Ditching failed plugins

As much as I’m very picky when choosing plugins, everyone makes mistakes. Some of them simply didn’t pass real studio test and failed expectations. Here they are:

The Mangle – despite cool and colorful interface, as well as potential for unheard harmonic clouds, this granular synth is a chore to use. Not only is the interface split among many pages and dialing in desired amount of modulation is notoriously difficult (“drag and drop”, they said). It also tends to lose / forget loaded samples after some time, under different circumstances. The Mangle doesn’t come with suitable sample pack for granular synthesis in first place, so every time I need to search for something nice before I even get started. All in all, lots of wasted time with this one. Bye, bye.

Plugins galore

The summer sales are coming and I already purchased a full set of tools from my wishlist. Now that I can get tunes released, I just need to work faster and create tracks easier.

Forever Underground

Well, that’s the name of my latest track prepared for a music contest. It’s now free for download.

The contest was about creating track with extensive use of delivered samples from Warsaw Metro. It was quite a challenge to fit them into a proper trance track, so the result is somewhat original. I tried to use synths sparingly to make space for other sounds. All the percussion and FX are made out of samples. There is also part of the kick, nice granular pad delivered by contest host as Ableton rack, and my specialty – Roland-style supersaw created out of train siren sample 🙂

As you notice, orchestration is very rich and so is melody, I just tried to show a whole array of sounds instead of sending one-trick pony someone might like or not.

The track was highlighted as “finalist”, though I didn’t win. The top was dominated by some deep / drone / ambient stuff as well as some more groovy D’n’B made almost out of samples alone. In fact I’m the only who used a number of synths and some apparent melody.

The host also said the track is greatly mixed. In fact I finally found a simple trick which allows me to use arbitrary sounds nicely. Enjoy it 🙂