New Track - Voyager

[Derek]

Hi

It's been a while since I posted any music as life has been nuts. Anyhow, here is a "short" tour de force, the germ of which was inspired by a Wavestate patch called Voyage. I tweaked it and called it Voyager as it sounded a bit cosmic to me, and that was the start. As you know, sometimes songs write themselves, and then some take a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get right. This was in the latter camp, but I think it was worth it.

This is a very laid back, ambient noodling track. The underlying rhythms in both sections are the new Korg Wavestate doing its work, and I built on top of that.



There are many synths on this

• Wavestate
• Prophet X
• Summit
• Kronos
• Montage
• An1x
• Dune (VST)
• Omnipshere (VST)
• Avenger (VST)
• Biosphere (Kontakt VST)

The noises at the start and end are actual "field" recordings made by the Voyager spacecraft as they passed Jupiter and Saturn, and also listened to interstellar space, capturing electromagnetic storms.

With both the Montage and Prophet turning in very good CS80 emulations in different places. The Prophet is the more strident "Vangelis type" brass sound. The Montage is used in the second part of the song, and sounds gorgeous, especially (I think) around 9:34, which is mainly Montage (sounding very analog and lush) underpinned by bass notes from the Prophet.

A big shout out as well to the reverb used on the song to create really dense reverb. It is UVI Plate (in "Insane Mode" during mixdown). This has quickly become my favourite reverb for ambient music. It is so rich and lush.

[Rara]

Very nice work

Listening to this (again) with my laptop while playing with space engine on my desktop really works
well

Rara

[Derek]

Thanks for listening, Rara

When you say Space Engine, I assume you mean this Space Engine?

Looks interesting and I may take a look myself.

[Rara]

Thanks for listening, Rara

When you say Space Engine, I assume you mean this Space Engine?

Looks interesting and I may take a look myself.

Yes it is, it is amazing. I havent tried the steam version yet, I will do soon I hope.

Rara

[Derek]

it does look amazing. Sadly, WIN only by the looks of it.

Hope you enjoyed the music. It was one of those that I nearly gave up on, but I think I got it right in the end?

[parametric]

Very Nice Derek . . . .

definitely some "Wish you were here" flavour in there

Chris

[Derek]

Thanks for listening, Chris

No intended "Wish you were" influences, and quite a different chord structure....

[parametric]

I was thinking more of the solo Brass?-type "tune" against the backwash of the ethereal pad on a held chord . . .

Chris

[Saul]

Lovely piece of music Derek. Very nicely composed. How long had you been working on this?

[Derek]

Lovely piece of music Derek. Very nicely composed. How long had you been working on this?

Thanks for listening, Saul.

I started this just after Christmas, laying down a lot of basic ideas quite quickly, but......

As I said, some songs seem to write themselves instantly as you go along, others you need to sweat on, and this one was very much the latter. And work has been absolutely bananas, so I guess I would have been done by end of Jan, Mid Feb if it wasn't.

I loved the basic ideas, but as I listened more and more it was not quite working for me, and it took a lot of time to sort out in terms of whittling down the ideas into something cohesive, getting the balance right in all the sounds, etc. Then figuring out the time signatures the first Wavestate patch was doing (5/4), but I had to dive in to the patch and change a few things to get the start point in the sequence right for the song, balance the volumes of waves in the wave sequence to suit the song - so quite a learning experience on the Wavestate, which is an amazing synth.

And it probably took me three nights to find the descending glittering glissando sound you hear now and again. A classic mistake of never noting what you like. I heard that when going through some sound collections for the Dune III VST and thinking "very nice, quite Vangelis, that would be good for a Comsic type song", but because Dune has no way of marking favourites, of course when a year later when I come to want to use it, I had to go through all the patch banks by hand to find the damn thing! It was worth it though.

So it took a long time, but then it is also 16 minutes of music, so nearly the side of an LP in old money!

My current job (esp as summer is coming) is to go through all the Spectral Streams songs I have done (and posted here over the past few years) and remaster them for consistency before I set up a Band Camp account and try my hand at selling them.

[shelly0624]

So beautiful, a really gorgeous celestial piece. Layers and layers of rich cosmic sound. I can't imagine what it would be like to have so many amazing instruments at my fingertips... (and your skill) ...but that song really transports a person. Andy and I are huge sci-fi fans and the fact that you used actual audio from Voyager elevates it to a whole new level. Every time I hear something you compose, I wonder why you're not doing soundtracks for movies ..(or maybe you are?).

[Derek]

So beautiful, a really gorgeous celestial piece. Layers and layers of rich cosmic sound. I can't imagine what it would be like to have so many amazing instruments at my fingertips... (and your skill) ...but that song really transports a person. Andy and I are huge sci-fi fans and the fact that you used actual audio from Voyager elevates it to a whole new level. Every time I hear something you compose, I wonder why you're not doing soundtracks for movies ..(or maybe you are?).

Thanks for listening and the kind words, Shelly.

After a few nights away from it since posting it, I chilled out to it with just headphones last night before bedtime with the lights down, and I am quite pleased with it now.

As I mentioned in the title post, I cannot praise the UVI Plate reverb high enough for giving it that sense of cosmic depth, and I agree the field recordings of the electromagnetic spectra in deep space, really added something. It's a blend of three or four recordings, and there is also an ambient layer from Luftrum's Bioscape to blend them together.

I am not doing sound tracks, but something I wouldn't mind getting into, and part of the plan of getting my music onto some better platforms than what I am currently using is to see where that leads, and I will offer the music for licensing as well. Of course I am a realist and realise it is already a crowded pond.

BTW, a slight tangent, but if you like cosmic things, I learnt the other day that NASA's entire media library is public domain and searchable.