T2 Live: A Retrospective

First of all, an apology: I broke my vow to myself to try to write a blog post a month for the year, including for my birth month, which was last month. In my defense, one reason for my silence is because one of my positions has wrapped up recently.

Yes, a relative nobody like me had the honor of contributing to a major production: a concert based on one of my favorite film soundtracks!

The full backstory: in November 2025, the painful decision of needing to quit my dayjob cxouldn’t have been better timed, as a week after that decision was made, Alex Ball, a notable soundtrack and synthesizer analysis YouTuber, reached out to me informing me that he recommended me to Avex Classics International for this project. Ball and I had known each other in advance thanks to his working on his analysis of the original score for the film, in which he borrowed some notes and sounds from me to assist with his video essay.

Back to the present: I ended up getting the role of being a synthesizer consultant for the concert, meaning I was assisting with the sound design for the keyboard players using my knowledge and sound sources I compiled that were used for the original film. While most of the percussion was performed live in the end, it was still not an easy feat to get to sound close to the original experience.

Main obstacle: the original score was written and performed almost exclusively on a pair of now-rare Fairlight CMI Series III systems. Unfortunately, even if more than a few hundred were ever made, one of these units was destroyed in the LA fires in the past years, its data on it lost forever in the process, and a few third party end users, as opposed to Fairlight alumni themselves, gatekeeping whatever may or may not be left of the libraries. My research suggests most of the samples originally used originated from both the factory Fairlight library and the third party Prosonus Sound Library. Fortunately, the latter was also made available in its entirety for the Synclavier, which I was able to obtain, so that was, ironically, the trivial part to recreating the parts and sounds the performers needed. For the rest, some sounds I had no choice but to attempt to recreate from scratch, and while not perfect recreations, hopefully the differences are subtle enough to everyone who is able to listen to the performance.

Last week saw me go as far as to fly to London to attend its premiere last Sunday, alongside family and a good friend from the area. It honestly felt extremely surreal: sure, I wasn’t in a front row seat, let alone on stage, but the idea of having my work involved in such a big project, which also included a pre-show interview with one of my biggest musical influences, was a feeling I fully admit I’m unable to describe effectively in words.

Overall, a huge moment in my life. Special thanks go out to Pierre O’Reilly (producer) and Pete Billington (lead synthesizer programmer and consequently who I was mainly working with) for their interest in my knowledge and services, and to Brad Fiedel for the amazing music we tried to replicate!