Sunday Synth Jam: This video captures Miltos Schimatariotis‘s take on Rachel’s Song, from the Vangelis soundtrack to Blade Runner.

The arrangement was made entirely on the Polyend/Dreadbox Medusa. Here’s what Schimatariotis has to say about his arrangement:

While exploring the warmer/sweeter side of the Polyend Medusa and the play-ability of the grid, I ended up making this small cover of one of my favorite tracks by Vangelis from the Bladerunner soundtrack.

Some more details: The Grid for the lead sound is setup so that the X-Axis goes one semitone up, so on the X-Target I have the value of 10. With this setup it may be quite difficult to play always on tune so if you look at the video I always tend to touch the pads from the left side. This way doing the slides is also easier. I treat them somewhat like guitar frets. For the Y target I just have some filter cutoff. And for z-target a tiny bit of FM.

The pad and the drone are double tracked and panned left-right. For the bass, in order to fatten it up a little, I have used the filter resonance. The bell sound is just self-resonating filter. The tuning here was a bit tricky, so I ended up doing some extra tuning later.

Generally the sounds are left without any significant post editing, except of course the addition of effects and some basic mixing/mastering at the end. I have used Softube Tsar mainly on the lead sound to make it sound “bigger” as this reverb blends nicely with the sources, and for the long reverbs I have used NI/Softube RC 24. For the “shimmer” effect that is audible mostly at the outr,o I have added the Pitch shifter from NI Replika XT before the RC 24. There is also a little bit of Clouds at the pluck sound from VCV rack.

For the cover itself, I was partly influenced by the version of this song from Vasilis Saleas, a famous clarinet player in Greece. His version of the song is included in his album called “Orama”.