The video captures a live performance on the Midnight Special by Billy Preston, Malcolm Cecil & Robert Margouleff on The Original New Timbral Orchestra, aka T.O.N.T.O.
Cecil & Margouleff were some of the first musicians to bring modular synthesizer to popular music. They produced the classic albums of Stevie Wonder, and worked with variety of musicians, ranging from Billy Preston to Ravi Shankar.
Watch the video and share your thoughts on it in the comments!
Composer + synthesist Marius Leicht shared this live performance of Nachtblau, featuring the sound of the Oberheim Matrix 1000 synthesizer.
“The piece Nachtblau has gone full circle,” he notes. “I originally wrote it as a synthesizer piece, when I got GForce Software’s Oberheim Eight Voice emulation, OB-E for review.”
“While recording my first solo album, Weltmaschine, I transformed it into a piano piece and recorded it with Nils Frahm’s Zwicki Piano at his studio in Funkhaus, Berlin.”
“As there is not always a piano available when I play live shows, I rarely played that piece on stage. But since it gets requested a lot, I now went on to create a sound on my Oberheim Matrix 1000 which can be played very nuanced in dynamics and color, so I can do this expressive piece justice.”
Synthesist Jonathan Block shared this ambient improvisation featuring the classic sound of the Mellotron.
Here’s what Block shared about the technical details:
“Here’s an ambient Mellotron improv in AUM using the following apps from Igor Vasiliev: Stellarvox, VintageRack and Classic FX. Igor provided me with these apps since I’ve used his SpaceFields app extensively. The main sound is the classic Mk2 3 Violins but I also use sounds from the M400 such as cello, choirs, flute, oboe and saxophones.
This improv is based around Stellarvox, a hybrid reverb app that’s gives you extensive control over reverb tails, including space, tone and time. ClassicFX provides some modulation and delay while Vintage Rack is at the end of the chain for compression and to widen the stereo field with a Dimension D effect.”
