Ed "EditEd4TV" Bauman is no stranger to die hard Reason users. He's a stalwart member of the PUF and hosted the "Create Any Sound You Hear" day for Propellerhead's May Music Making Month this past Spring. I had the pleasure of interviewing Ed for Resonant Filter back in August of 2009, and have enjoyed his fantastic Recovers ever since they started appearing on Ed's youtube channel. So when I found out about his new 88mph Vol.1 Reason Refill I knew we needed to take a closer look...
EditEd4tv's 88mph Vol.1 is a refill based on Ed's Recover work and consists of 51 combinator patches made up from 9 classic 80s hits: Prince's "1999", Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough", Simple Minds' "Don't Your Forget About Me', Human League's "Don't You Want Me", Cindy Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", Blondie's "Heart of Glass", Bowie's "Let's Dance", Madonna's "Like a Virgin" and Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams". It should be noted that Ed's Recovers have sounded so much like the originals that he's had many flagged on youtube for copyright infringement! Each patch in 88mph Vol.1 is named beginning with E4TV_Song Name, then Patch (example E4TV_1999 Bass Synth). That way each song's patches are near each other. Makes sense? Will take a closer look at a few of these tracks in a minute, but first I wanted to ask Ed why he thought 80s music remains so popular 20+ years after the fact:
"I think 80's music has survived through the years because it was simply a fun time. Granted there were problems of course, what era doesn't have problems, but growing up in the 80's as a teen was an incredible experience. Had I known what was occurring at the time, had I known we'd look back with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia... I would have paid more attention. That time was the rise of the synthesizer. Sure we had synths well before this time, but it was the birth of MIDI and the acceptance of keyboards as the primary instrument in modern pop.
And I think the truly great thing about 80's synths is that they're very specific, the tone and feel is very, well, 80's. Take for example a guitar sound. Guitars of the 50's through today have always sounded like guitars, no offense meant at all, in fact that's a good thing, but the guitar is a specific instrument that changes via the type of guitar, the effects applied, and the amp choice. And it's very much tied to the players style and ability. But a rock guitar from the 60's, that specific tone, can be used today, and based upon the players style and ability - it doesn't necessarily drip with 60's at all, it's modern, it fits in with today. Now take an 80's synth patch, and play it today, and 90 percent of the time it still has that 80's feel to it. It's identifiable. A big part of this I believe is how modern synths are so intensely multi-sampled and multi-layered and multi-effected and so much more. For me, it's sometimes overkill; why doesn't that enormous synth sound fit in the song?... because it's too freakin' huge. Back in the 80's the circuitry was expensive and sample RAM was expensive too, so you made the best with what you had: a simple sawtooth wave with a bit of chorus and a bit of reverb and you were golden. The instrumentation was often simple, the production was clean (except for massive reverb of course), the songs were *happy*... you don't often hear that today - too much bitter angst. Anyway, I'm reminiscing now, but yeah, it was a great time to live through."
The first set of patches in 88mph come from Prince's "1999". One of my all-time favorite artists! There's a "Bass Synth" patch, the ubiquitous 80's "Wind Whoosh" and the "Strings" sound used on so many of Prince's songs from that era. The "Strings" sound is one of my favorite patches from 88mph Vol.1. In fact my 86 year old neighbor is probably wondering why every morning this week she's been awakened to that particular sound and me saying "Dearly Beloved we are gathered here today to get thru this thing called life." Bless her heart she hasn't called the cops yet... ;-) But I digress, on this patch Ed uses both the LFO2 and Mod Envelope in Thor to achieve this lovely sound, which I asked him about:
"The string sound from "1999" has pitch modulation from both LFO2 and the Mod Envelope. The Mod Envelope in this particular patch is affecting Oscillator 1 only; it ramps up the pitch so that each note played has a bit of a bend at the attack. It's almost like a portamento glide up to the pitch. But because it's only Oscillator 1, it blends with the other unaffected oscillators to provide a bit of thick beating at the onset of a chord. The LFO2 output is routed via Thor's Modulation Bus Routing Section (MBRS) to CV1 output, where it's routed right back into the pitch bend input with a CV cable. You can do the same thing in the MBRS via 3 separate routing assignments, but this was a quick and easy way to affect all 3 oscillators at once. The amount sent from source to destination is very subtle (in fact it's probably too subtle), and it adds a bit of warble to the overall pitch of all 3 oscillators."
