Traveller

John Carpenter's "Escape from New York" was one of my favorite movies. I saw this movie in the theater many times. I loved this movie's soundtrack! I bought the; the vinyl, the VCR tape & the T-shirt. My friends & I created this massive board game based on the movie... and even attempted to turn it into a computer game! The story, the atmosphere & most of all, the soundtrack that John Carpenter & Allan Howarth collaborated on. The tracks on this movie soundtrack were minimal in composition but full of atmosphere in presentation & very memorable. They were easy to construct on a modular synthesizers & loads of fun to perform. Reconstructing songs from this soundtrack to the modular synth system became somewhat of a learning environment to me for a while. Through Carpenter & Howarth's compositions I found my way to creating more genre like songs with a modular synth. A different approach over the large carpets of electronic audio complexity that most of us start off creating with our modular synthesizer. This "ESCAPE FROM NYC" example was demonstrating to me how to build synth patches that could play an entire song; drums, bass & melody. Modular synthesizer patches that screamed song & fit to a mood atmosphere, over patches that create evolving audio. Traveller, is repetitious and organic, as the drone fills the reverb atmosphere of the clocked percussion. If we were to discuss various ways to construct synthesizer compositions, this soundtrack would be one of my topics. If you own a modular synthesizer, I highly recommend that you reproduce one of the Escape from New York tracks on your system.

A track from the "Escape from New York" soundtrack.

John Carpenter & Allan Howarth collaborated on a number of movies using this semi-modular analog sound. The results were excellent. In most cases their tracks not only work great for the soundtrack, they are strong enough to stand alone. I hope to cover other great movie & TV soundtracks and their composers in this journal blog of mine.

Reflecting on the original hardware used to make the music... We actually had a Tapco mixer just not the same model. Back then I had no idea a Tapco(EV) mixer was used to record these tracks. And where as John & Allen had the whole TASCAM 80 8 1/2" reel system, we used Akai (4 channel) --> Teac (2 channel) Reel to Reels to record on. The Carpenter/ Howarth sound is ARP, Linn & SQ Prophet 5, Traveller is constructed of oscillators; DOTCOM, ModCan & MOTM. The biggest difference to me, John & Allan used Eventide Analog effects, Traveller is on a digital Lexicon plate reverb for it's atmosphere.

Click on this link to read more straight from Carpenter's web site.

Traveller, this modular synthesizer performance is my tribute to what I could only hope would be a synthesizer composition & recording that could easily fit along side the music composed for Escape From NYC. When I developed the modular synth patch for this, the movie was all part of the creative process to produce this Traveller track. As the patch plays out, I accompany the track with the nasal synth melody, triangle chimes & resonant drone knob twisting throughout.

Traveller by KicKRaTT