Excerpt from an interview on the original PP tour

[Dubsounds]

Chris Payne: "Gary at the time was looking for something very sparse to give the impression of something very cold, and the simplest way to do that was to get a succession of very simple, bare sounds incorporated in the music. I was in Rod Argent's music shop in London trying out different keyboards, and playing the Polymoog, I found this vox humana sound on it and thought it was great. I also played this Crumar string machine which I thought was good too, so a couple of weeks later me and Gary were in London and I took him there. I showed him the Crumar which was crap! I thought it was good 'cos it was cheap, but when I showed him the vox humana sound on the Polymoog he loved it. I'm very surprised that a lot more people don't use it.

"Both the Minimoog and vox humana sounds are very attractive as independent sounds, so we just worked them out like that. A lot of the melodies on 'The Pleasure Principle' were derived from that first pre-set, with the minimoog just there as a force to back it up, an extra bass line to grate away and really hit you. They are completely apart in range, top and bottom, for maximum separation of sound. The only other sound we used was the third pre-set, which is a string sound with a lot of attack like in 'Cars', on which Gary put a slow MXR phase on the vox humana to give the music an interesting flurry. I defy anyone to get a sound like the vox humana on a Prophet! It's just so rich."




Read the article in full here:

www.alanwildphotography.co.uk/15.html

[vstream]

;D

Great site! thanks.

edit:
I just read the article. Really great stuff! Thanks again. I knew it was Chris Payne who introduced the VH sound but what I didn't know was that preset sound string2 was used too...

"The only other sound we used was the third pre-set, which is a string sound with a lot of attack like in 'Cars'"

Does anybody know in which songs?

Joeri

[Polymoog Lover]

Yeah, he used that String sound in songs like "Tracks" "Cars" "Oceans" and "Engineers".

[Minimoog]

Yup it's the lead in Tracks and Engineers and through the MXR Phase 90 on full speed it's the middle 8 bits in Cars.

[mattjessup]

totally right,

[mattjessup]

Chris was right about the Prophet (5) , it just did'nt have the mod facilities for VH
these days though,,,,,,the 08 does it just nicely.
how things have evolved to enable us to go backwards eh.

[Dubsounds]

What's your thoughts on the 08 then?

[mattjessup]

we had one here at the shop on demo, so i fiddled and started programming, i noticed the old helicopters preset in there that numan used on the intro of shes got claws and the middle of wembley' (if not it was very similar,) as usual i ended up trying to make VH, the prophet 08 does a very warm recreation. not too fussed on the little sequencer though, it sold after a day, so i cant say love it or hate it, there was;nt time to pull it apart and put it through its paces

its definatley no match for the TI2. but i think it held a little of the Pro 5 . nice fat sounds and nice mod facilities, if i remember rightly the pro 5 had no mod unless you used the wheel,

[vortex]

If it sold in a day how come you didn't get more in? I now suspect you are the Chief Executive officer for Access

[mattjessup]

they were in short supply at the time, wil have another here soon.
as fore the virus, i sold 4 in total now , 2 of those went purely on the numan sounds
ta gary.

[nervejam]

You could get another microkorg in as well. Then you could program VH on that.. (Hint)