The response to our single Live Well for Less with our friends Killer Kowalski has been amazing! I may have got the dates wrong on the release and put it out 2 months early but honestly I think it worked out for the best. If you haven’t heard it yet here’s some links to stream or download it:
Don’t forget if you want to create your own remix, you can download the stems from here
We had an amazing night at the single’s official launch night at The Library in Oxford with our friends from All Will Be Well. LWFL got it’s live debut and Tom from KK joined us on lead vocals. A big shout out to Old Man May and Manners for joining us as well. Here’s some photos from the night by the amazing Ian Hanham.
Taken by Ian HanhamTaken by Ian HanhamTaken by Ian HanhamTaken by Ian HanhamTaken by Ian HanhamTaken by Ian HanhamTaken by Ian HanhamTaken by Ian Hanham
In case you’re wondering, the cover art was made using a kind of janky mod I made of Streets of Rage Remake. I’m wondering whether or not I should make the mod available as a download. If you’re interested let me know.
When I started on this project in December 2021, I had absolutely zero expectations about what it would raise or achieve. If you want the long version of how the whole thing came about, you can read about it on the Orion / Sandman Bandcamp page and listen back to the interview I did with the folks at BBC Introducing in Oxfordshire but the short version is that it was a fairly stupid thing I put together with some amazing people in remembrance of a friend.
Orion / Sandman came out on Friday 2nd December and to date has raised £220 for Katharine House Hospice in Banbury via donations on the bandcamp page and I know some people have donated directly to the hospice which is totally fair enough (and you can also do here). I know there’s a lot going in the world right now but I just want to say how much I appreciate all of the support it has received so far from everyone that has donated, downloaded, commented, retweeted, and featured the project in any way. I also want to say a particular thank you to Gabby and the rest of Dan’s family for all of their support as well.
This project would not have been what it is without the support of all of the musicians that helped out. Please do yourself a favour and check them out via the links below:
As of today, Orion / Sandman is 100% free to download – no email or donation required, just go here to download. I do still ask though that if you can, please continue to donate directly to Katharine House Hospice.
I posted my little tribute to Vangelis on the blog the other day and someone asked if I could share the Arminator 2 patches I used for the synths. I thought I could do slightly better than that so here’s some info on how I put the track together and the fx and vsts I used.
Recording and Mixing
The goal was to record and mix the whole track very quickly between other things so the track was recorded in about an hour and then mixed in a couple of hours the same night. Normally I’d spend much longer on both but to quote Kenny Beats “Don’t Over Think Shit“.
Everything was recorded and mixed in Ableton Live 11. The drums, pads and bass were programmed using my Arturia MiniLab Mk II and midi for the leads was recorded using a Fishman Tripleplay Connect midi pick up fitted to my Epiphone SG. I then used my Ableton Push to trigger the bass, drum and pad clips live while I recorded the lead synths over the top, pretty much in 1 take.
If you just want to know what my Arminator 2 patches were, here you go (8k zip file)
Although most of Vangelis’ tracks have rhythmic elements they don’t really have drums but in the interest of artistic license and creativity I thought I would add some to my track. I used Ableton’s 808 Core soundpack for the actual drum samples which is my default for most projects and seemed to fit the vibe of the track.
808 Drum Pattern
Processing on the drums was done on in 2 stages. Here’s the EQ and compressor settings I used. Again, nothing crazy.
Drum FX 1
To add a bit more grit and slap back to the drums I used Waves Kramer Master Tape on the main drum bus. Here’s the settings I used.
Kramer Bus settings
Bass
I’ve never really used Armintor 2 for bass before but after doing this little track, I think I will again. It has a great synthy grit to it. I used one of the arpeggiated presets that came with the plugin as the basis but I didn’t like the pattern the plugin’s built in arpeggiator created and the built in echo didn’t work for me either so I got rid them and used an external arpeggiator Max 4 Live midi plugin called Probability Arp from a Cm chord.
Arminator 2 – Arpeggiated Bass
And here are the midi fx settings
Midi FX
As you can see I used Ableton’s utility plugin to reduce the width and reduce the stereo spread of the synth and then fed the lot in to my bass bass which is just a bit more EQ and a bit of side chain compression to duck the bass when the kick hits
Bass Bus Fx
Pads
In a way the Pads were the most straightforward bit. They were created using more Arminator 2 goodness with a bit of EQ. I think I tweaked the attack a bit so that they didn’t fade in quite as slowly but apart from that I played in a Cm chord on my midi controller then duplicated it and moved the bass note to a B for a bit of variation.
Arminator 2 PadsArminator 2 pads fx
As you can see I used Ableton’s built in EQ in L/R mode with slightly different profiles on the left and right to add a bit of stereo separation and width. The channel EQ just had a slight bump in the mids to give them a small boost.
