Vintage synthesizers… you’ve gotta love ‘em. People tend to forget that these keys of yester-years are actually pretty good at what they do. For a year or two modern indie/alternative bands have been using these behemoths to create something that’s stylistically a bit more distinctive. At this moment, I’m loving Phoenix’s album Wolfgang Amadeus (2009), as they infuse contemporary music with the retro appeal of the 80’s.
On Phoenix
So here’s my own take on Phoenix’s 1901. I wanted to see if it was possible to create something a bit more bouncy mixing 60’s drums, with 70’s funk, 80’s synth, and 90’s guitar. My general influences are drawn from Beck, Feist, Ladyhawke, Chemical Brothers, Portishead, Passion Pit, and Air.
So there’s pianos, glocks, drums, and an 8-bit funk guitar. Building up to the chorus section with the ARP 2600 blipping away, and some retro computer sounds. I added on their Yamaha CS-80 (siren) sound with the Octave CAT… which has a similar edginess to it that adds a little extra sparkle (modulating the pulse-width and mixing in the waveforms manually).
Download the Track
Phoenix - 1901 (Obscuresounds Remix)
Notes: Please show your support by sharing and enjoying. I welcome any feedback.
The voice is a big chunk of the track… but one thing I wanted to do was add in a Queen effect where the vocals go through a Roland vocoder with slight distortion to harmonise the main vocal track. This only happens briefly twice, but really makes a difference. The process isn’t pretty - I have Thomas’s voice converted to midi which controls an ESQ-1, which is then fed in to the vocoder, and the results are sent back in to the computer. I also wanted to add a bit of Dimension-D chorus on the whole vocal track, but never got around to it.
If I had time I would have made a few more changes. Enjoy and feel free to share this around… I’ve sent this off to Phoenix’s label so hopefully something will come of it (permission more than anything), but there are so many remixes out there that I’m releasing this to try and reach out to a larger audience and showcase my own production skills, which considering I’m a one-man show in a self-built studio I reckon is a good thing! You’ll be hearing more from me in the near future.
Enjoy!
