Four overlaid improvs with classic synth pads

video upload by ParadisoModular

"In March 2021, I decided to surround myself with keyboards (7 of them!) mostly playing classic-sounding vintage pads. These included my Nord Stage (mainly playing sounds I made - e.g., from a sampled Mantovani song - heavily processed, of course), a Korg TR-Rack and N1R (mainly stringish sounds), a Mellotron from my Emu Classic Keys, that famous 'Soundtrack' sound from my Roland MT-32, and a sawtoothy swell from my Alesis Micron (thanks NanWei for that one - it was well debuted here!). Adding to these polyphonic voices from synths I've long loved, are a couple of mono-voices, namely an echoy arpeggiating sound from my Korg Prophecy and a complex lead I patched up on my modular (controlled by the keyboard to the right of the Prophecy up top) that leverages a few PLLs, where I can adjust their tracking properties with the mod wheel and if I hold a key down longer it starts a crossfading chord from my PLL octave tracker.

Unlike most of my other posts, there is no autonomous synth patch running here - everything is directly played by me on the keyboards. I recorded several takes of this - I had no real plan, as I was just improvising and having fun, but most of the takes followed a similar contour and lasted a similar amount of time. Listening to them one at a time, they sounded a bit thin. But some months later I got the idea of just layering them atop one another - here you have four of these improve sessions mixed down to a stereo track. This worked better than I thought it would - again as the sessions had some similarity and centered somewhat around the same chord structures - it can get a little big and unwieldy in the places where I depart, but this adds variety/tension and always seems to resolve the right way. There's no dynamic mixing here - they takes are just flat added.

Of course, I shot video of these sessions too, so I figured why not overlay a bunch of them to give the feeling for how this big mix happened. Hence that's what we've got here. The video isn't necessarily aligned with the audio, but the eyes often find the correlations they are looking for nonetheless.

This sits in kind of a JoeP version of a NewAge-ish visit to space - again, a quite different from my usual autonomous patch, but I hope you find something enjoyable on this particular voyage..."