this reminds me of is when I was emailing the guy who played the synths on the Twin Peaks TV show soundtrack. I was surprised that he didn't still have the original Emulator II file for the guitar sample he used to make that great bass guitar sound in the intro (he only had it in a newer format, with the pitch shift and tremolo already applied). I get that he probably never uses his Emulator II anymore. But I would still think once you made a hit with something like that, you would immediately back it up in multiple places and keep it safe forever.

 

I'm sure some things were written down the old fashioned way in the early days. Later on though, with instruments that could save patches to cassette and then diskette or memory cards/cartridges or even computer-based editors, I'd expect the archiving was digital.

 

A lot of times, we didn't actually get exact recreations of studio sounds live. For the intro chords on "The Big Money", for example, on the PoW and HYF tours, we didn't get that big, layered sound...Geddy was just playing a single PPG synth brass patch. Several sounds were played on completely different synths where you wouldn't even be able to transfer patch settings because the newer synths had different architectures. Like on the HYF tour, where he played the "Tom Sawyer" lead on a square wave unison mode preset from the Prophet VS (that was...different!), or played the "Subdivisions" poly parts on the PPG and the leads on the Roland D-50. Or the "Red Sector A" arpeggiator bass played on a Prophet VS preset on the HYF tour. "Red Sector A" went through a lot of changes regarding the sounds used over different tours. Seems like there was a fair bit of just looking for the closest approximation on whatever new instruments had been incorporated into the setup.

 

And then, of course, from the Presto tour onwards, we hit that stage where, for some parts, they just started sampling synth bits from the original masters and triggering samples live. That's when the "Big Money" chords started sounding like the album and various things from the "Camera Eye" OB-X parts to the main chords from "Between the Wheels" were just triggered samples. If you watch him play on vids from the last several tours, there's a lot of just pressing one key and getting a chord or an entire phrase going on.

I always assumed that the sound on Witch Hunt is an actual toy piano.

I can get a reasonable approximation of this on my OB-X synth, so I always guessed that's what it was. But it does almost sound like something else with how distinct and percussive it is. Watching some P/G footage, he appears to turn to his PPG Wave to make this sound when playing it live on that tour (although his OB-Xa is tied up with playing the choir patch). The sound is also a lot more drawn out and synthy compared to the original recording.

 

Yes, on the OB-X. You aim for a celesta patch, which takes on a music box/toy piano tonality in higher octaves. Plink around, then drag that index finger up and down the white keys.

 

Perhaps a Synth/Synth Settings appendix would be a champion idea for the memoir. You don't suppose the editor would dismissively chortle at the idea, do you?

 

Ooooo....it would be great if Geddy had a chapter called Synthworld in the memoir! I'd love to hear him talk more about that stuff and not just give the standard "I just got tired of playing triads and not playing bass" thing he's been saying for the last 10+ years.

 

It would be nice to see something like that, definitely. Though I suspect that, like Terry Brown, there are probably a lot of details he just doesn't recall by now, especially since synths apparently haven't been a major source of interest for him for the last three decades. Not that he completely abandoned using them and stopped following any tech developments - I did see him on the Access Virus user list, so I presume he probably picked one up when they were relatively new and hot and maybe used it on MFH. But obviously you don't commit all the details to memory the same way you do with something that is a real passion.

 

It occurred to me that if I was asked about the details of what I used on this or that thing from like 1993 when I was recording stuff for my first attempt at an album...I'd probably be almost as clueless. Which sound from the Samplecell II library (there's a blast from the past) or the Kurzweil or whatever did I use on that chordal part? Uhm...dunno...that was more than half a lifetime ago...couldn't tell you if the fate of the world rested on it. And of course Rush's synth heyday dates back even further than that.

iirc, when we used to do "Subdivisions" in cover bands eons ago, I just had some sort of swimmy, ethereal PWM sound with a moderately low filter cutoff tuned an octave up that I would bring in on top of the main sound for the intro/outro...I think I had it programmed to come in when I flicked the modwheel to active position. It's interesting that I can't recall Geddy himself ever incorporating that detail live.

 

Regarding the DEW intro, I doubt that was accomplished with the onboard capabilities of any synth/sampler in his setup at that point. To my knowledge, the only sampling capability Geddy had on P/G was the Waveterm, and I don't think the lowpass-only filtering one could do in the Wave 2.2 with a Waveterm sample would accomplish what we hear on the album. To me it sounds more like some sort of noise source run through outboard effects units (possibly a chain of them). Sounds like there's a phaser in there. I remember several years ago, (I think) Howard Scarr very quickly whipped up a patch for u-he Zebra by request on the KVR forum for that sound that was sort of evocative of it but not quite there.

 

Btw, the vocal sounds Geddy referred to on "Afterimage" I'm guessing are the "aaaah" and "ooooh" drones you hear in the midsection after the second chorus. The stuff that almost reminds me of some of the male choir samples from the Spectrasonics Symphony of Voices library.

 

If anything, it actually became easier to identify sound sources from HYF and after because it seemed like there started to be less bespoke synth sounds and more use of presets. HYF is full of Prophet VS presets. Roll the Bones has a lot of Wavestation and JD800 presets on it.

I'm not a fan of her acting wise but she's legally in the right considering HBO Max paid Denzel a little more for The Little Things because of COVID and are doing the same for Keanu and Will Smith for Matrix 4 and that new movie about the Williams sisters of tennis. Disney didn't keep their word and they're learning the hard way.

 

Complete OT, but I was listening to a Youtube demo of a software synth with a groove patch playing in the background while browsing TRF, and when I scrolled down this thread, the groovin' kitty in your sig was in PERFECT sync with the beat from the Youtube audio and stayed locked in for a good 20 seconds or more. :7up:

I see it was Geddy's newer Taurus 3 pedals, the ones Moog put out around 2008-ish. (But then, who knows if he even still has any sets of the original Taurus pedals by now.)

I've watched it a couple of times. IMO, a vast improvement over the theatrical version. Much more backstory and depth. One can see, based on this version, how much edge was taken off the theatrical version, which felt somehow a little too cutesy and leaned a bit too much on comedy.

 

It's unfortunate that, now that they salvaged that film and made us want more, they're apparently playing the reboot game AGAIN with yet another Batman. They're never going to give the MCU a run for its money if they can't make up their minds what they want to do and stick with something for more than 2 or 3 movies.

I'd take HYF, on the whole, over any album that came after. Among its other merits, it (like PoW) contains some of the most inventive, intricate bass playing of Geddy's career. He had a strong ear for melody during that period too.

 

But I got into the band in the spring of '85 so, to me, that more orchestrated approach with a lot of keyboard textures was the sound of Rush at the time I boarded the train. And of course I'm more into synths than I suspect many Rush fans probably are, so I suppose I tend to hear those mid '80s records a little differently. (That said, there are a few keyboard parts on HYF, like that Emulator II shakuhachi sample that worked better on the intro of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" than it did in the overly repetitive way it was used on "Tai Shan", that even I don't entirely dig in hindsight, hehe.)