Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” synth sounds
reverbmachine.com
reverbmachine.com
This undersells the CS-80. It had polyphonic aftertouch, which most synths don't have today.
Most have velocity sensitivity, meaning each note transmits how much initial force you applied. And most have aftertouch, meaning they transmit how much force you continue to apply after hitting bottom. But for most it's just channel aftertouch, meaning it transmits the aftertouch of the key you're pressing the hardest.
The CS-80 transmitted aftertouch of each individual key, and had nice controls to to adjust how it used that information. A lot of synths can use polyphonic aftertouch but only a few new ones actually have poly-AT keyboards. The ones I know of are the Hydrasynth (out for a couple years now), the Behringer UB-Xa, and the Iridium keyboard (both introduced this year).
Vangelis was also a huge CS-80 fan and used it on the Blade Runner soundtrack. Incidentally, a boutique synth that replicates the CS-80 pretty well (without keyboard) is the Deckard's Dream. It's $4000 but that's way less than a vintage CS-80.
Vangelis using poly aftertouch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoEkyBX7qsg
The CS-80 also famously had a touch strip, which Vangelis used to great effect in Blade Runner.
The strip in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV3qDUTVsNo&t=1487s
A famous example where it's used: https://youtu.be/smpTDkLCYb0?t=125
> A lot of synths can use polyphonic aftertouch but only a few new ones actually have poly-AT keyboards. The ones I know of are the Hydrasynth (out for a couple years now),
Interestingly the Hydrasynth is also one of the only modern synths with a touch strip. I think it's clear what the Hydrasynth was going for.
The GP is probably referring to the (false) urban legend that Phase Distortion, a technique developed by Casio, was meant to get around the FM patent. But PD has very little in common with FM (or PM) at all: the relationship largely begins and ends with the fact that they both operate on the phase of the sine wave. But PD is quite different, and its closest cousin is waveshaping. Indeed PD has its own patent.
This happened in the wake of the DX7, which was a massive success. Casio's CZ line never really touched it but they had some interesting qualities to them. I had the 101 which I bought for ~ $70 when nobody wanted them and they sell for a lot more now.
Even if the underlying algorithms are nothing like FM if you get similar sounds (the gritty, busy waveforms) it made a lot of sense to market it and dilute the appeal of "FM" as THE digital synthesis method of the 1980s, as the DX7 nearly did.
I also wouldn't loop in wavetables with these approaches.
Previous attempts were pretty miserable, such as versions 1-3 from Arturia, and Memory Moon. At best they could be described as CS-80ish.
Poly aftertouch on the Hydrasynth is a revelation. I didn't think I would use it nearly as much as I do, and now I can't imagine being without it. I even play my Novation Summit from the HS.
Oh, and the Deluxe adds release velocity, something the original didn't have.
Anyone know of weighted keys that implement this?
Poly-AT is mechanically pretty hard to do so it's quite expensive. It wasn't considered a prime selling feature because not many people really wanted it.
The people who did want it were desperate for it, but it's taken until now for it to start appearing in mainstream products.
Still no modern weighted keys, unfortunately.
The Gem S2 and S3 (as mentioned by TheOtherHobbes) from around 1992 - these do indeed have poly aftertouch, but neither of them are weighted.
Ensoniq was the company who most consistently used poly aftertouch in their keyboards during this era, but AFAIK only ever on the synth-weight keys. For their models that had weighted keyboards, they would use a keybed made by Fatar which only provided regular aftertouch, not poly.
I was picturing it in the context of a piano.
Now I remember the conversation went on to "efficiency" and Roger definitely comes from the "optimise for glory" camp. Told a story about how the Linn Drum machine was really less that 8 bits and used some trickery to squeeze out quality at a time when cheap 8 bit DACs were not a thing.
I heard them touch the touch strip for the first time and the roots of the blade runner soundtrack just oozes out.
> Keyboards capable of generating polyphonic aftertouch are relatively rare, since it requires a more expensive mechanism than what is needed for channel aftertouch. Polyphonic aftertouch is also known as a generator of large amounts of MIDI data, which in older equipment was capable of exceeding the maximum bandwidth of a standard MIDI cable (the so-called MIDI choke),
https://electronicmusic.fandom.com/wiki/Polyphonic_aftertouc...
It's also in the background of All We Ever Look For (backing a Fairlight sampling a whistle). There's clearly some amplitude control going on but then again it could be something else (clever envelope programming or even just getting lucky with compression).
If you hear from two CS-80 owners (Ty Unwin and Dave Spiers) talking about the CS-80 (back a few years ago when a Yamaha R&D engineer asked a forum what they would want to see in a CS-80 remake, which started a new round on the rumormill) on Sonic Talk, the Deckard Dream sounds nice but it ain't a CS-80 - the thing that was special with the CS-80 was the UI rather than the sound itself.
One of the defining characteristics of an organ is that the sound of the note tends not to change over time and the keys are essentially just on/off switches. Hence, any kind of articulation you want to get into the sound has to be done by working the controls while you're playing.
