Published on March 25th, 2009.
Author: Darren McEntee
Category: Interviews.

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Eric Persing is the founder of Spectrasonics, a company specializing in developing World Class sampled sound libraries on CD-ROM since 1994. He has produced over 25 of the industry’s top selling titles.

Eric’s ground breaking Distorted Reality series of sample libraries are the best selling and most widely used collections in the world. Spectrasonics samples are used on thousands of major film, television, record and multimedia productions.

Atmosphere – Dream Synth Module is a programmable, sample-based Virtual Synth Module software plug-in, which combines a massive 3.7 gigabyte core library with a powerful, yet easy to use interface and synth engine for manipulating the sounds, and creating your own original patches.

We got the chance to chat to Eric Persing, and discuss the unbelivable: Atmosphere – Dream Synth Module.

Darren: Hi Eric, your very welcome to Traxmusic. Thank you very much for accepting our invitation to get inside your head, so we all can get to know you a bit better!

Darren: Can you give our viewers and myself a small introduction to you and you personal background?

EP: Sure…I’ll try to keep it short…but….

I was born in Germany, and lived all throughout Europe until I was three, as my Dad was teaching music in Europe in the 60’s. We then settled in the San Francisco Bay Area where I grew up and studied piano, trumpet, pipe organ and sang in my Dad’s choirs in church.

Played my first Minimoog when I was in 6th grade, and it was pretty much over for me at that point! Ever since then, I’ve been playing, composing, dreaming, eating, drinking and learning as much as I can about electronic music! I’m really a junkie for this stuff…

In the early 80’s I moved to Southern California and on the trip my Volkswagon bug literally exploded with every one of my possessions in the car…I lost everything in the car fire! Luckily, I escaped injury and our insurance covered some of my loss. However, instead of replacing my clothes or car, I took the insurance money and bought a Yamaha CS-60 and Sequential Pro-One and started creating music using two cassette decks and an ancient Reel to Reel machine with Sound on Sound dubbing. Since I had no car, I had a lot of time to make music! I played in bands, studied recording engineering, production and arranging in college, worked in retail, taught privately and then got picked up by Roland to demonstrate a new thing called a “MIDI sequencer” at the NAMM show in Chicago!

After the show, I was hired by Roland as a product specialist/demonstrator in the US. Pretty soon, I was getting very involved in Japan with the engineers, product development and doing the factory patches for a lot of Roland instruments. I got to work on a lot of instruments that are well known, including the D-50. I still do consulting with Roland, and oversee the final sounds of their pro level instruments like the V-Synth and do sampling work with them. My relationship with Roland has always been great and mutually beneficial…there’s a great team of people there, and I’m really honored to be part of their legacy.

Because I had the prototype D-50 in Los Angeles for almost a year before anyone else, I got a lot of session work out of it! This opened doors for me working as a session keyboardist, arranger, composer and sound designer for films, and record projects. This led to working with a lot of great artists and well known musicians, and built my skills as a producer too. So then my relationship to Roland became as a consultant, and we started a local R&D facility for Roland in LA.

In 1994, my wife Lorey and I decided to try selling a sample library on our own (Bass Legends) and suddenly we had a business of our own called Spectrasonics, and I found myself overseeing our many ambitious sampling projects. Since then it’s been quite a wild ride and a wonderful journey into now developing sample-based virtual instruments exclusively.

Whew!

Darren: How did you get into the Pro Audio development scene? Did you have an interest in it from an early age?

EP: Yes…but for me it was always an extension of being a musician first. Sound is interesting, but it is most interesting to me in the context of music and synthesis. When I started, there were no such things as preset synths, so learning the synthesizer as an instrument included both playing and what we now call “sound design”….back then it was just called knowing how to use your synth! It wasn’t until years later that I realized that I had a talent for creating sounds.

Darren: Were there any major obstacles in developing your products, to achieving a specific/desired performance?

