Anyone here know how Rush made the first 45 seconds of 2112? There has to be some Rush fans here. 
If it was a synth, could it be recreated with a Little Phatty or Voyager?
i swear i remember reading somewhere years ago it was a ARP2600
I can’t recall ever seeing Geddy Lee use ARP gear. In the early days it was all Moog and Oberheim.
To me it sounds like sending noise through the filter with resonance cranked then playing with the cutoff knob.
i meant that the ARP2600 was used in studio production - never used live. to my knowledge, the intro has always been a tape played from the soundboard.
in fact, a mellotron was used for the flutes and strings in the song titled “Tears” from the same album. mellotron was never used live either.
Thanks guys. There are a few layers. I wonder if they’re all synth based. Is it a multitimberal sound or monophonic…? Did he take a mono synth and just record a few different tracks. The sound evolves over those 45 seconds in such a cool way.
Cygnus X-1 from AFTK is another really cool synth intro. I wonder if they used all synth or real bells and explosion sounds. Maybe from a sound library.
Or how about 4:35 - 6:45 of “Jacob’s Ladder” off Exit Stage Left.
Rush have come up with some of the coolest synth music ever. Where can I learn this stuff!?! 
I want to kidnap Geddy and force him to teach me… KIDDING. That would be a great scene in a movie though.
I am sure a 'Phatty or Voyager could get you something close, but you’d have to multi-track to get all those weird little sounds.
I was noodling with a RedSound Darkstar and got something similar in a live situation. That unit is well suited because it has an assignable joystick which allows you to vary cutoff and resonance in one motion, and it is 5-part multi-timbral so you can sweep in the low stuff.
Exit Stage Left was the pinnacle of analog for Rush, although I guess a lot of people liked the sounds on Signals, too. In ESL the Taurus pedals were CV-linked to the Oberheims for the sustained backgrounds (listen to the breathy transition between The Trees & Xanadu), and the Mini and OB-1 handled the leads, all played live! I wish Geddy would have kept going in that direction, instead of turning to sequencers and triggering sampled bits of a studio performance during live shows.
He’s got a Phatty, but doesn’t use it for any of their new material. What a shame … he was one of my favorite mono-synth players, bringing little moments of synth magic & giving the hard rock a little break now and then.
I know this is an older thread, but here’s what I did for when we play 2112 live…
I basically do what Rush does - use the actual sound from the CD. I literally just took the song into Sound Forge and cut the rest of the song away, then went back and cut out the two “shots” near the end of that part, leaving me with the perfect sample, which I trigger on my Roland Fantom-S88.
Cheating? Perhaps. But it’s what Rush themselves do, so…
The intro to Camera Eye is by far my favorite of what I’ll call “modern” Rush. Certainly it all changed over the next 3 albums and as somebody said, they’re not doing anything now 'cept they used Mellotron on Snakes and Arrows.
But I have a feeling that the release of Taurus 3 might change that (fingers crossed). I’m looking for a bunch of bands to take the beast in and start anew.
If you think about the music you love, you can apply Taurus to it, at least that’s what I’ve been doing. One is Vital signs, the instrumental section towards the end. A fast arp running from my Little Phatty, stomping on the T3, playing the bass line.
Even alternative bands of today, like Yeah Yeah Yeah’s could due with a Taurus. I could see Nick (the guitar/kbd/bass player) leveraging it both live and in studio. He does quite a bit with digital delay pedals today. I’d put money down that a T3 will pop up on a future album.
From the “Rush is a band” website = Album intro: ARP 2600, programmed and played by Hugh Syme. Not sure of their source, but there are some knowledgable folks there.
This goes back a ways… But back in 1978 I used a Micromoog to do that intro with a band.
As I remember, it sounded pretty good.
I think I had noise feeding a Low Pass with Resonance and the Ribbon was controlling the Filter’s Cutoff.
Then I used two fingers to “walk” on the Ribbon. By stabbing at the top of the ribbon and dragging
downward and then repeating that motion with a second finger you’d get that:
Doooo Doooo Awwwww, Dooooo Dooooo Awwwww…
with "Doooo being a falling filter sound and “Awwwww” being a slight climb upward from the bottom of the ribbon.
The I slowly raised the Cutoff knob after each pass. {I’m pretty sure I also had an oscillator quietly mixed in there
as well whose pitch also followed the ribbon - but it’s been over 30 years since I’ve thought about it…}
The final filter sweep (at the guitar hit) is high Resonance with lots of delay and a wild twist of the Cutoff knob.
Could it be done with the Phatty? Maybe, but the ribbon let you start back at the top without having to wheel back up there.
The Merely Players book states that Hugh Syme played an ARP Odyssey on the “2112” intro and a Mellotron 400 on “Tears”.
If anyone is interested, here’s my edit of the album’s sample: 2112-Intro
I just uploaded this into my Roland Fantom and trigger it when we play it.
Just tunr your guitar 
This is a little off topic…
I tried to sample the Micromoog with the Fantom and it didn’t realy work all tha well.
It would be nice to trigger something other than that woman going “Ah huh huh” lolol
Hello guys. This is an old topic but I am hoping some of you are still around. I ran across this while looking for someone who had successfully cut out the samples from 2112 Temples of Syrinx and Overture and I see that a few of you have. The link where wolf2112 had posted his samples but the link is now dead. Would anyone still around be kind enough to let me have their samples? I am a guitar player that is trying to get my band to play this song and the samples would help us playing it live. I am also the technical guy that figures this stuff out and haven’t been successful in getting the best clips to use on my own so you guys who are much better at this stuff could be my savior. I have isolated the beginning part and just play it on my iPad but would like to have the rest of the song too and a better clip for the beginning also if available. Thanks for any help!
Hunter