► GIVE AND TAKE (3'49)

I had this verse in mind for a while, playing around with this 80's clean guitars mood, like the classic songs from The Fixx or Icehouse, but no real chorus yet. But, I had the opportunity in the 90's, to work with a progressive rock band in France called WARM, and write a couple of songs with them, some of these songs being totally or partially revisited in my album today. In this case, I remembered this original chorus for the song GIVE AND TAKE. You can listen to it today, by clicking right there !

The Juno-60 software emulation U-NO LX is playing all the sequences and riffs from the verses. There are a lot of treated percs, samples and FX from the Emulator X, as well as the rhythm stab and sweeping wide chords from the progressive bridge segment. As always, the Xhun Audio LittleOne plays the bass line.
When I tried the original chorus again, boldly extracting it from my old Atari 1040STF, I discovered the ugly truth : being one one the last song I wrote just before this band splitted, the sound design was quite erratic. The brass pad was very thin, some riffs from the Emax II very rugged, etc...

There's a lot of Waldorf PPG Wave in there, the VSTi software inspired by the famous german vintage PPG keyboards. I absolutely loved it, at the time. Always have, since the first time I heard these uncanny sounds in Propaganda, Tangerine Dream and Depeche Mode from the mid-eighties ! It's one of the gears you'll hear the most in my songs. It performed a fair amount of strange voice-like and metal stab here, but mostly the distinctive chorus brass chords, though it may sound very much like classic vintage analogic sound.
 

About VSTi versus real vintage gears. Not even to mention the price and maintenance of real Prophet-5, Jupiter-8 and other PPG Wave these days, the trend amongst synth lovers today is to despise software synths, as "inferior by nature" to any hardwarel keyboards. Sure, some artists like Gary Numan or Howard Jones really don't mind using VSTi softwares intensively in their albums and live performances, but what do they know ?

VSTi synths never detune, they've got no polyphony nor memory limitation. Sorry if I enjoy using them. The real technical flaw is something else. Since all your VSTi run into your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation, Cubase, Logic...) within the same computer, through the same audio card, it may cause a shrinking funnel effect through the audio main output. There are tools for this. As some of you regularly plug preamp and gears before your hardware instruments, you should also insert this kind of plug-in at the top of your virtual synth track. Like the T-RackS vintage amplifiers, the Brainworx BX Saturator, the SPL Twin Tube... in order to warm up a VSTi synth input, and slighly move it from the other.