A selection of live improvisations and experimental test recordings...

All Compositions & Recordings Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio.

Relaxing With Electrons..

I found a couple of lovely old 1960s Gibbs spring reverb tanks I'd rescued years ago in the workshop and had a go wiring them up as a stereo pair - the setup grew on the bench adding an old TEAC RA-41 tape preamp as the recovery amp and my experimental tube vox-box oscillator along with the workshop's trusty Alesis Micron (supposedly only in here for test purposes but somehow ending up on so many recordings!) feeding my old prototype tube BPF box.. high voltage and cables aplenty - it was really quite inspiring... :)

Composition & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio, 2021.

A Spring Thing: Having Fun With 1960s Gibbs Spring Reverbs..

Made with several overdubs of various signal sources fed through a gorgeous 1968 Brüel & Kjær type 2107 all-tube regenerative swept band pass filter during final testing following the resurrection/restoration of yet another of these unique and wonderful units with modifications for creative use in the studio. 

The 2107 pass frequency is hand cranked to reveal harmonic content at up to a 50dB per octave crest.  At this sort of resonance little that comes out of the beast sounds even remotely similar to what goes in so its to fun to catch the harmonics on way whilst cranking the huge tuning dial.

Composition & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio, 2022.

1968 Brüel & Kjaer type 2107: Down to Band Pass Creek

Blending a few layers of samples taken from 1938 Hammond Novachord No.346 with some previous live recordings I'd captured from the beast suddenly had me daydreaming of Lulworth Cove and the Jurassic Coast which is one of my favourite places on planet earth.

Obviously the Novachord doesn't sound like this out of the box but it often amazes me how easily just a few carefully chosen layers of material from the beast can quickly end up producing huge ensembles and washes especially when some are played at half speed.  I think this is in part due to the Novachord's six free-running vibratos which produce a very organic sea of wobbly goodness.

Composition & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio 2023.

Jurassic Daydreams (Layered 1938 Novachord)

Made by feeding a single sustained chord played from a Studio Electronics Omega 8 into a classic Brüel & Kjaer type 2113 L/C band-pass resonator bank, sampled through 21 different filter settings, and then randomly sequenced live into a 1969 Dolby A301 for some multi-band compressed magic!...

Composition & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio

Brüel & Kjaer type 2113: Random Resonations...

Warping time using FM encoded tape... here two intertwining arpeggiated patches from my Blue Zone Kontakt library were recorded at 240bpm using only keys from the top two octaves onto two (out of 7) tracks of a TEAC MR-30 Laboratory Analog Data Recorder at 38cm/sec.  The FM encoded audio was then played back at 9.5cm/sec thus restoring the pitch but time stretching everything around it including reverb, delays and modulation effects.  The result is quite magical – not least because the tape machine itself adds a load of mojo in terms of smearing/limiting/filtering/noise resulting in a sort of crusty sonic Sepia effect.

No additional reverb has been added - its mearly the original reverb and delay tails ending up 4 times longer due to the tape speed reduction.

The MR-30 was originally intended as an Instrumentation Recorder to capture mainly slow DC signals (yes, it will record CV in parallel with audio!) and vibrations from transducers in laboratory experiments but it turns out the unit is capable of recording 7 tracks of audio concurrently well into the audio range (about 10KHz)and can playback and record at 6 different speeds from 1.2 to 38cm/sec.  In max speed a C90 lasts less than 10 minutes!

Here is the recording... warts and all.

Composition & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio 2020.

1983 TEAC MR-30 Slo-Mo: Molécules d'eau (Lo-Fi FM Encoded Tape Experiment)

Recorded in just two takes, Alto Volo is a live improvised duet conceived and performed by D.A.Wilson on string ensemble (Hollow Sun/Hideaway Studio Novachord) and Thomas Grillo on Theremin in 2010.

For more on the 1938 Novachord see www.novachord.co.uk

2016 Digitally Remastered Version Copyright D.A.Wilson & Thomas Grillo.

D.A.Wilson & Thomas Grillo - Alto Volo (Theremin)

D.A.Wilson is an Electronic Engineer, Sound Designer & Vintage Synth Specialist with a particular interest in combining vintage tube, classic analog and modern digital technologies working as a synth engineer looking after a very considerable amount of vintage studio equipment for Will Gregory (Goldfrapp / Moog Ensemble) and a number of other internationally celebrated electronic musicians and producers.  Having undertaken several major restorations and produced custom electronic designs for a number of major artists including Jean-Michel Jarre, Dani is also known for fully restoring two out of the world's four remaining 1979 Crumar GDS and partially restoring 1938 Novachord 346 (the only known operational Novachord in the UK) to playable order along with developing and producing the new Elfin family of 8-bit polysynths and the popular MIDI Front Panel Animator (FPA), Filter Defeat Module (FDM) and XD-280 Drive Emulator upgrades for the AKAI S612 sampler.

Demos of the S612 Upgrades in Action: 

https://soundcloud.com/hideaway-studio/sets/hideaway-studios-s612-front


Hideaway Studio Kontakt Sound libraries may be purchased directly from: 
https://www.lootaudio.com/category/kontakt-instruments/hideaway-studios
 

..and a nice introduction by Cory Pelizzari to the Hideaway Studio Kontakt Libraries:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-C7a3ChC9U&feature=emb_title


For more on releases from Hideaway Studio for Kontakt please visit the blog at:  www.hideawaystudio.net