Chung Kuo (Revisited)

For better or for worse, I'm (just) old enough to remember when "mainstream" analog synthesizers were new and mysterious. I can recall an early teenage afternoon at Draper's Music Center in Palo Alto (it's no longer there I'm afraid) making strange and wondrous sounds on a Yamaha CS-80, and marveling at the bulky landscape of sliders and push-buttons. And ever since that time, there's been a permanent place in my sonic heart for fat, analog synth sounds - Wendy Carlos, Isao Tomita and Vangelis providing the bulk of those tones.

Fast forward to today….

I recently purchased a great batch of samples of the Roland VP-330 Plus - one of the greatest Vocoders/String Synths - at Hollow Sun. For those of you who don't already know, besides the Vocoder section (listen to the solo on ELO's Mr. Blue Sky), the VP-330 was one of the main "goto" synths for lush string and faux choir pads. So when I loaded the samples up and hit that big chord... I was suddenly back in time; warm analog string tones pouring out of my speakers. And within a few minutes, I found myself playing the chords to Chung Kuo, by Vangelis. You remember the tune don't you… from the Mercury Lynx commercial from the early 80s? So once I had the chords down, I decide to attempt to recreate the entire song, and that's what I'm presenting to you below.



A few performance notes: This isn't meant to be a 100% note-for-note recreation, but I wanted to capture as much feel of the song as I could using similar tones and "signature" lines from the song. With the exception of the VP-330 samples, the bulk of the analog tones are coming from Applied Acoustics Systems Ultra Analog VST (8 instances). The melody line is played on Ichiro Toda's Synth1 VST.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did making it.

And for those of you who have the VA-1 VST, here are the patches I created.