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Yesterday I listened to Boston’s “Third Stage”. An album that took six years to accomplish. Wow! A duration that seems totally insane from today’s perspective.
In the liner notes of the CD, producer and lead guitarist Tom Scholz states that he didn’t use orchestral sounds or synthesizers. Yes, that seems legitimate for a rock band in the 80s coming from the 70s era. But how did he create all these noisy/spacy sounds? Well…
No Synthesizers
That’s right! Honest! And no violins either (so how do you make thunderstorms without a synthesizer? A twenty-year old Vox Tone-Bender with a bad transistor). In other words, the Boston sound is powered by old, straight ahead rock-n-roll equipment, as opposed to midi-interconnected-computer-sequenced synthesizers.
Tom Scholz
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You know, when you’re sick you take all sorts of medicine. Some taste bad, some make sparkling sounds if you put them into water. And that’s exactly what I did, but not without recording it.
Finally I opened the file in Apple Logic, applied some EQ and processed it through effects and automated effect loops. This is what the result looks and sounds like…
Make sure you watch it in high definition, since Vimeo’s audio codec removes most of the high frequency content.