You then take a synth which is vastly more receptive to having its sound reshaped in real time, and design a UI for it that encourages this, you get a synth that we're still talking about (and struggling to replicate) 45 years later.
I do have this Loopop review of the DD that compares to the CS-80: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNf0kpidGc4
That says they made various updates (e.g. MPE support, more presets) but seems to suggest it's pretty similar. The biggest deficit is lack of some effects and the ring mod, which are available in an expander.
The main control area looks very similar. The form factor is definitely different and maybe the CS-80 would be more ergonomic. It certainly oughta be, since prices on reverb.com go from $60K to $90K.
Here's Ty holding up the DD saying it sounds nice, but its not a CS-80:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=unY34O7NZ10&t=3124s
Hearing Sonic Talk's whole discussion on the CS-80 is interesting:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=unY34O7NZ10&t=3124s
... regardless, even Behringer's CS-80 clone sounds a bit out of reach for me, but how long would that take given we're yet to see more demos of the UB-Xa in months!
On a tangent, when I was in prison my mom died, and Kate Bush was her favorite music. Also in prison as a coping mechanism I created my own superstition that music on the radio was a message for me (I know it isn't but I needed a way to just get a little space to breath). Like Tom Petty meant the the day was going to turn out ok. So I programmed myself to be super receptive to Kate Bush being popular again and it's been amazing for my mood and productivity. Programming little positive things into my makeup has been really important in getting through stuff, be it addiction or just day to day difficulties.
https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs
You can try it out at https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/demucs if you don’t want to install it. If you google “source separation” there are a bunch of hosted services which mostly use either Demucs or Spleeter (which was an earlier, good but not as good, system from Deezer)
Looks like the meat of this is using a JS script to invoke Spleeter using execSync so it might be quite simple to adapt to Demucs, maybe I’ll give it a go!
To this day they're two of my favorite bands.
Music has this weird property of connecting you to different people and different times. It's some kind of magic.
Sorry to hear you've had it so rough. Hope you're ok.
I remember seeing a breakdown of The Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" that made me lose absolutely any respect I might have had for the composition of that song. This writeup kind of had the opposite effect; I get what went into the song and how much the tools they were using defined it, but it's somewhat more interesting as a result.
I love this song, but I wonder if I'm the only one who thought it was really out of place in that scene, even kind of forced in.
It too me out of the scene rather than keeping me in.
;P
(It would have been more fun if we'd spent the past month with clickbait like "What is Orgone Energy, Anyway?"
I have to say I’m more impressed by artists who’s music is largely sample based but they twist them into entirely new forms (eg DJ Shadow and Future Sound of London) than just lifting a few loops wholesale though!
Finding stuff like that will definitely give you a new appreciation for DJ Shadow (both, for what it's worth, were excellent live).
Also Labi Siffre: very good stuff.
In case you didn't know: KEXP occasionally does breakdowns. Here they played every song sampled on Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. https://www.kexp.org/breakdown/paulsboutique/
and the whole of that first album, Deadringer, is great.
Oh, I only found this which is an actual cover - did he put the original on one of his releases too?
https://www.whosampled.com/cover/5048/RJD2-Making-Days-Longe...
Daft Punk not so much. Rather than composing the samples together they use the entire sample as the hook. Maaaybe they might speed it up a bit but that's usually it.
The whole album is nothing but a medley, and it's one of my favorite albums of all time.
"Making of "The Prodigy - Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff"
I'm a big fan of Imogen Heap who is very similar to Kate Bush in that she brings together technical sophistication in composition, a love of technology in the service of art, and something deep and meaningful to say in each song. It's hard to conceptualize that much awesome incarnate in a single person.
One thing I often notice is that if you listen to music with other people, you hear new things in it, because you are partially hearing it the way they do through reading their reactions.
Song writing is an art it's not like a technology where you can point to power usage and how v 2 is better than v1 to show the thing is now better, great.
He goes into great detail about the entire songs it's never just "point to a thing" and say "there it is". He'll describe how the choice of the wording, the chords, what scale e.g. "mixolydian vs dorian", how it all combines to make the song great.
He's at his best when he's analyzing the vocal melody against the chord harmony (ie: they're using the #4 on the F for a Lydian feel to the 3rd on the Am)
I feel like this has been missing in more recent videos though.
Personally, I started listening to her because of the much smaller "wuthering heights fandom". Regardless of how people get into her, it's good to hear people are finally listening to her in the states.
Remaking an existing hit song is much easier than making a new hit song. Making a hit song is very very very hard, even if you're using some samples along the way.
Same goes for Daft Punk. Those samples were all sitting there for the taking for years, but no one else put them together in such an electric way, supplemented perfectly with their own synths and drum machines, mixed brilliantly (there's a lot of unique and creative mixing and engineering going on) etc.
