At Knobcon 2018, we talked with sound designer Paul Schilling (Schilling Sound Emporium), who was demonstrating some of his work with the Deckard’s Dream analog synthesizer.
He also shared some of the details of his setup, which pairs the Deckard’s Dream with a Kurzweil MIDIBoard (for its polyphonic aftertouch) and a LinnStrument.
Schilling shared a pair of videos with us that he made at Knobcon, featuring several other synthesists that gave the ‘Dream setup’ a spin:
Schilling’s recent work includes patches for the Deckard’s Dream and Tangerine Dream inspired patches for Arturia, embedded below:
Great synth and impressive patch design.
Someday this will be mine.
The Blade Runner sound has become the sonic equivalent of how fast can a car do a lap of the Nurburgring.
Here’s an extensive comparison of how a variety of synths do at recreating the Blade Runner Brass sound:
https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2010/02/21/the-iconic-sounds-of-synthesis-vangelis-blade-runner-brass-sound/
If you listen carefully, only a few really get close to the original CS-80 sound.
As a simracer and enthusiast, i know this is accurate.
The only problem with ribbon slides is that in the real CS80 when you slide to the left, the pitch would go subsonic.
This doesn’t do that on Linn instruments.
Fab recreation of this synth though.?
Not the only problem – there aren’t’ any commercially available keyboard controllers with polyphonic aftertouch, so you never get to harness that aspect of the instrument, rendering it significantly poorer from a performance point fo view (I’m a CS80 owner)
You could transpose octaves on the Linnstrument so that’s possible.
Mark yes I could kick myself, in that particular video I had the pitch bend range set to only 1 or 2 octaves. The max pitch bend range for the Deckard is 96, and if you check out this video I put together (also at Knobcon), the pitch bend goes further down. It definitely goes subsonic when the pitch bend is set to max
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwOBvN4LIwk
Fantastic.
Totally goofy that we have to rely on old Kurzweil’s (and Ensoniqs, etc) for poly-aftertouch on a keyboard these days though!
Someday I’m gonna meet this fella (Paul Schilling) and the world-wide graviton sensors will be triggered
Looking forward to that day Mr. Dorschel!