Sunset Drive

Published on Jan 29, 2017 davidryle

"SUNSET DRIVE by Tangerine Dream. From the movie "Wavelength".

An exercise in simplicity of motion. The beautiful ideas expressed by TD were well defined in this piece with six basic elements.

1. The Bass line is made by a combination of two trigger patterns mixed into a row of 901 Moog style (Moslab) oscillators, which are run through the quintessential low pass Moog ladder filter - 904B (Moslab).

2. The wandering, hollow sequence below is a synthesizers.com Q119 into four vco's and another ladder filter - Q150 in -12dB two pole.

3. There are a pair of intertwined ratchet chuff percussive sounds which I took upon myself to imagine. In reality Chris Franke probably used a more common single voice to interplay against the wandering sequence but I found the rapid hocketting sound to fit well in the 1980's era TD style. These lines were generated by an STG Soundlabs voltage mini store sequencer and a Switch module into a pair of Q106 vco's in soft sync.

The bass line and ratchet sounds are both sent through a 73B Dual Delay from Modcan.

4. The stab chord is a unison double-octave G from the Roland JX-8P. The patch is "Whitewidow" and is modified quite a bit. I am not so certain this was the synth used by TD for this particular song, but it seemned to work well.

5. The flute sound is a sample from Sampletron of the Mellotron Mark V 'Mltron Fultes'. I used a bit of delay in Sampletron and a little Valhalla reverb to thicken it.

6. The middle portion glassy sound is again the Roland JX-8P with the 'Waveaura' patch. This patch is all over TD's 80's music and particularly prevalent on"Wavelength". I used the patch as-is and another duplicate track with some modifications. Quite a bit of Lexicon reverb and delay was added.

All clock timings were generated using midi and sync24 from Cubase. The main clock base in the modular was the Suit & Tie Guy Time Divider and Integer Divider modules. The Moon Modular 563 Trigger Sequencer was used to generate the main lower bass line timing and the STG Soundlabs TMS was used for the upper bass line. A Q960 was employed to fine tune the levels between the two bass line elements. A Yusynth AC/DC mixer was used to mix the envelopes and control voltages to the filter and vca.

I am a long time fan of Tangerine Dream and particularly fond of their sequential modular work over the last forty years. The music can be purchased from http://www.tangerinedream.org/."