Lead
The lead line was Arminator 2 in mono synth mode with midi coming from my guitar via the midi pickup.
Arminator 2 – lead
Again a bit of EQ add but nothing to shout about really. I sometimes add a bit of saturation to lead lines to help them cut through a mix but as this wasn’t really a dense mix I didn’t need to here.
Noise / FX
In a nod to the pulsing crashing wave noise in Chariots of Fire I add my own pulsing white noise bed under the track. I have no idea how Vangelis did it when he recorded Chariots of Fire but I used Ableton’s Analog Synth with the noise on and the oscillators off to generate the noise. I then used auto EQ and auto pan to create the pulsing effect (which I believe was created by someone manually moving the volume fader up and down in the original). I then added some stock Ableton reverb at the end for a bit more space and bumped up the width a bit in the utilty.
As you can see the mix was set to 100% and I adjusted the sends on the bus channel until I got the vibe I wanted.
On the master channel I added another tape based effect called Tape Cassette 2 from Caelum Audio which adds nice bit of grit and warble to the whole mix in a tape-y way and ups the retro-ness.
Normally I would stop there, check the levels on the master and try to make sure the track peaks at less than 3db then bounce the whole lot down to master separately but in the spirit of seeing what I could do quickly, I just added a copy of Waves’ Infected Mushroom Pusher to the end of the master channel and used the Gentle Giant preset to do a quick and dirty master.
Infected Mushroom Pusher on Master
Wrap up
That’s it. I hope you found it useful. I have never claimed to be an expert in any of this stuff but I hope it inspires some of you do see what you can do. If there are any questions or comments, leave a comment below or feel free to message me on twitter or instagram.
I first discovered Blade Runner via my dad. He’s a massive fan of the film and the incredible score that accompanied it. It’s fair enough really – the powerful combination of the imagery of the film and Vangelis’ synth driven score is still mind bending today let alone when the film was released in 1982. Add to that the mystery around the film and the soundtrack itself (which wasn’t released until 1994) make it something very special to music and film lovers and geeks like me.
When I found out that Vangelis died it hit pretty hard but I’m not really sure why. I don’t really own much of his music to be honest. He was 79, a fair age. He did many other film score like Chariots of Fire (which I think I have a 7inch of somwehere) and 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and released many solo albums and albums with Jon and Vangelis and Aphrodite’s Child but really for me it all comes back to Blade Runner.
The video below is my little tribute to Vangelis’s Blade Runner score; recorded quickly using Ableton live, the drums are 808 samples and all of the synths and bass are care of the amazing Arminator 2 plugin, arguably the best Yamaha CS80 emulator you’re likely the use. There’s a small nod to the pulsing noise from Chariots of Fire too if you listen closely. The lead synth was recorded using the midi pickup fitted to my SG which worked pretty nicely.
You can download the audio below too.
RIP Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou aka Vangelis. Thank you for everything you did.
Hey everyone, hope you’re doing ok in the current circumstances. Given everything that’s been going on in the world right now I know things are pretty crazy and it’s pretty apparent that no one really knows how it’s all going to pan out. I guess we’ve all just got to hang in there.
Anyway, I’m really happy to say that Sinister Sound Gallery and I want to give our new track Easy Tiger to you for FREE. Yep, FREE. Was it a bit stupid to give a brand new track away for free on one of Bandcamp’s fee waiving days? Maybe. Don’t care though. Y’all deserve it.
As you may be aware, SSG and I have collaborated once before when I produced Golden Nugget Morning. That track was an interesting one as Jake had been jamming versions of it with his old band The Deadbeat Apostles for a while and I helped him polish it up and finish it off. Easy Tiger though is a brand new track that started with the same chat I had with Jake and Mike from The Deadbeats after we’d just seen the AMAZING Algiers live in Oxford.
I sent Jake some stems for a punk-ish track I was playing with to see if he wanted to do anything with it. Then, to be honest, I forgot I sent the stems to him. In the mean time he sent me back a bunch of guitars and an amazing vocal take from Mike which I just had to turn in to something new (with a bit of help from Pete on the keys and Tiece on vocals but she doesn’t know that). The result was “Easy Tiger”.
I’ve been playing it in my #IsolationWave streams on YouTube for a while and we even jammed a version live with Bruno Muerte just before lockdown kicked in but Jake and I wanted you guys to have it for free so that hopefully you can play it loud and maybe do a small strut around the house or while you’re doing your socially distanced shopping.
I’m not great with words but fortunately I’ve got friends who are. I did this remix for the brilliant Lucy Leave a while back and I’ve been playing it in DJ sets for a while but we weren’t really sure how to put it out. Due to recent events, now seems to be a good time to get it out there.
![Lucy Leave – Talk Danish To Me (Tiger Mendoza Remix) [PWYL Download]](https://www.tigermendoza.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/LL-DanishRMX_web.jpg)