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.

The Making of: Meteor Ride

Well, my boot drive just died, so I can’t make any music this weekend. But I can post another blog about past productions 😉

The goal was simple: Create groovy, buzzy, driving and hot tune that could hit festivals. No elaborate arrangements or sound design extravaganza – jut distort everything until it burns.  I intentionally picked simple synths, Sylenth1 and Vacuum Pro, to make simple and oldschool yet effective sounds.

VIP, Advance and presets

So – yes. I own Advance 49 keyboard with VIP preset browser for a year and a half now. Why I didn’t write about it earlier? Well, because goddamn thing didn’t want to work.

The making of Starvation

Since now extended versions of tracks are on Youtube, there’s a good point to discuss how “Starvation” was made.

I had a simple idea in mind – a straightforward trance tune with african theme. This involves, obvioulsy, polyrthytmic djembe drums, but also harmonies. Some grooves were played by hand using different instruments, such as Ableton stock rack and Big Bang Cinematic Percussion, other loops were found on the Internet. As to harmonies, I googled some “african music”, understood correctly or not, and tried various chord progressions until it worked.

Enfortro – We Came To Conquer (Warmonger Remix)

It’s time for another freebie! Get ready for this warm uplifter.

The track was originally prepared for a contest somewhere in April. But it wasn’t that good. I got down to it again last weekend and found out it honestly sucked. But not all is lost!  I already figured out how to turn it into proper uplifter. What do you think?

Synths used were Vacuum Pro (first ride) for basses and phasy arp together with LuSH-101 for pads and final supersaw lead. In fact the most important thing in that project was D16’s Devastor 2, which is pretty much on every track and adds tons of warmth and agressiveness to this tune. I aimed at dirty, warm summer vibe and took inspiration from old Sean Tyas tracks in particular.

There are also polyrthytmic maracas rolling through entire length of track. I bet you didn’t notice, but they add some interest to the composition as they drive multiple envelope followers from Live M4L stock.

What really makes or break the tune are the reference tracks, though. This summer I did even more careful A/B comparison and particular started matching EQ, which turned out to make day and night difference. I believe this one is the very best and properly produced trancer I ever shared, so enjoy it!

In the meantime I finished more tracks and need to send them out to labels. In particular the ones that actually check the demos 😛 Life is hard.

4K in a DAW

I’ve been looking forward to get 4K monitor to use it with DAW and recently made it. I would like now to discuss the benefits and observations in a form of short guide, as seemingly many people are still confused about these.