50 years Tangerine Dream – 5 albums you should listen to

As I never tire to mention, I’m a big fan of the German electronic band Tangerine Dream and am heavily influenced by their work and their embracing of different styles and re-inventing themselves over the decades. Founded 50 years ago today and having released far over 100 albums, soundtracks and compilations, it’s hard to choose only a few favorites, or to tell anyone not familiar with the band where they should start listening. And although I’m doomed to fail, I’ll try anyway and present five Tangerine Dreams albums you should listen to – from classic times to more modern works.

Tangerine Dream through the years

Step-Sequencing like Klaus Schulze, the easy way

Step sequencer patterns can be pretty repetitive, and although that’s what you often want when using them, you don’t want them to be boring. So you can use filters and other tricks to liven them up. Or: If you’re into electronic instrumental music, I bet you’ve heard of Klaus Schulze. He’s one of the founding fathers of the so-called Berlin School (as opposed to Kraftwerk‘s Düsseldorf School) in which you can find artists like Tangerine Dream, Manuel Göttsching, Bernd Kistenmacher… And Klaus Schulze is famous for using step sequencer patterns that, although being repetitive in their parts, don’t really repeat over time, as they weave into each other more or less randomly and create new patterns over a song of, say 15 minutes.

Source: Wikipedia

Recently I wanted to try this, too. So I started a tribute song for Klaus Schulze. Of course there are other ways to achieve these kind of (more or less) randomly interweaving patterns, but here’s how I did it this time: