Having been asked on more than one occasion, it is about time that I posted a sound from one of my favorite synthesizers, the Sequential Circuits Pro-One. This is actually two layered tracks of sounds I made with the Pro-One today in a session with Nils Westdal. The sounds are effects for a dub track at 73 beats per minute. I ran them through a couple of tempo delays and reverb to create some atmosphere. Even after using this instrument for more than ten years I still manage to get new sounds out of it. Perhaps it’s the unpredictability of the analogue oscillators and filters, or the fact that you cannot store presets, in any case it seems to breathe and even sometimes cough as if it needs to wake up a bit before behaving consistently. The short story is that this simple mono-synth from the early 1980’s has a lot of character.
Pro-One Dub
I produced this sound by playing one note in a virtual instrument called “Harmonic Dreamz” which is part of
I looped this section of radio static where I was quickly swapping between two channels of music with the analogue dial. Although cacophonous, it has a strangely attractive rhythmic and musical quality to it. So, of course that led me to experiment with some processing. I did not want to manipulate it too much so I could illustrate the drunken quality to the passage as it repeats, but I added a short, modulated, stereo delay to create some imaging on the mono recording. After that I decided to map a couple of controllers to the left and right feedback of the delay, allowing me to over saturate the output dynamically over the recording’s one minute and six seconds duration.
For some reason, the AM (amplitude modulated) radio static that I recorded recently is much noisier than the FM (frequency modulated) static. The noise is also at a lower frequency than the FM noise which makes sense since the FM band is at a higher frequency than the AM band. The AM band is in the kilohertz range (535 to 1705kHz) while the FM band is in the megahertz range (87.5 to 108 MHz). In any case, I think you will find this recording familiar. 