the last year or so, i've been trying to make my music more effective. i have a tendency to take a cerebral approach to things, of which the style of this blog is a case in point. and it's not much different with my music. i've reached a point where i think that a lot of my music is just too clever to be really effective on the dance floor. so my challenge is to make something more visceral. and there are many ways to do that.

for me and many others, the most remarkable softsynth of 2008 was sonic charge's synplant. the swedish company scored a big hit with the microtonic drumsynthesizer, and i think it's quite courageous they followed it up with something so outlandish as synplant. i decided to do a couple of presets for it, and offer the results here. just download the zip and unzip it to your synplant folder.

the audio quality of ableton live is the subject of many lively debates on the internet. many people claim that live doesn't sound as good as, say, apple logic, and that live's summing bus is to blame. if the claims were true, i wouldn't hesitate a single moment to switch from live to logic for mixing. so i compared ableton live's and apple logic's summing bus with a null test, and talked about the results in a previous post. i couldn't find a significant difference, so whatever difference people are hearing, it's probably not due to the summing bus. but what could it be then? in my post, i already mentioned the placebo effect and peer pressure. but i think there is another, more substantive reason why live and logic sound different.