Sure. There were many obstacles along the way, especially when we decided to make the big change from sample libraries to virtual instruments. First of all, we are not coming from a software coding background, but from a sound and music background. So the first major hurdle to realize this dream of our own instruments was to find a software partner who understood what we wanted. We spoke to nearly every software company doing VSTis about what we wanted to do, but none of them really understood what we were trying to achieve. Then our French distributors showed us an engine they were working on with some guys from Audioease in the Netherlands, and it was exactly the right concept we were looking for. After many months of hard work, working closely with them, this became the UVI engine, which is the core technology that we customize to create our instruments. It’s also the same technology used in the new MOTU Mach Five 5.1 sampler announced at NAMM 2003. This relationship with Univers Sons in Paris is a very important alliance for Spectrasonics.

Also, then we had to develop the interface, which is much harder than you would imagine. I’ve been scribbling synth designs on napkins and notebooks since I was a small kid, but to actually commit to a real design for your own instruments is quite a process. We wanted to include only the most important parameters in an easy to understand “less is more” kind of design, and also have a distinct, easy to identify unique “look” to the instruments. The visual element is really an important aspect of virtual instruments…so that was a fun kind of challenge.

With software of course, the devil is in the details. Making an instrument work perfectly in every major host and computer platform is a huge amount of work and testing. We’ve learned a great deal in this process….it’s been a real stretching experience to become a software company, but I love the challenge of doing something brand new that I don’t have all the answers for….makes life interesting!

Darren: WOW! … That MASSIVE 3.7 GB core library of over 1,000 sounds in Atmosphere. Was it a tiring and “dragged-out” part of the project?

EP: Yes, but it was also very exciting to put to the test everything that I have learned from Roland, my sound design work and all our business and development skills we’ve learned from the sample library world…All our instruments have huge core libraries, and it took more than 2 full years to develop all of this brand-new material. Our Total Bass Module -Trilogy, which we just released, was the hardest actually, because of the level of detail in the sounds. We were kind of pushing the envelope on multisamples, with a really detailed patch like the Acoustic Bass having more than 1,000 samples in ONE patch! It takes months to tweak these kind of patches to play and sound naturally. Our goal was to really raise the standard on these instruments as much as we could, and so now that all three are out, it’s really satisfying to hear how excited people are and the many interesting ways in which people are creatively using the instruments. We couldn’t be more pleased with the response we’ve had.

Darren: I get the impression that it is clear that Atmosphere would be mainly used in the ambient and soundtrack/movie field (hence its name). Was that it’s main objective? Or were you just looking for that killer synth module?

EP: The original idea for Atmosphere was as “pad module” since there wasn’t really anything like this, and everyone needs pad sounds. But as we got more and more into it, it became clear that what we were developing was far more capable than simply ambient pad sounds. Through the feedback we got from our beta team, we discovered that it was morphing into quite a versatile synth…so we made a few more enhancements, expanded the core library more and changed the sub name to “dream SYNTH module”. It’s only the beginning too, we have a lot of cool plans for it in the future too.

Darren: I know that “Layering” is an extremely fast way to get great custom results when programing a synth. But can you enlighten us more with this “dual-layer” concept you’ve used in Atmosphere?

EP: When I taught synthesis, one of the most important lessons I would teach my students is the idea of “component synthesis”. This is not a particular technology, but it applies to any synthesizer. The basic idea being that if you isolate two elements or more of a sound and give them unique parameters, you can create many interesting composite sounds by using more than one component. Two elements are ten times (exponentially) more powerul than one sound element.

This is a fundamental technique that all experienced sound designers use, whether their tools are modular analog synths, FM synths, additive machines or several MIDI modules. Layering with MIDI is a very easy way to do component synthesis, and I relied on this technique heavily in my work as a session musician and sound designer for film scores. This technique, which was fundamental to the success of the D-50 sounds, the JD-800 and many others had been getting a little lost in the VSTi world, since it wasn’t easy to layer virtual instruments in many sequencer hosts or within the instruments that were available. Layering gives many possibilities very quickly, and is a powerful creative tool that almost anyone can understand.

