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Japan Tin Drum Stereo synth sound - help to design.
I'm looking to get close to those wide stereo sounds Japan used on the Tin Drum album. I'm sure I heard that many are made by recording the Prophet 5 mono sounds for the left and right channels and then adding fx that help make the individual sounds feel like one stereo wide sound. Probably not explaing this very well, but so far my sounds are missing something.
Anyone that knows this album have any ideas for an app or two that might help with this. I sure some form of tape fx at the end may help as I'm sure some of the sound has come from how they originally recorded. Maybe the they used more than one sound per channel? Any ideas would be most helpful.
Comments
Skimmed through the album to get the gist of the drums. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the main drums are panned dead center, and other drums are panned right and left.
About the wide stereo sounds, it sounds like an extremely short reverb on the drums, the reverb which is highpassed to not affect the bass frequencies of the drums. I could be wrong and it could be some other technique, but I'm pretty sure it's a super short highpassed reverb.
EDIT: Or it could be a short and quick delay.
Sorry, I thing I've confused you with my appalling grammar. I meant the keyboard synth sounds, not the drum sounds
Lol! My bad. I misread it completely. Which tracks in particular have the synth sound you're interested in?
“Japan Tin Drum” also me off on a totally off base tangent.
I’m thinking:
Are Japanese Drums (Taiko drums) even made of tin?
Are Tin Drums popular in Japan and I missed that cultural detail?
Is there a version of Tin made in Japan that’s suitable for making drums?
I’ll go check out the album now and wonder about the synth patches which is just as confusing and prone to assumptions as the linguistic traps listed above… can I identify classic synths and FX processing from a finished work? No. But I’d like to think about it.
Carry on.
And the use of “Stereo” also sent me back to the time when you could go to a retail outlet and buy a “Stereo” and 90% of the stereos I would see came from Japan in the 70’s.
I can't double check at the moment as my wife is asleep next to me and I don't have headphones handy. I'm pretty sure one of them is on The Art of Parties. They do it a few times throughout the album on different sounds. I believe similar things were done by other bands as the Prophet 5 has a mono output only. Due to this many bands used single prophet sounds multitracked throughout mixes. Japan though just hit a magic spot with this album. I know they used other synhs too like one of the Oberheims, but I'm sure many of these 'doubled sounds' were Prophet 5.
As you say, the drums are mostly centre I believe, and with Karns bass played almost as another voice, the synths while often subtle, tend to swirl magically around the other instruments somehow. Possibly its the whole mix that's making the sounds so memorable for myself and not just the sounds themselves?
Off to sleep now.
While I can’t help with the sounds, I can say that if you’re not familiar with this album you’re in for a treat. Particularly Mick Karn’s bass playing and Barbieri’s sound design for the synths.
I spent a large part of my youth listening to vinyl through one of those mono box record decks with a built in speaker lol
Another question often asked about Japan is who had that haircut first, David Sylvian or Princess Diana?
Yep, Each instrument and track, so close to perfection in my opinion. No filler. No tracks just for the sake of it. Wonderful musicians.
On another tangent, David Sylvian has a wealth of post-Japan work to enjoy. The track « Ride » is fantastic, for example.
Well if we look at his earlier look, he had the pink rinse that Diana would have sported if she had have made old age lol