I showed this to my guitar teacher once and it made his day, thank you, he already passed away now but at least I got to learn and share my passion about guitar, also Deep Purple and Allan Holdsworth, cheers, this brings back great memories
Same to you! Thanks for watching my stuff 😁. I saw your live Devil playthru. Incredible! I had transcribed the first 30 seconds or so and we were ALMOST identical 😄.
Thanks! I think it's important to share because I'm not some super genius with my ear. I use all the tools I can to come to some logical and simple conclusion.
I was fortunate enough to watch Allan play the Synth Ax at GIT Musicians Institute, I know it was early 1985, he said he'd just acquired it. He managed a set with it. Undoubtedly midi'd through a DX7 or Oberheim. Iirc he was doing mostly keys and orchestral voices with long decays due to a bit of latency problems. That performance was taped I'm sure. We all had Sony and Toshiba Stereo hifi cassette Walkmans. I had a rare even for then, Toshiba KT-RS1 Stereo Cassette recorder with a removeable stereo mic head and a belt clip. The am/fm tuner was on a cassette you removed to play a cassette. I paid 130usd for that recorder. Just saw a working example for 85. Wow, the things that depreciate 40 years later you thought would be sky high. I notice none of these I see still has the Stereo mic head. So why no double record speed? It was hard enough isolating motor noise at normal speed.
Yeah those original Synthaxes weren't as responsive as they would become a year later. Guys who worked for the company had to go around and upgrade everyone's system with new chips and firmware updates.
Love these deep dives of yours, John. So rewarding! It's really funny how one tends to just label these things as too difficult and borderline impossibe "because it's Allan", while diving deep you find out that even AH didn't shy away from making things (relatively) easy for himself. The complexity of the patches, discerning what is really fretted and what are overtones that the ear perceives in different octaves, well, that's a whole other story...! Thanks for your willingness to share!
Great stuff as always, John. Thank you for all your time and dedication in bringing us these synthaxe compositions. Wishing you a very happy Thanksgiving there. - Best wishes , John
I saw Allan Holdsworth at tipitinas club in New Orleans in 1984 on the iou era with steve Morse and probably the dixie dregs and didn't know a lot about his music except that I knew it was fantastic sounding fusion. I was acting as security for the dressing room which was upstairs.
This tune would be perfect for the film Total Recall. I love this guitar solo and i hope you will make a lesson about this solo. And again, great work. 👏👏👏
I've got quite a few cds and even a cassette of the iou, but Allan Holdsworth was so original and great, great 👍 playing it sounds like Allan 👌👏😃. So cool to see the synthaxe😃👏🎸
Thanks for your dive into this tune. What a composition! Always felt the A section was a cheeky nod to “da blues”. The melancholy B section stirs nostalgia for 1980s Allan (and my youth). The solos on this too…❤️🔥
Fascinating stuff! Funny thing is that I was never a big fan of this tune. There's such a wonky rhythm to it, which I just couldn't get into - still can't, really. But seeing this video makes me appreciate Allan's creativity (and yours!). I never really thought about the clever use of dominant chords, even though I knew that Allan never cared for them. But I think it had a lot to do with the way they are used in bebop in II-V-I progressions. It is quite a cliche sound. He would go out of his way not to sound like bebop - he brought this up many times over the years. The way Allan uses dom 7ths here has more in common with bossa nova, actually! It's like Allan's version of "One Note Samba", with those pivot notes with chromatic chords moving underneath. A word on the patches: I'm not sure how much sound programming he was able to do at the time of "Atavachron", but he later claimed that he would program most patches by himself. The bell-like sound was an inherent quality of the Yamaha synths, he thought. He found the Oberheims to more flexible. The Yamahas were digital, while the Oberheims were analog. The amount of time he must have spent learning these two very different form of synthesis... I still struggle working out purportedly simple analog synths... Finally I have to mention that it's really amusing to listen to the sounds of of the trigger strings coming through on your mic. I can't help but think that it's a bit of a turnoff if you're playing really quietly to hear the "sproing" of the strings coming through every time you attack it....
He's definitely using that tubular bell sound. Ive been able to A/B them from my sound and whats on the record and they're practically identical :). I do agree, this wasn't ever one of my favorites either. Believe it or not, that sprong sound is a bit more apparent when watching video, then when you're actually playing it! But its certainly there and could certainly be a bit distracting!
@@TurrigenousOfficial Your playthrough section highlights the only real crunchy part of the song, so - a good place to choose for this particular song.
