Voyager Delirium

Published on Sep 10, 2016 Praxis Axis

"I created this music as a kind of challenge and homage: To use a single monosynth as the sound source for an entire tune; that synth being the mighty Moog Voyager.

This synth is sometimes misunderstood. Its preset tones are rich yet very smooth, and this prompts some people to think it's too "vanilla" sounding. But this kind of complex monosynth takes months of messing with to find its full capacity, which is buried somewhere deep in its modulation routing capabilities with the magical third oscillator (which doubles as an LFO - great for complex FM). This video is partly to show the kinds of sounds a Voyager will make when you push it hard - well beyond even the famous Model D (tell me in the comments if you don't agree, but show me a D doing this kinda stuff, lol ;) )

Nonetheless, experienced ears will note that some processing is involved here. I'll fess up to all of it:
* Fabfilter delay on various voices - pretty obvious
* A bit of cheap reverb on some (not all) voices
More controversially:
* A small amount of saturation on *some* of the voices. Contrary to some reports, it's simply *not true* that the Voyager can't make aggressive, abrasive sounds, and though I've relied on a little saturation a few voices, there's plenty of moments when it's pure Voyager (including many of the aggressive or brassy-sounding lines).
* TC Electronics Mojomojo on some of the drums. You can overdrive the Voyager on its own (ie the headphone trick), but using a nice pedal like the Mojomojo is just easier and more versatile.

Drums on the Voyager don't happen very naturally. Here, the kick is still just res + decay + noise etc, etc (you can see me building one in the video actually), but running drums through a pedal helps to control / compress sub bass in a very dependable manner. Generally I haven't used the overdrive pedal on pitched voices - I've tried to show off what the instrument can do (mostly) by itself. The drum sounds are layered, to give them a slightly more "contemporary" sound (I don't really do techno ;) ). The noise generator really helps here, and a bit of gate reverb in the DAW does the rest. Sweeping the noise up with an envelope (or just manually) provides the pre-hit sweep effect.

Any questions about the production are most welcome."