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New Ambience: Xenon Refinery
🕑 Added 2025-04-02 16:44:49 +0000 UTCGreetings Patrons,
I was noodling around on my Prophet synth last week and came up with a cool idea that I thought could work in a track. It was an interesting process as rather than sequencing everything I put on a click track and recorded the entire thing live. Not being highly quantized to a grid gave it a nice organic feel, but adding things on top of it proved to be a bit challenging. On top of the synth track, there's piano, flautando strings, some deep percussion and a few synth drums that are pushed way back, to give a bit of movement.
The part that I think sells it, however, is the synth/dulcimer part that lends the whole piece a vaguely ethnic vibe. I experimented with a lot of different sounds in this one and I think it ended up sounding pretty cool.
For the ambience, I knew I wanted it to be a planet exterior with some massive gas extracting towers, belching vapour into the air. Xenon is apparently quite rare on earth so I picked that rather arbitrarily. Or maybe it was because words that start with 'X' are cool and give instant scifi credibility.
As this track is in Patreon exclusive sneak-peek mode, I've included the mixed version (live on the site next week), as well as music-only, and ambience-only versions of the track here. Additionally, I created two 'No Towers' versions that make it a barren planet surface ambience. I hope you find these useful additions.
Thank you all, as always, for your continuing support.
Best,
Tim
Comments
OnyxMonolyth
When you said that you had just chosen Xenon because it sounded cool (which is true), I kept thinking about how you would refine Xenon and since Xenon is produced during the fission of Uranium, the Xenon Refinery would likely be a specialized nuclear reactor. Now the real question is what they need the Xenon for. Maybe this alien society really likes Xenon based lights.
