"Desert" - Liner Notes - August 23, 2000
I was introduced to Mustafa Waiz through our sound designer, Scott Petersen, in February of 1999. Scott was responsible for a great deal of sound work as well as much of the drum samples heard on Diablo II, and had been rehearsing with Mustafa in his Oakland, California basement studio for a performance at a soccer game that spring. I was gearing up to get some material rolling for Act II, and was excited about getting some authentic flavor in the mix for these tunes. Mustafa put down some truly amazing stuff on the dumbek, djembe, and finger cymbals which was a real pleasure to build tracks around.
I generally spend a great deal time more cleaning up my own instrumental performances than I do with the actual recording of them, so I was pleasantly surprised to have tracks that were so good that almost no editing was needed. I have a vivid memory of sticking an eight bar sample into the sequencing program I use - an ancient windows 3.1 relic - and being shocked to find that it needed absolutely no tempo adjustment. Every beat was as perfectly timed as if it had come from a machine.
The material I came up with is a definite mixed bag - somehow I ended up with moments that seemed more like 70's jazz fusion or particularly strange euro-disco than anything "middle eastern" in spots, but I was still largely happy with the results. I could not resist putting down that synth bassline which enters at 1:00 in the track - the 303 had been trying to work its way into the soundtrack from the beginning, and I had to give it its half-minute of raver glory somewhere.
- Matt Uelmen
I was introduced to Mustafa Waiz through our sound designer, Scott Petersen, in February of 1999. Scott was responsible for a great deal of sound work as well as much of the drum samples heard on Diablo II, and had been rehearsing with Mustafa in his Oakland, California basement studio for a performance at a soccer game that spring. I was gearing up to get some material rolling for Act II, and was excited about getting some authentic flavor in the mix for these tunes. Mustafa put down some truly amazing stuff on the dumbek, djembe, and finger cymbals which was a real pleasure to build tracks around.
I generally spend a great deal time more cleaning up my own instrumental performances than I do with the actual recording of them, so I was pleasantly surprised to have tracks that were so good that almost no editing was needed. I have a vivid memory of sticking an eight bar sample into the sequencing program I use - an ancient windows 3.1 relic - and being shocked to find that it needed absolutely no tempo adjustment. Every beat was as perfectly timed as if it had come from a machine.
The material I came up with is a definite mixed bag - somehow I ended up with moments that seemed more like 70's jazz fusion or particularly strange euro-disco than anything "middle eastern" in spots, but I was still largely happy with the results. I could not resist putting down that synth bassline which enters at 1:00 in the track - the 303 had been trying to work its way into the soundtrack from the beginning, and I had to give it its half-minute of raver glory somewhere.
- Matt Uelmen