[LAU] Prog rock instrumental, sort-of WIP

[Q]

Julien Claassen wrote:
> Hey Q!
>   this is great. You got the sound absolutely right. Especially towards 
> the end of the existing parts. This sounds really like the FloKis 
> (Flower Kings). Nice use of Aeolus, I always planned to see how it would 
> work in such an arrangement.
>   Nice composition, I'm listening to it again just now. There are some 
> interesting harmonies and progressions. And those sounds. No I wouldn't 
> say anything against such sounds, Wine and all. These are really sweet 
> mellotron samples.
>   Only the snare drum sounds out of place there. To canned, to static in 
> its sound quality. The rest of the drums sound good though. I didn't 
> know, that there were such good kits for hydrogen, or you just mixed it 
> very handsomely.
>   Kindest regards
>          Julien
> 
> --------
> Music was my first love and it will be my last (John Miles)
> 
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> 

Hi again Julian

Thanks for listening and I'm glad you like it and thanks for your kind 
words.

It's funny you should mention the Flower Kings, as they are probably the
furthest from the bands I had in mind. I've heard a fair amount of their
stuff on internet radio and I didn't find them to my taste,
hyperpolished modern production, remorselessly upbeat and cheerful. I've
always thought that there's a large divide in Scandinavian prog bands,
with the upbeat, cheery bands like FK and Moon Safari on one side and
the remorselessly gloomy or melancholic bands like Änglagård, Anekdoten,
Liquid Scarlet, Sinkadus, White Willow and Wobbler (to name a few, but
not all of those are symphonic prog) at the other extreme, with not much
in the middle.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the compliment as FK are a talented 
bunch, just not to my tastes and not what I had in mind, but it's nice 
to be compared to them all the same!

Regarding the harmonies and so on. I was looking for inspiration and
picked up a guitar scale book, deliberately looking for "odd" scales in
order to try something a bit different and "exotic" (to me at least). I
stumbled upon one, which is most odd: it's a major scale but it doesn't
sound it and it seems to lend itself to a lot of strange harmonies,
especially ones with tritones. I'm no theorist so it's not easy for me
to explain, suffice to say that I really liked the sound and it sparked
off many ideas (although I've still not used the very first one yet!).
It seems to be known by a few different names including double harmonic,
Arabic and Byzantine, although Part 4 actually uses the Phrygian
dominant apparently -- the same scale but with a flattened 7th.

All the Tron sounds are the fantastic GForce M-Tron (and its successor
M-Tron Pro) VST instrument. The original just plays one Tron sound at
once without any bells and whistles, the Pro allows two tape banks to be 
layered and also has filter and amp ADSR envelopes, a delay and ensemble 
effects and so on. Most of the time I just use the sounds as they are 
without messing about with all the trimmings much. The Pro also has a 
few instruments looped, but I won't use those for the sake of 
authenticity. There are loads of tape banks, they even somehow managed 
to find a few new ones for the Pro and there are samples of related 
devices like the Chamberlin, Birotron and Optigan as well.

The M-Tron Pro with its two layers, envelopes etc is based on the GForce 
Virtual String Machine, which is samples of the sound generators from 
analogue string machines like the Eminent, Freeman, Logan, Solina etc -- 
another lovely VSTi if you're into that sort of thing.

If any Tron geeks are interested, I used: the famous Mk II violins, 
cello, male choir, boys' choir, mixed brass, sound effects bank 2 (for 
the water, birdsong and tolling church bell at the start of part 3), 
female choir, double bass, augmented 8 choir and violin orchestra.

The drum sounds are an expansion pack for Native Instruments' Battery 
drum module, called Studio Drums. Although it's designed for Battery the 
samples are all WAV files that can be used in Hydrogen. There are 
samples from five different kits, plus three additional large sets of 
toms, 11 chromatic snares to choose from and so on. I mixed and matched 
from different ones to build the kit and sound I wanted.

About the snare: I compressed it pretty heavily to get the snap and 
crack that I wanted (in addition to EQ as well) and perhaps I've rather 
overdone it. I'll have to see whether I can back off the compression to 
improve the dynamics without losing the sharp crack.

Sorry for the overly long reply!

Best wishes

Q