I did a little remake of the main loop of LCD Soundsystem's Someone Great. It wasn't particularly hard (once I had access to the right synths). But to have sculpted idea to use those sounds, notes, chords etc. all put together like that is brilliant.
Thankfully I don't listen to music radio or watch TV/Cable/Sat so I'm not being exposed to the oversaturation of once upon a time nice things.
Maybe time to re-visit The Dreaming :)
What I like about Kate Bush's songwriting is that many of her songs cover relations or are from viewpoints that are quite different from those usually found in popular music.
For example "Breathing", from the viewpoint of a fetus during or shortly after a nuclear war. "The Kick Inside"--consequences of incest. "The Infant Kiss"--Governess dealing with children possessed by the spirits of the dead previous governess and the dead lover of the previous governess.
Also: there are more good episodes of Bob's Burgers than there are of the Simpsons. You're seriously missing out.
Also I feel bad pointing this out but one thing fetuses don't do in the womb is...
She's just so weird! If you like Kate Bush a lot, and I sort of get why her weirdness is endearing, you'll like Tina Belcher. Just a lot of the same energy.
Finally, it's what she represents, which is an artist who was able, over and over again, to pursue her exact vision while giving zero fs what EMI wanted -- and was able to release top selling albums (in the UK) in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and 10s.
She's probably the only pop artist that is worth engaging with as a genuinely mind-broadening experience that should be undertaken precisely becauseyou might not like it at first, like some classical or jazz.
Never for Ever is really good too though. The range represented in those three consecutive albums (NfE/TD/HoL) is staggering.
Kate Bush was recording a song, which may or may not turn out to be great.
Meyers and Molko were recording a hit song, they already knew the power the song had and they lean into it far more than Kate Bush could.
That said, I prefer the Placebo cover over the Meg Meyers one. The Chromatics, who I generally like otherwise, cover is not their finest work.
I prefer the sounds of the Kate Bush original for sure, a re-recording of it would be my ultimate. Draw it out. Higher highs, lower lows, don't be afraid to give us some space to feel the weight of what we're experiencing.
Placebo's "Without You I'm Nothing" is one of my favorite albums although I've never checked out any of his other work, heh.
Rick shows you the construction of songs that we all hear and he shows what went into the construction of a song. Some of it may be a guess some extremely precise.
He's also more musical than lyrical he's even said in some of his videos he can't dissect lyrics as he does music.
He's also in a contact battle with YouTube algorithms and DRM he's always getting blasted for a few seconds of music. I'm amazed that he has survived YouTube's idiotic controlling behaviour.
Maybe drop your "fascination" with rejecting him and just listen you'd find it a simple enthusiast tour/lightweight music class, and appreciate it as nothing more.
Jeczalik also worked on Godley and Creme's "Cry" (1985) - another synth heavy reverbish song.
[0]: Kate Bush and the Fairlight CMI: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MgLtS_TNrt4
Syntorial (on desktop or iPad) is an app which teaches you synthesis by doing - it’s a full synth which you can use in its own right, and it introduces you to each part and gives you challenges to recreate a certain sound using that part. I can’t say I’ve done the full thing but it’s a cool concept.
You can also just download some free/cheap synths (or get a free trial of Ableton or some other music making software which comes with its own included synths) and start messing around of course haha, there are a tonne of good ones around, including on iOS if you use an iPad (the advantage being the touch screen makes it maybe more fun than using a mouse). GarageBand on Mac is maybe a fun place to start experimenting too.
Happy to advise more if you have specific things you’re interested in!
If not, just get Vital and start messing around. There are tons of Youtube tutorials.
https://www.arturia.com/products/software-instruments/pigmen...
True, because Max comes with bandlimited oscillators and envelope generators ready to go. In Pd you need to build them yourself or import libraries.
> and is more fully featured out of the box
True. See above. A lot of things you'd make from scratch in Pd come in the standard namespace of Max.
That said, there's nothing you can do in Max that you couldn't do in Pd is you're a decent DSP coder, and that low-level entry point is half the fun IMHO. Don't forget they were originally the same codebase. MSP is Miller's initials (For those who don't know Miller Puckette named it Max as homage to Max Matthews).
I’ve loved hearing how it was used in Stranger Things (a show I also have always loved).
Trivia - one of the Fairlight engineers wrote the open source 'libsndfile', used everywhere.
I've tried to experiment with new artists....there's nothing there...gen-z has to plumb the 80s for music to listen to....sad
I’d wager that there are plenty of gen z kids listening to billie eilish and lil yachty and the entirety of mumblerap that would disagree with the idea that there’s no good pop music outside of the 80s.
edit: I’m not debating that 80s pop continues to be popular among younger people as it has since… the 80s. I was specifically responding to the comment about gen z needing to plumb the depths of 80s music due to some perceived lack of palatable pop music today. It’s genuinely a silly idea. Who is buying olivia rodrigo tickets? Or dua lipa or doja cat or lizzo or megan thee stallion
Not true in the slightest. Every older generation has been saying this about the newer generation forever. New music today might even be the best yet.