Remixed by Rat Souffle
Download / Play Doctor_Who_-_Digital_Howell.mp3 (160, 1:36)  (ogg)  (Play)
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At last! My Howell mix is ready! This was created using Cubasis Vst 5, mainly using the Steinberg Model-E (A softsynth version of the Mini Moog). I did the bass first, as I knew that it sould be the hardest bit to recreate (Although I do not intend to recreate it completely faithfully, that would be boring). First I started out fiddling around with a freeware VST synth called Crystal, but it was useless at recreating anything remotely resembling the Howell bassline.

So, as I was just messing around with my MIDI keyboard and Model-E, I worked out that on the patch "Moog Pluck", if you play two keys an octave apart it produces a pleasingly realistic Howell 'bass growl'. I tweaked it a l ittle bit (Splitting it into about 4-5 different tracks for: Main, Reinforced Dum-De-DUM, Growl, and a special track added over the opening bass which was to compensate the lack of melody, and to flesh out the texture a little).

I then created the oo-ee-oo using Model-E, Imported it into Wavelab, and "gave it a bit of echo" and a "wobble on the end" (In Peter Howells words). For the vocoder section, I didn't use a vocoder, well I did, sort of. I made the melody bit out of a synth-electric guitar noise, but it didn't have the same dynamic range and stuff as the original, so I recorded my voice doing the Wee-Wah-Woo and filtered out everything exept the really high white noise frequencies of my voice which I put into some effects processors (Reverse echo, reverb, slight distortion etc.) and added that to the guitar part. The Middle-8 section is pretty self explanatory. I just played it on a synth with a fast LFO so it sounds like the "bells" of the Howell version.

The sound FX were just just lazily filtered out of the original, ditto opening scream and closing bang. I did try creating the Howell scream myself using SynthEdit, but it failed miserably.

After that, I realised that with all the melody and sfx on top, the bass sounded weedy and rubbish, so I made an altered special bass track and added that on over the top (Which was a nightmare because they both kept going out of sync). The final mastering of this track was awful as I exported the mp3 file, send it to whomix and only THEN do I notice that the whole track has a horrible distortion on it! (This is my second send)

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