Valotonin wrote:Jesus, you came armed and ready didn't you? Happy first post and welcome, I guess. It is interesting you seem to be able to identify so much just from listening. How do you know that your ears don't deceive you ?Jonathan Doezesoph wrote:Hey,newb here
I'm calling bullshit on there being any "secret weapon".there is absolutely nothing in BoC's sonic repetoire that would suggest giant,expensive,analog poly.pretty much everything that could be attributed to a synth has sounded like a simple mono-synth to me, ala SH-101.even on Tomorrow's Harvest,a lot of the chords sound like overdubs of monosynths (palace posy,come to dust)
If there is a secret weapon,it's definitely not a synth.it is most likely a sampler or an obscure device for sound treatment.they play a far bigger role in the sonics of BoC than any synths do.
Then again,if i am being completely honest,there really is nothing obscure about what BoC does in production terms.it's just more about how they put it together
Cheap,grainy reverb (quadraverb,Midiverb most likely) ring modulation and frequency shifting (probably a synth with an audio input,i don't see them using moogerfoogers lol and they've been using frequency shifting and ring modulation since the old tunes days),tape treatments,vintage sampler abuse (this is basically 60% of their sound),reamping and "world-ising"
I'm not in anyway undermining what they do.just shedding some reality on the processes (there's nothing unusual about what they use)
No hostility or anything, it's all love x
The filter sweeps on the synths near most always sound identical in all of their stuff and the envelopes that the synths produce are all relatively the same,as is the timbre of the oscillators.the way the stereo image is distributed on their poly parts would suggest overdubbing more than unison e.g CS80.it's not quite as thick as unison,but it has a better stereo correlation (unison tends to sound everywhere where as BoC's has some directionality to it)there's also a sort of a deeper sort of sound impression you get when you double,triple,quadruple track mono parts,that you can't achieve with synths that use unison (they take up too much sonic real estate and you have no real control over their stereo panorama)
Wildlife Analysis's microtonal melody sounds like a self oscillating filter that is remarkably similar to the CEM Filter used in some of Roland's mono-synths
I guess i should provide examples to all my speculations errr
The bassline in Roygbiv has been re-mic'd (the room sound is the give away)
the distortion on the drums in Chinook is sampler abuse (Akai possibly).cooked through the DAC's (op-amp distortion) at a lower sample and bitrate and probably recorded to cassette
The reverb is an obvious one.it was a firm favourite amongst all the warp-sters and the general tonality of their verb has never really changed right the way through to Tomorrow's Harvest (most obvious on Palace Posy and Come to Dust.adds a pseudo unison impression to the mono-synth lines.earlier blatantly obvious example would be, Bocuma)
Analysis aside,i could be talking out of my ass
