► "NO TIME TO FEAR" (3'50)

Another one of my oldest songs, NO TIME TO FEAR was one of the first demos built with an Emax II in the early 90's ( ! ). Of course, you can hear the latest version, by clicking here !

At the time, I was trying to achieve a well-paced rhythm ensemble, with several synth sequencing, my favourite 80's clean guitar ( like The Fixx, Scritti Politti, etc...), the chorus theme being the slow-paced part. I had this strong bassline in mind since the very beginning, but it went to a lot of tries all these years, about the right sound to perform it ! Finally, I used the Xhun Audio LittleOne again, definitely one of my new favourite bass stuff..

The whole sequence parts though, are still triggering the same original sounds I used for the early version ! Of course, retreated through the Emulator X dynamics and filtering... If I recall correctly, these samples originally came from a big Korg T-1... minus the annoying dynamics and aftertouch excessive mess, I hated in KORG digital keyboards ! It was intended to be a (not so good ) voice pad, but the attack happened to be very interesting. So, well... here we go.

Some of my favourite drums samples were already there, in my early 90's de- mos, since I always had in mind to build my own "acoustic rock" drum kit, ra- ther than use electronic flavours. An obvious tribute to my love for Phil Collins, Robert Palmer, Oingo Boingo, and such. Plus, I never could afford a real drum- mer, with expensive recording sessions, and this much extra beers, etc...
So, I'm using pretty much the same custom samples kit for ages. Some kick and toms from Bob Clearmountain ( this guy, if only I could get him to mix my whole mess ! ), my infamous heavily processed snare from Peter Gabriel's song "Intruder" (a fascinating story, indeed ! ), various hi-hats and cymbals from sample CDs... I sorted somehow a coherent drum kit from all of it, with less than, wait for it... 15 MB of data storage !
So, hear this ! You certainly don't need the fat expensive, multi-layers, mega- giga drum libraries they try to sell you. You just have to choose carefully a bunch of effective samples you like, and take good care of your MIDI program- ming and EQ ! After that, oh my god... it takes around six months to achieve the drum kit processing and mixing. Piece of cake !