Demo Track Archive

• This track, Crystaline, is by Christian Werner. You can reach Christian at Synthics@web.de

  Crystaline

  Here are Christian's comments on the track:

  The basis for writing this song was to explore Crystal. "Crystalline" is the result of my first contact with the synth. I tried to find the "language" and spirit of Crystal, to see and hear what it can do.

  I began by browsing the presets and started with a sequence, the Rave Master preset. After that I searched for a preset to enhance the sequence and used the PotomacToms. The sequence was done and I began to structure the track and added the SwirlyQ pad. This pad works every 16 bars as an introduction for the AuntyEM pad.

  Once the Pads were done, I needed a melody. The next sound was the Wider Pulse. It was so much fun to play this sound that I began to move the pitch wheel and I played this pad like a solo instrument. The song was developing nicely. Now I went over to the next category, the Swells. Swell 10 was the right one and I used it in the same way as the SwirlQ pad. Both sounds fitted together perfectly.

  Finally I realised that I needed some high tones or FX and went over to the Bell sounds. The Trouble Bells were a great surprise and I simply had to use them.

  Browsing through the presets again inspired me to move all tracks 17 bars away from the start and play a small "strange" intro. The -Ambient- preset was great for that. -I couldn¹t stop! Long Journey, Who´s in there and the Pennzoil preset finished the intro and built nice tensions throughout the whole song. Adding external effects (Reverb,EQ,Delay and Comps), a quick mastering and the "Crystaline" song was born.

  Just browsing the presets inspired me to record all tracks. The modulation matrix is brilliant to mutate the sounds in an easy way and give the sounds a character while you play. I assigned the Modulation Wheel to the Filter Cutoff and Resonance on most of the presets. After 6 Crystal instances I must bounce to 32bit Cubase wav files and the track uses 12 instances in all.

• This Crystal demo track is by Brian Desmond. You can find more of Brian's music at his web site.

  Mars Exploration

  Brian's comments on this track:
  Crystal really is incredible. You can get all kinds of great sounds out of it with a few tweaks. The envelopes are amazing.

  I just started with an empty Crystal, and then went from there. A lot of the presets are really using the synths capabilities and I wanted to start from scratch and these are the sounds I got. I can get the best pads for backing up stuff with this synth it's incredible.

  I wrote it rather quickly (maybe an hour?) using 4 instances of Crystal, and some of my own (heavily compressed)drums. I ran it through Ozone when I was done and this was the result.

• This track, Riding the Tail of the Comet, is by Bruce Satinover (AKA x_bruce):

  Riding the Tail of the Comet

  Here are Bruce's comments on the track:

  I auditioned several Crystal pads and atmospheres figuring I would develop a simple progression based on C and Bb. At some point I heard a bell-like pad I liked and started redeveloping it. The modulation envelope was changed to fit the rhythmic ideas that started developing in my head. Changing sine, saw/square and noise waves to voice and breath and substantially changing filters and routings I had the pattern that interested me.

  That was fine for a few seconds but I needed another breathing pad that would augment it and went about altering a preset. Crystal may take a while to wrap your head around but once you get the idea behind it programming is more intuitive than adjusting a bunch of virtual knobs as you have almost everything right in front of you in a easily viewable interface. The initial pattern returns after a 12 second or so rest and is simply repeated as addition timbres are layered in different harmony arrangements. Again, since one of Crystal's strong points are it's moving and swirling textures two or three notes from different patches can be quite powerful in terms of arrangement.

  By the time this basic sequence was finished I decided to add some drums from a licensed dnb collection and used a bass with both strong attack and ambient texture. I prefer creating a song rather than a lot of sections of a song for demos. It's more complete and gives people a "in use" idea of the timbral range of Crystal, although no 2:00 minute song will do Crystal justice. :)

• This example, made by Ned Bouhalassa, consists of 4 Crystal tracks. The only thing added is a drum loop (from Spectrasonic's Retro Funk sample cd ) and some compression:

  Crystallized

• This track is called Crystal Ball, by Remco Hogendoorn (AKA Poweruser). It consists of five Crystal instances. You can reach Remco at endlessturn@hotmail.com.

  Crystal Ball

  Here are Remco's comments on the track:

  I limited myself to 5 crystal tracks in fruityloops I used no samples to simply show the power of Crystal. But Crystal does have the feature to load sound fonts !

  I started playing a bit with Crystal and used the presets tikov built for Crystal and decided to tweak some of the knobs myself ... figuring out how tikov build the presets ... the outcome was .. crystal is not so hard to learn at all. A couple of voices (read sound layers featuring nice! oscillators) a modulation section and a mixpanel to put it all together. Great for building moving pads. It has built in effects and delays and choruses and reverbs and filters... really all a electronic musician can wish for, especially because you can use send effects and you can link effects! You can trigger the start of a sound via an effect for example ... absolutely fabulous for making percussive moving sounds.

  I started off by making a arpeggio using the preset north pole. After that I built myself a baseline using plaid from tikov, a touch of piano sphere using the standard preset atmo epiano and giving it a bit more attack and body. I built a violin like pad sound myself which i put through a telephone eq.

  For inspiration I listened to glimmerland from DonkeyT and to my own song the gardens (which is a bit in this sphere as well)

  Presets I used :

  1. Northern pole adjusted to my taste - wanted to have a icy dreamy sphere
  2. Plaid from tikov adjusted to my taste - wanted to have a solid bottom baseline
  3. Atmo epiano adjusted to my taste by simulating mda epiano - wanted dreamy e piano
  4. 0.017 second from tikov adjusted to my taste - wanted to have wondering bleeps.
  5. crystal violin ..own preset - wanted to stick the wondering bleeps together with a pad.

• This Crystal demo track is by The Dual Nature of Matter. Visit the web site at: http://www.indiegrooves.com/dnm/dnm.html

  The Third Planet

  Here are his comments on the track:

  My goal was to try and showcase both the capabilities of crystal as a source for evolving ambient soundscapes as well as some warmer analog sounds, which sound (to my ears at least), even better with the latest version of crystal. Browsing through the patchlist, and jamming with the patches (often just holding a note for 30 seconds or so and letting it evolve) resulted in The Third Planet.

  This track uses 4 instances of crystal with minimal fx (some reverb, a touch of the stereo enhancer on the pads from the PSP stereopack and a dash of dominion at the end), and some automation. I started off with the patch "SaturnScape" which carries on through the song, holding just a single note and letting it evolve, e.g. till the 1:03 mark I don't take my finger of the note I started off with. For the first "soundscapy" part of the track I layered on a patch called "Big Butterflys". At the 1:03 mark I brought in one of my favorite patches in crystal called "wider pulse". I pretty much used it as is, but in my songs I tend to use a lot of realtime modulation with this patch by modifying the mod matrix to route the mod wheel to the filters and LFO's. To end the song, I added on another analog-sounding sweepy sound from Vintage Bank #1 called "Filter 9 point".

• Here's a demo track made by Kriminal, called

  Insekt