Quote: gongbass Originally Posted by Charlie, huge fan of your work. I adore your scoring stuff. Its a constant source of inspiration to those of us composers stuff in jingle/corporate industrial/cable news cues purgatory.



You mentioned that you don't really use synths anymore. Of course I get what your saying about mangled guitar and piano samples. When you need "bread and butter" (actually your work is so original you probably don't) patches what soft synth/sampler are you using?



I remember a V-Synth and a few Moog hardware pieces in your studio (from clips and pics) are you still digging them or not so much?



Thanks for getting involved with this thread. Its amazing to have insight from a pro like you!

Thanks man!I got a Voyager because I felt it was my duty as a "synth fan", but it's never actually been on a track. The track I did for the Moog documentary was all Arturia (sacrilege, I know!).I have a V-Synth XT, but it's predecessor (the original V-Synth keyboard) was the only one that appeared on a track - I did the vocal stretching on my remix of Rob Zombie's "Reload" on that, but that's it.I have a JP-8080 that I used as a filterbank on one track - "The Great Below" from The Fragile.I have a Nord Rack 1 that actually has been on two or three tracks back in the day.I have an MKS80 that was on a few remixes back in the day.I still have one of the custom grey Waldorf Microwave II XTK keyboards that Waldorf made for us for a video back then, but it's never been on a track.I have a stonking great EuroRack setup with a Sequentix P3 that I got to use on the score for the videogame "Singularity" and it's all over that, mostly doing lame basslines that could just as well have been done in Omnisphere in ten seconds, but I was bored.Prophet VS, VS Rack, and Xpander have never been on a track. Jupiter8 was on some ancient remixes for the Australian band Icehouse 20 years ago, but it's on long-term loan to a buddy.I do have a few circuit-bent toys - SK1, HR16, Speaks, etc. and they have appeared here and there on the "Saw" scores. The zingy, pitchy high percussion on the "Hello Zepp" cues is from the bent HR16.I've used ES2 for a few analog-ish sounds here and there on TV and movie scores, but nothing fancy - just a tiny bit of "bum-bum-bum" stuff.I like Omnisphere but have only used the "dream piano" sound on a couple of cues, mostly to serve as a contrast to my other piano sounds - the great Malmsjo Grand as well as some from Imperfect Samples and Tonehammer. Most of the piano I've ever used is Malmsjo - I love that sound. Most of the time I key-shift my pianos down six or more semitones to get it sounding more distant and plonky.I do a lot of "playing" guitars with ebow, cello bows, and dulcimer hammers, and for that I have an old Gibson double-neck sit-down non-pedal steel guitar, some Line6 modeling guitars (fantastic for this purpose) as well as a Moog guitar, Moog lapsteel, and Parker Adrian Belew sustainor guitar; the last three have Roland synth pickups with 13-pin output that plug into a Roland VG99 guitar modelling thingie. VG99 lets you pitch each string by +/- 12 semitones and has a bunch of hex effects (separate compressor or distortion for each string, etc.) and with a 13-pin guitar you can make some pretty wild non-guitar sounds. The Moog guitars and the Parker have various sustainor / ebow type things built in, so the combo is great for making drones and ambiences that have an acoustic-ish footprint. Put a modelling guitar on a banjo or sitar preset, shift it down 24 semis, and play with an ebow or dulcimer hammers and you're bound to find something evil sounding!I do have a lot of pedals, and the MXR Hendrix fuzz and Red Whammy get used a lot. I don't have any outboard reverbs or delays really. I have a Cranesong Spider, a pair of 1084s, a UA6176, some Distressors, and a UBK Fatso that I use when recording wardrums in the living room. Reissue Ludwig Vistalite Bonham kit and some rototoms and framedrums for that purpose. Rode mics, cheap and cheerful.I'm still using EXS24 for just about everything in the VI world. Once in a while I'll do a recording session to capture weird piano torture (rubbing strings with rubber or metal balls etc.) and then I'll chop up the recordings and make EXS instruments out of them. My scoring AutoLoad has 128 EXS instances with a few empty instruments in case I want an Omnisphere or something, but I have so far been able to resist the trend to deploy a bunch of VEP servers to serve up a full orchestra on outboard computers. I have set it up a few times, but the wonky workflow (partly Logic's fault - 16 midi channels per AU, 1-core issues, etc.) just kills it for me, so I've never actually used it on a project. Having the orchestra banks stay in place as you go from song to song in Logic is nice, but that's what I've already had for years with EXS - there is a feature in the EXS prefs that will prevent unloading and reloading of EXS instruments when switching songs if the same EXS Instruments are used in the same instrument slots in both songs, so my rig has worked this way for many years. I set up an AutoLoad for each project with the instruments I want to use, and then I can move between songs very quickly since EXS doesn't unload and reload - just like using VEP in "preserve" mode.I like to keep things simple!