It was in the early afternoon when the studio doorbell rang on january first. A new decade man, with a new fresh perspective has come to our shores. On local shore, it was ‘Derauhe’ at the door who came by to check in with us. Nothing out of the ordinary, given that he actualy has the access codes to the complex. But he also brought a curious bag with him which caught my suspicion. I had no idea what was to come.
“Nothing sounds better than a nineties hardware synth!” – Derauhe
After the mandatory celebratory greetings for the new year, conversation quickly went over to what one another did last night. It turned out, our dear friend ‘Derauhe’ went to a retro party. In contrary to what you may expect of these types of parties, it turned out that this was a proper one. From the first filtered basses outside of the venue, provided by Robert Armanis’ ‘Hit hard’ classic, Derauhe was treated to a trip through memorylane taking him from the early rave to the nineties’ mesmerizing melodic synths of the hard dance genre.
Nostalgic feelings struck the lot of us. The former glory, we once had the honor to witness, it seems is no more. Nothing is as edgy these days, nothing as creative even though back then they had way less resources at their disposal as we do now.
It’s the curse of the digital age. We have virtually endless amounts of processing power at our disposal. An unlimited amount of high quality samples are readily available via Splice, Sonoiz and the lot. And yet we all keep getting trapped in the same 16 bar loop. The big problem there is, our bar loops all sound the same sonically with virtually any diversification.
At that point, the bag that was brought in earlier by Derauhe, was getting opened while the conversation continued. No cliché got spared, but none had is hard as the “Preset way of working” we have nowadays. The argument for it being that it would confine you into a limited possibility range. In the old days, someone like ‘Push’ would have been obligated to manually configure new patches on top of his stock presets and there was no ability to download presets on the fly.
Et voila! Derauhe established a base for the surprise of the day: an Access Virus B in mint condition! The predecessor of the iconic and marketshaking Virus. Even though it is the second generation, it is a treasure to have. And we were going to have a go at it for the afternoon.
The result of this session is a lovely dub techno track that was recorded live into its current form as the “Studio jam session”.