Oh my god this is bringing back memories. When I was a kid, I'd put Best of Tomita and Switched on Bach on the record player back to back and listen for hours. I must have been a freaky kid, but it was synth heaven.
If you know synths it’s pretty easy to reverse engineer the sounds on SoB. They’re unfamiliar by modern pop standards, because there’s a lot of layering and paralleling with simultaneous envelopes and multiple filter sweeps that (boringly...) isn’t done much today. But they’re not opaque.
I have no idea how to copy some the sounds Tomita got from his Moogs, and I’m fairly sure no one else does either. Some are easy, some are “That’s really clever.” But there are more than a few that I have absolutely no clue about.
The fact that he patched up and recorded these huge flamboyant orchestral-sounding pieces note by note and line by line with such a creative range of unique and original sounds is just astounding.
Yeah I totally agree! I love SoB but the arrangements and patches are way more traditional and straightforward. Tomita really explored and extended the canvas of the synthesiser as a musical instrument in its own right. JMJ too.
Unsurprising, as the most complex orchestrations in SoB and its sequels are the small-ensemble Brandenburg Concerts; parts are already written, creative orchestration is limited to designing four or five instruments to play them.
On the other hand Pictures at an Exhibition is a piano solo piece. If it has a fancy "synthesized orchestration" Tomita, like others before him, developed a fairly arbitrary adaptation.
It’s a solo piano piece orchestrated by Ravel, who was a master orchestrator.
That’s the point about Tomita - there’s nothing “arbitrary” about the orchestrations. They’re an updated and exotic take created by someone who is rooted in that lush late tonal school of orchestration, but is using a completely new instrument to make original sounds.
Snowflakes Are Dancing sounds a lot more pianistic. The later Tomita albums sound more like attempts to reinvent symphonic music, with some quirky additions. He’s very consciously shaping the music like a conductor would, while painting with evocative sounds - very much not arbitrary at all.
I think Tomita is another great example of a musician who took material and adapted it for a new medium in really interesting, innovative ways.