Let's take a look at Simple Minds "Don't You Forget About Me", the song that made the movie "The Breakfast Club" famous, or is it the other way around? 16 patches are included from this classic, including the fantastic "Synth", "Bass 2" and "Chirpy SID". The "Piano" sound has found it's way into my daily scales and chord practice because of it's great sound and easy control of ambience with Rotary 3. Both The "Piano" and "Choir" patches are based on samples whose origin I asked Ed about:
"The ReFill contains a number of samples within NN-XT devices, and these all access the Factory Soundbank included with Reason. It's one of the biggest mistakes that people make in my opinion... to pass off the Factory Soundbank as old and tired. There's a LOT of great content in there - a LOT. People tend to want to go beyond the FSB and search out something new and different, but I tell 'ya, there's a ton of patches in there that can be the foundation of many great things."
3 patches from Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" make it in to 88mph Vol.1 as well. A great "Organ" made up from 2 Thor Saw Analog Oscillators and 1 Saw Multi Oscillator (with control for detuning on Rotary 1.) Button 1 on the "Organ" patch enables Velocity Sensitivity for more responsive playing. But my favorite patch of the three has to be the "Whistle" sound from the bridge section of the song. This "Whistle" patch has controls for the frequency of the Low Pass Filter on Rotary 1 and control for Delay Time on Rotary 3 that sweeps from an ambient slapback (63 milliseconds) to a nice slower delay (417 ms.) Between these controls and the Octave control on Rotary 2 it's very easy to tailor this patch to your own liking.
From the pop music of Madonna to the funkiness of Prince I had to ask Ed how he decides upon songs for both his Recovers and 88mph:
"I decide the songs I'm going to tackle based pretty much on just what I feel like doing. I stick mostly with New Wave of course, because it's synth oriented, but I delve into other 80's genres now and then. The source list we've compiled for the Retromaniax (the 80's cover band I'm in) is absolutely huge. It's amazing how long the list is - literally hundreds and hundreds of songs, and you can randomly pick any song in the list and start singing it, everybody remembers these songs (well, not *everybody*, but you know what I mean). So the list is long, and when you're flooded with so many great memories with each song, it's actually very hard to decide which song to recreate, they're all great. There's just not enough time to do them all."
2 patches made up from Blondie's "Heart Of Glass" make it in to 88mph Vol.1, an absolutely beautiful "Phasing Pad" and the fantastic "Pulsing Synth" sound, the latter of which uses LFo1 in Thor to modulate both the Amp Gain and Filter 1 Frequency to great effect. The former, "Phasing Pad", is a gorgeous pad sound created with a Thor Polysonic Synthesizer sent thru a PH-90 Phaser, with controls for the Phaser Speed and Feedback controlled from the Combinator's front plate on Rotary 3 and Button 3, respectively. Beautiful!
Some of my other favorite patches from this refill come from Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough" - "Sampled Brass" and "Round Synth 2" . One thing really worth mentioning about 88mph Vol.1 is that every patch has mappings for the 4 Rotaries and Buttons on the front of the combinators and the majority for the Mod Wheel - which makes them easily tailorable for your own productions, be them covers of these classic songs or more modern creations. In fact, Ed uses these patches in his own band The Retromaniax:
"Yes, all these patches come straight from the songs we've done with the Retromaniax except these are much more fine-tuned and overhauled. Upon loading any given patch the parameters are all set and ready to play as heard in the original song. To make things easy to get back to original settings, most patches load in with the knobs at either 0%, 50%, or 100%, so you can easily find your way back to normal. But yeah, these are exactly what I use with the cover band. When I take a look at my cover versions, the patches are made 95% from the ground up with initialized devices - that other 5% is an occasional NN-XT load-in of a sampled piano or something of that nature, but the analog synths are almost always initialized. Once the patch is made I'll map volume to Combi knob 4 and that's it, I'm done. But when I decided to make this ReFill I couldn't just release the patches as is with only 1 parameter mapped, so I went through a lot of work to make each patch interesting. Upon initial load-in the patch is exactly how I used it for that specific song, but changing the knobs and buttons can create some incredible changes - that's a VERY important element of this ReFill: don't just load a patch and be done, you really need to explore the knobs and buttons because I went through a lot of programming to make sure each patch provides a ton of variation. I'd say the rough average of initial creation of any single patch is perhaps 30 minutes or so, and upon revisiting each patch for this ReFill I'll spend anywhere from 20 to 60 additional minutes programming various parameters to do something for the end user, so each patch has about 50 to 90 minutes of time invested into it. That right there... that's love. :)"
In conclusion, 88mph Vol.1 is a fantastic refill for classic synth sounds from the 1980s. These patches are perfect for those interested in injecting a little sonic revivalism into their songs, and/or anyone in a cover band. You can pick up your copy of 88mph Vol.1 today from baumanproductions.com for $35 USD, or pre pay for the coming two volumes in advance for $80. And if you're in the Bay Area, make sure to check out Ed perform with The Retromaniax!
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