A bit of experimentation tonight with Angelicals.  This experiment began with a pad and an arpeggio from Angelicals, and then I simply let things develop on their own from there.

This is purely experimentation.  This is definitely far from being useful in a Hollywood film, but I find it interesting – and it worked well in the car test tonight, even though this definitely needs a fair amount of work to be release-ready.

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The music of Jean-Michel Jarre has a very distinctive sound, especially his pre-1990 music, and now it is relatively easy to emulate his sound.

Thanks to Twitter, I learned about Angelicals from  Applied Acoustics Systems (@AAS_News).  In just the first few seconds of hearing the demo, I was hooked – barely 10 minutes later, I had bought Angelicals and begun testing it.

According to the AAS Web site, Angelicals is “[h]ighly inspired by the work of Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre.”  I have seen so many posts over the past year or so by people wanting to emulate the sounds of Vangelis and (especially) Jarre, and have also seen and tested various SoundFonts which somewhat emulate Jarre’s sounds in particular, but Angelicals is the best I have yet heard… and it is definitely not limited to a single sound – in fact, there are 101 sound presets in 7 categories, including pads, synths, and arpeggios.  While testing many of the individual sounds, I could clearly “hear” their inspirations in Jarre’s well-known works, from Oxygene to Rendez-vous and others.  (I do not know Vangelis nearly as well, so I cannot identify which of his works have inspired certain sound presets.)

Best of all, Angelicals comes with the free VST-compatible AAS Player, so there is nothing extra to buy to use this.  I had already installed the AAS Player to test the free Swatches sound bank compilation, and I can definitely envision how some Swatches sounds could nicely compliment the Angelicals sounds.  Since these both work with AAS Player, I can easily use their sounds in PrintMusic and compose with them alongside other sound sources as needed – for example, I can envision layering Angelicals pads with a piano SoundFont in a space-ish composition created entirely in PrintMusic (before using Reaper for mixing).

Now I just need to finish my work today so I can spend tonight exploring the possibilities of Angelicals!

This must be the world’s most humorously BAD use of music in a TV commercial:

I happened to find another video on YouTube from Jean-Michelle Jarre’s 1990 Paris La Défense concert. This has long been one of my favorites, both from all of Jarre’s works and from this concert in particular.