technodiary

The State of the Art?

To catch and keep the ear of your audience, you need to be able to deliver new sounds. Just watch TV for a few minutes. Listen to the sounds used in commercials, on movies and even on top40 radio. Listen to a few cuts from the top albums. You hear sounds that are fresh, new and intriguing everywhere. It's now the norm to mangle drum beats, come up with what used to be considered bizarre synth sounds. As we entered the 21st century, Noise and retro synth sounds have taken a new hold on the contemporary musical consciousness. Spacey, trippy, grungy, quirky, 'retro' synthy sounds are "cool". It used to be that industrial noise and industrial ambient sounds were radical, and cutting edge. Now they are practically mainstream, and you have to have them just to fit in. But now we are rapidly running past DnB, club, techno Hard Core, Gabber and are contemporizing and mainstreaming these sounds with both retro and vintage sounds, and with the beautiful sonorities of new age and world music. I call this homogenization Post-Industrial Sound. "Post" means "after", or the sounds that are the metamorphosis of these as we leave 20th century industrial music.

My goal was to create a massive 128 meg palette of sounds for the Emulator EOS series that would have everything I need to make any synthesized color I want, from the dirtiest analog mix cutting drone to the tiniest arpeggiator ready crystalline little blip. And everything in between. There is a tremendous variation of useful vintage sounding synths and leads, steamy pads dripping with character, unusual Orch hits, a vast range of electronica-oriented synth basses, and finally hundreds of variations of noise. All of these are combined in EOS to make killer synths and pads, drum machines you have never heard before. The true joy of a great soundset is that possibilities open. You can simply link 2 or more presets together and come up with something totally new. But not everything on this disk is new. There's some stuff that really old, like tons of variations of synth strings, new agey pads made on analog, raw clean CZ violins, stock basses in addition to hot ones, clean PCM sample-playback tones. Sample playback? The Horror! Ease back, my filter swept friend, think as a sonic artist, a dab of this, a dab of that and a unique color comes to life. And fear not, the TweakMeister adds filters and real time controllers to everything. Expect to turn a knob and have something cool happen. This is not a genre specific soundset. We are post-industrial, after the metamorphosis. Expect new and old blended, morphed, transformed. Expect the bright and thin with the phatt and lush.

--manifesto/ad copy for Rich the Tweakmeister's Post-Industrial Cybr-Sound Depot