davidn

I've recently been trying to get a new sound for my music, as I've been using the same SNES-like samples for a number of years now and I feel it's time to move on. The trouble with trying to find new instruments is that you need to find ones that sound not only good on their own, but also along with your other samples. And with the vagueness of requirement for a "voice" instrument, that's more difficult than you might think. VSTs are electronic instruments that contain special effects far beyond those of the normal samples-with-volume-information that I usually use, and they're all the rage now (even though they're primarily used in electronic genres like dance), so I downloaded a few and tried them out.

Impossible/10

I should point out that this is just one window among the pack I downloaded, which offer layouts of varying sizes and complexity, each containing at least six waveform windows and more dials, sliders and switches than the average NASA spacecraft. We learned in HCI that replicating real systems exactly on a computer doesn't work because we use computer interfaces in a conceptually different way, and this is a practical demonstration of it.

I feel I now have to take back everything that I might have once said about dance music. It may consist solely of arpeggios, synthesized chords and 80 minutes of the same drum loop, but that's because you need a PhD in particle physics just to understand your instruments.

Maybe I'll just actually learn the guitar instead.