Synth-Studio Weblog

EDIT: Updated version with different patches with some more bite for “vocals”.  What do you think?

Today, like many days, I was going through the thousands of patches in my Roland XV-5080 and came across a few replicating some of Jon Lord’s (Deep Purple) organ sound.  So, I decided to remaster an old MIDI of one of my favorite Deep Purple songs on the XV-5080, Child In Time.

The two organ patches I used for this song are called “Fire Perc” and “HeavyTraffic” from the “SR-JV80-08 Keyboards of the 60’s and 70’s” expansion board .  I customized both of the patches a little bit until I was happy with them.

Next, after spending more time than I would have liked to looking for a suitable guitar patch for the song, I gave up and made a new one.  I wasn’t really going for emulation and just made something I thought sounded nice in the song.  I spent a fair amount of time on the guitar patch.  I’ll try to remember to write something about it later.

The next thing on the list was the drums, I used the “Studio Set” kit from the “SR-JV80-10 Bass & Drums” expansion board and customized some of the cymbals and crashes a bit.  I also routed the drumkit to a separate audio output on the XV.  So that I could amp it up a bit during recording, I set it to output from the XV dry, and added a different reverb and very minor EQ to it.

After that, I worked on the “vocals”.  Normally I don’t bother using or keeping “vocals” in MIDI music.  But, seeing as Child in Time is as much a great organ piece as a voice solo, I decided to keep it.  I settled on a smooth mellow sound using a couple patches on the SC-8850 which I think does the job of keeping the melody of the song’s lyrics.

Here’s the recording, let me know what you think: 

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Download My Updated MP3: Child In Time MIDI Remaster v2 (Roland XV-5080 & SC-8850)

Download My Original MP3: Child In Time MIDI Remaster (Roland XV-5080 & SC-8850)