Song of the Week: May 19 – “Nail It To the Wall”

In the interest of not allowing this Song of the Week thing fall completely off the map, I’ve decided once again – and against my better judgement – to pull another piece from out of the tune vault. While I realize nobody but me will know whether or not a piece was written yesterday or twelve years ago, I still feel obligated to maintain some transparency about when something was written. There. I feel better.

I wrote this about 10 years ago, not long after I first discovered VST technology. It had been out for awhile even by this point (2004), but I was pretty behind the times. A friend of mine gave me a copy of Computer Music Magazine or something and it had a software companion that included an light version of Orion by Synapse Audio. I’d used Reason a bit by then, but one limitation of Reason was that it didn’t have third-party VST plugin support – whereas Orion did.

I thus began my long and adventurous journey into the world of free VST software synths.

This tune was among the first batch of tunes that I’d written using this new software. I’m not completely sure of all the plugins I used on the track, and I’m sure I’ve lost many of the synths by now. I was also on Windows at the time, so I’m sure that many of them are no longer available.

A few plugins I do remember:

Pokegy – this was a Moog Prodigy emulator. Not sure how much it sounds like a real Prodigy, but I used it for the bass line in the piece. It’s a sounds that I try to imitate often even now.

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Crystal (Green Oak) – this one is still out there. Great little synth capable of a lot of sounds. Available for Windows and Mac OS, and apparently for iPad and iPhone as well. Definitely worth checking out!

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Blockfish (Digital Fish Phones) – a great little compressor plugin. DFP has a variety of other free plugins worth checking out here.

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Triangle I and II (rgc:audio) – I believe rgc was bought by Cakewalk, but these used to be freeware synths. Some killer bass and lead sounds could be coaxed out of these bad boys.