As I always said to my students, there's no good way to pronounce that planet. But the official pronunciation is U' rin us (sorry about lack of phonetic symbolism there).

Looking forward to the rest of the series Mike.

- Dan Ling

Just listened to Venus. It's definitely a well crafted rendition! Very inspiring! Good luck and best wishes for the rest of the album, and I hope you get signed!
Actually, there is a way to say "Uranus" without sounding like a little schoolboy...say it backwards...but nobody will know what you're talking about...


- Corin

Hey everybody, I just finished Uranus: http://soundcloud.com/mike-leghorn/uranus. It's mostly Diva, with some Zebra and ACE. (I also used Z3ta2, but had a lot of problems with the bugs.)

I hope you enjoy!

Hey Mike, listening to Uranus (for those who don't know, Uranus is a planet! )

Very interesting, definitely checking out the other stuff as well!
When I saw your comment the other day, your name seemed pretty familiar... than I remembered about Sonic State and your planetary project.

Are you leaving Earth for the grand finally? ..better leave room for diversity!

Thanks listening to Uranus (not to be confused with "Your -you-know-what-"). I used one of your patches near the end, "Pad_Ethereal Fjord Ens".

I won't be doing Earth. It would be an interesting project, but I'm going to stick to Holst's music and focus on adding value as a synthesist (if that's a real word).

I thought I'd give you all an update on this project.

I recently finished Saturn, and made a lot of changes to Mars. I learned a lot since first finishing Mars, so I needed to go back to it and try to bring it up to the same level of quality as Saturn (my favorite so far) and Venus. The new Mars is here: http://soundcloud.com/mike-leghorn/mars-revised

I was planning on finishing The Planets in May 2012 -- which has come and gone. Now it's looking like August 1, 2012. By that time I will have worked on it for about a year.

I've just started Neptune, which is the last one for me. I'm also going to make a lot of changes to Jupiter and Uranus. Then I'll be done!

I'll be so happy when I finish this!

Cool, been waiting for this.....and thanks again for buying the soundset.

Just listened to Mars revised..
Quality work, lot of action and dynamics + cool synth sounds!

I just finished Neptune: http://soundcloud.com/mike-leghorn/neptune

Now I've done all the planets. I'll make a few revisions to some of the other planets, then I'll declare this project as complete!

I'd like to give special thanks to Howard for the patch that I use for the vocals at the end of Neptune -- which is HS Ligetimat (Zebra -- you can find it in the 2.1 folder). In addition to Zebra, I also use ACE and Diva in this arrangement (and, I must confess, z3ta2).

Great work Mike.
Sounds excellent.
What's next?

Thanks for that great video Todd. I've just been calling it "Planet U" because every time I told my wife I was working on "Uranus", she couldn't look at me with a straight face. When I dropped off a demo CD at a local record label here in Chicago (several months ago) I told a person there that I had just finished "Uranus", and she looked like she was going to crack up.

Thanks for that.
I now have a new Diva sound named "Planet U"

After almost a year of work, I've finished The Planets: http://soundcloud.com/mike-leghorn/sets/the-planets/

Feel free to download it in 360 kbps high quality mp3 format -- although to me, mp3 sucks. I want to provide this in uncompressed WAV format, and even in 96khz/24bit. We'll see how that goes.

This has been a huge endeavor for me. My wife and daughter are so happy that I can now go back to being a normal human being -- or at least as normal as I'm capable of being (Actually I'm not capable of being normal, but you get my point).

Now it's time to celebrate! I'm drinking a 26 ounce bottle of Dupont Floret Saison. Actually, I'm always celebrating, even if there's no reason to -- but at least now there's a reason to.

Synths used: Zebra, ACE, Diva, Tyrell, z3ta2, Sylenth. I also used Uhbik for effects, and Valhalla Room for reverb.

I hope you enjoy my Planets arrangement.

Anyone know of a good record label I should approach?

Wow! What a huge undertaking! Well done! it sounds really great:) The spirit of Wendy Carlos lives on...
The Planet Suite is probably the most important music to me because it's the reason I became a composer/musician.
When I was ten years old our teacher took our class to the main hall (where the record player was) and played us the whole record. I couldn't believe what I was hearing and to this day it still fascinates and enthralls me so it's very exciting to hear this music performed just with synths.
There is an amazing production of the Planets performed by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Sir Simon Rattle that is in my humble opinion the best recorded version available.
Good luck with finding a record company.