March of the Molecule Men was one of the last songs I wrote for Flight of the Atom Bee.  I had decided that the whole album skewed to the experimental and artsy and what I really needed was a straight up easy-listening four-on-the-floor piece of ambient techno. The...

Every  week, I am publishing an article about a composition of mine, the gear, the inspiration, what was involved, and so on. I hope you enjoy them! I am enjoying writing them. —Knox I have mentioned the Roland JX-8P Synthesizer in the pieces about Flight of the Atom...

This box was the core of the Bee. The basic buzz came from one of the three old oscillators in the upper-left panel. A simple saw-tooth, modulated slightly to round-out the waveform with a rising and falling control voltage. There was also, the obvious rising and falling pitch generated by the Dual-Slope Generator over on the right. The DSG also triggered the Stepped-Function module to send out another voltage to raise and lower the over-all pitch of the buzzing bee, in steps, of course.

The distorted wing-stress sounds were made with the Triple-Wave Shaper and mixed in with VC Gates.

The Whoosh was filtered white-noise and the phase-shifter, which Greg Jones pulled out of a Mutron guitar pedal and kludged into the panel on the lower right. Also gated.

These three elements were mixed and sent out in a mono feed to another Roland Spaced Echo. sergeghost

Timing pulses all generated by the Roland TR-606, which can be heard on the song. The only other sound on the song was the chord, which was made by a Roland JX-8P with the keys taped down and fed into the mixing board.