Wednesday 16 April 2014

C-Moment


More music, this time from 2003 or so, lurking on my hard drive. Off the top of my head I used Cubase VST five point something or other, with some very simple software synthesisers and the hilariously jerky Supatrigger; and from what I remember the distinctive whooo-eeeee noise was produced with GMedia's ImpOSCar, a simulation of the culty, financially unsuccessful OSC OSCar monosynth.

Composition-wise it was a conscious attempt at minimalism - the melody sounds like a broken machine, it doesn't change throughout the song, which is based on a simple four-chord pattern. There's enough development to keep it interesting for three minutes and the production is nice. If I say so myself.

The OSCar was an anachronism - a monophonic analogue synth launched in the early 1980s, with MIDI. It resembled an Oberheim 4-Voice and was generally shunned in favour of the Yamaha DX7 and slightly older polyphonic analogue synthesisers such as the Prophet V and Oberheim OB-XA. The concept sounds interesting today (a Roland SH-101 with more oscillators, and MIDI!) but it was very expensive even when it was new, and musicians wanted to play several notes at once. If it had been cheap, it might have taken off.