Mark Pulver's Time - The Olde Days

Click here for a 7.25M mp3 Mark Pulver sent to AH. Below are the notes on the track also sent to the list after quite a few people asked. I asked Mark if I could put this up and he say yes. It's a fascinating piece. Thanks Mark!

"The track was done in 1979 (possibly early 1980) and is called "Time". The setup was the SIUC (Southern Illinois University - Carbondale) music lab - which is sadly no longer there.

The lab was "cool" in the sense of what a lot of us olde tymers here would consider cool. Homebrew quad system, _PLATE_ reverb, modified Hammond tank reverb, upright piano with the back torn off for access to the harp ("prepared piano" for you olde folkes), an AKS, a bunch of tape decks, microphones, patch panels and... a nicely outfitted Moog modular. It was a System 55 with an extra top cabinet, two voice keyboard and a ribbon.

ahhh... my first love. :)

When I showed up, I brought along my (then brand new!) Rev 2 P5 and a MXR digital delay. The MXR was the first digital piece in the lab. :)

Anyway.. "Time" is around 25 tracks of stuff... noises, pads, pans, textures, etc. About 80% of what you hear as polyphonic is - it's the P5. The other 20% is multitracking from the Moog, or a single big honkin' multi-oscillator/multi-output patch.

"highlights" (ewww!) might include the constant atmosphere that's walking around left & right sides. That's the Moog driven by the 960. A killer combo that I DEARLY miss - the aural effect of the sequence changing is actually just from starting/stopping/triggering the 960 at different points or with different filter accents, speeds, etc. It's the same sequence.

There are a couple of big poly slides into oblivion - that's an old trick on the P5 (set unison, set glide, hold a note, kill unison, hit a chord - I think that's how it worked).

The ambience is generally the hacked Hammond tank, though the MXR is in there as well, usually _after_ the tank so that you get the smear.

Compression is courtesy of analog tape. The levels were pretty hot during some of the "tracks"... saturation is king. Digital today can't really touch something like this.

The piece used to be longer - about 11 minutes. I dunno that I still have that version. The front end was a bunch of babble over noises... nothing really exciting.

-------- start of typing while listening

The "Pink Floyd" sounding leads are all P5... The chordal undertone is P5. The airyness is courtesy of the Moog's fixed filter - VERY underutilized module. The "noise sparkling" that flutters around on top of the ping-pong sequence is P5.

If you can't tell, there was no "composition" to the piece. It's all vamping. I don't really remember where I started - if I had to guess it would be the P5 poly work... that was what I was into during that time.

The rushing and noise swirls to the end are both the Moog and P5. If it sounds deep and "OMG!" that's the Moog. That ringing tone is all Moog.

One thing about the bouncing around at the end and at a couple of spots in the middle... If you listen to it on speakers, and put yourself in the point of an equilateral triangle (based on the distance between the speakers) then you should be able to pick out a hidden 3rd channel. Along this time I was doing some work with burying a track by flipping it's phase across the L & R channels. if the L/R level is the same, and if you're at the point, then the track disappears. Move your head a bit and it'll show up.

Yes, this has been done a lot, but remember - this was 1979. :)

Anyway.. It's nothing big, but it's in there. I have NO idea how compressing this into MP3 would whack this around.


Oh! Love the tape noise at the end? There're a LOT of bounces in here with no noise reduction.

---- end of typing while listening ----


I think that's about it. Basically, the gear was minimal, it was just the right gear for the track - and the time. Putting this to tape helped a LOT, there's no way it would sound this "warm" (oh Gawd, not THAT word!) today.


fwiw, and I've said this before, THIS marks the time in my head that I'd love to get back to musically. I've never had more fun or been more satisfied than during this time.

... but, I've never been able to find it again. sigh.


Thanks for listening - and thanks for the comments!"