So when I got up this morning, I had the starting sound from, "It's Not Forever" stuck in my head. That's a song that was more or less written about mortality, and also waving goodbye to New Jersey when Abox decided to re-locate to California. I played the only existing recording I have of the song on Friday's stream, and it is a pretty bad recording at that. For one thing, it's not the entire song. It's a rehearsal. For another, the Sony reel to reel crapped out during the recording and the drop out is clear as mud. But in hearing it again, I was reminded of how many songs I've not recorded properly. This is clearly one of them. But it does pose a few challenges. There's a pulse pad in there that I no longer had.
I kept wondering how I could get that sound again 'IF' I were to re-create the track. Well, the IF is now a when. I had several ideas in my pocket as to how to achieve this. The obvious is to dig out the ESQ1, hope I have the backup bank on tape (the song itself is from 1988). I am sure that it is doable, but the ESQ I have is rather faulty. The filter is wonky, and even after I've tuned them via the secret pages, they quickly get wonky again. So sampling the loops from the sequence itself is out of the question.
One solution to the challenge was to at least get the sounds off the machine so I could transfer them to the Arturia SQ80V or my SQ8L. In truth, it's only two sounds I need. The aforementioned pulse-like pad that is played in the beginning, and a stereo bell. My bell is easy enough since most old ESQ banks have bell pads in them (it's considered a classic sound for the ESQ). But the pulse pad is my own 1988 creation, and it has certain properties that were rather unique. For one thing, the velocity affects both filter and panning in different ways. For another, it is very reactive to aftertouch (mine).
A second solution is that I have a short 'Grit' pulse sound which is similar. So one thought was to simply sample the sound and re-shape it using Ableton's Simpler. I tried this after coffee this morning, and I got close to the old sound. I even used Simpler's filter and random panning to create the movement in the sound. But it wasn't quite right. It was good, but not quite the same. But did I want the exact sound? Not really, but it would be good to start with the exact and work from there.
I dug out the SQ8L and started to look through my old banks. I found a sound that reminded me of the older one, and I realized it might be an edit of the patch. Sure enough, after about a half-hour I managed to get to about 80%. Once I got this far, I decided to export the patch into the SQ80V and continue. There, I was able to re-create the tape delay/reverb I had in the song itself, and the sound came back. I had to fiddle with the settings to get the movement in the sound, and in doing so made a happy mistake. I played the sample off the Simpler and the SQ80V to compare, but together they created a perfectly updated version of the sound. Then I found the unison knob on the Arturia. This wound up fattening the sound in an interesting way. I kept thinking that when the sound is isolated in the song, this added oomph could work. So I'm making note of it here to remember this...
So yes. I'm working on these older tracks. That's the project I've decided on for 2022. All else be damned except for shows and NFT art.