Hi all,
I’ve been listening to Nils Frahm and fell in love with his sequences, but cannot come close to replicate it or do anything like that…
How would I got about doing it?
Also, the sequencing is pretty sparse and the melody isn’t exactly Beatles - I think it’s a case of otherworldly melodies spawning otherworldly soundscapes
Yeah, as mentioned above, the Moog videos rely heavily on the reverb - it’s probably Eventide H9 or Strymon.
I just recently got into listening to Nils Frahm, and I think a big part of his sound is his delays. I was watching his live set on KEXP, and he is very fond of his Space Echo.
To my ears, there may not be anything crucial to the sequences’ sound beyond the addition of the echo. I see him using that Roland Echo in a lot of live performances, and the resulting performance sounds similar to the studio recording. Since I don’t recall him using an additional sequencer in some of those performances to add additional intricacies of timing/muting to the sequence, maybe it’s just the echo.
For the Nils’ fans, he has a newly announced band: Nonkeen.
The core elements of Nils’ synth-based stuff are often deceptively simple. In the main melody from “Says” for example, it’s just a simple arpeggiated Cm chord running over two octaves, processed through the tape delay. There might be some other things in the effects chain — chorus from the Juno, spring reverb from the space echo, perhaps another delay — but you can get really close with just a tape echo (El Capistan works great if you don’t have a spare €1k for a vintage unit).
The moog video isn’t Nils but as people have said, it’s mainly about the reverb in those examples.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the Korg they use around the 28 minute mark, which seems to be a poly MS-20, is (I think) a PS-3100. Beautiful example of filter sequencing.