#90s synth

When digital and analog crash together under the neon lights.

Slow Motion - draft

I just noticed that I hit 5k subscribers sometime overnight. I’m kinda blown away. I wasn’t expecting to get this kind of response in this short time. I’m a little too introverted to really be any good at online engagement and actually reaching out to people. All I’m good at is putting myself out there and seeing who likes what they see. Well, hear mostly for this blog.

Today I delved a little out of the Neon Streets style I’ve been working in mostly to try and do something a little more sound-track/cinematic. I don’t have the space or money for much in the way of actual synthesizers, most everything I do is purely digital. If I label something as analog, it’s because I’m trying to make it sound like older analog synths, not because I actually have the equipment. This was another attempt at trying to capture that sound and feel. There’s a bit of odd mirroring, using purely digital technology, often cheap and free plugins which are the only ones I can afford, to imitate the more analog sounds of earlier sci-fi cyberpunk soundtracks... that were trying to sound more digital and synthetic than most soundtracks of the time.

I did take a little bit of inspiration from my Neon Streets series, and I used two sets of synths for every instrument and layered them together in different ways. One track will fade from one instrument to the other. Another uses filters to slowly lessen the effect of one or both throughout. Some lean more towards the right channel while their counterpart leans towards the left. All in all, I was trying to use what I’ve learned while doing this blog to make something deep and rich, without having the sounds blend together into a muddy mess. And in spite of Acid crashing halfway through the first draft and losing a few minutes of my work (I thought the entire hour or so I’d already put in was lost until I found the backup file it had saved before it glitched up), I think I made something halfway decent by the end.

Horrorscores: Umberto – Helpless Spectator album review

Helpless Spectator is Umberto’s most beautiful album to date. It’s also his most terrifying.

For the last 10 years, Umberto‘s Matt Hill has been revisiting the weird, eerie world of retro soundtracks, usually of the horror variety. Starting with Unquiet Grave, Umberto was one of the first retro-revisionist sonic sorcerers to investigate the particular sub-category of horrorscores known as ‘horror…