Layering is certainly nothing new, and it’s not Rocket Science by any means. It’s very basic, but very powerful at the same time. I thought that this would be an excellent concept to base Atmosphere around. The real beauty of Atmosphere is how easy it is to layer and exchange layers between sounds, which sets off many creative ideas…since all the layers are in tune with each other. It’s a kind of “Macro” control which is very useful from a musicians point of view. To most software developers, they don’t understand what the big deal about our layering system is…the main thing is that it is so easy to use in Atmosphere…and so people aren’t afraid to take advantage of it and begin to design and customize their sounds to their own musical needs. I think bringing these fundamental principles of sound design to the forefront of the interface is really important to involve more people in the creative process. The response to this direction has been incredible too!

Darren: Do you have any plans for releasing a Linux or BeOs version of Atmosphere? Or is there a demand at all?

Well…that’s the first request I’ve had for that, so maybe that answers your question?

Darren: What is you view/opinion on Software Vs. Hardware?

EP: There’s certainly nothing like great hardware instruments. A software instrument will never have the feel, smell and wow factor of something as gorgeous as a Cherrywood Moog Voyager or a Virus Indigo, but where software instruments shine is in how they are so fast to work with, and that streamlines the creative process in an extremely important way. It allows musicians to focus on the music itself, instead of wires and cables. I think software has already far surpassed what’s possible in terms of sonic possibilities of hardware. I hope our instruments show that software can sound very, very good…and be as sonically excellent as the best hardware instruments or better. As software instruments mature, hardware will become more and more about only the reliability and real-time live experience…which is still tricky to pull-off with computers. However, the next generation of hardware computer-based instruments like Plugzilla and the EKO will be extremely interesting to watch. It’s a very exciting time to be in the virtual instrument field for sure!

That said, I will never give up my Minimoog, or Yamaha CS-80! New instruments like the Roland V-Synth and the Hartmann are also pretty amazing too. One thing’s for sure: musicians have never had so many good options to choose from!

Darren: Why “Spectrasonics” , where did the name come about?

EP: Spectra means all the colors, and what we do applies to all the colors of sound. My own interests in music and sound are very diverse and eclectic. Our logo is a prism, which filters white light into the various individual bands of color.

Here’s where it gets pretty interesting: In your Science class, you probably remember that colors are actually different frequencies, just very, very high ones! So if it were somehow possible to pitch up music above the sonic frequencies into the light frequencies, sound and music would theoretically become colors!

So in a way, I think all the possible sounds are already existing “out there” in this infinite white light, and our job as creative people and sound designers is to find them by acting as a kind of sonic prism to filter them into the domain where we can see/hear them as individual colors! In that respect, I am not creating something as much as discovering something that God already put there, but was previously hidden!

Darren: What is your future plans now? (personal and development). Have you anything interesting sneaking around the Spectrasonics corner, that you’d like to share with us?

EP: Well, it’s really very nice now to have all three instruments out and shipping. We are working hard on OSX and audio unit versions and some more new platforms for 2003. Beyond that, we have a lot of fantastic things in the works that will remain a secret until they are ready to be unleashed upon the world! Lots of great stuff in the pipeline!

For myself, I’m looking forward to Musikmesse this year and getting in a little more time at the piano!

Darren: Whats your faverite audio software? (From Spectrasonics, and 3rd party).

EP: That’s tough to say one particular thing, because I use so many fantastic software tools. I think the software that consistently amazes me the most is Metasynth. It’s a program that I’ve spend a great deal of time with, but I don’t know if will ever fully understand its potential. Using the language of light and color for sound creation was just one of the most revolutionary concepts I’ve ever seen….truly brilliant. Many people tried it and gave up, because the language was so foreign….but I’ve gotten some amazing things out of it, and I think it’s one of those tools that I will be discovering new techniques for 30 years from now. It’s that deep.

In terms of more “regular” software, I’d have to say that Reason is one of the most brilliantly conceived and executed programs ever. It was and is a milestone that I also learn new techniques with all the time.

Darren: What would you most like Spectrasonics customers to know?

EP: Good question!
I guess it would be that they would know that we really care about what we do, and that excellence is something we are constantly striving for. Also, that we are extremely grateful for their support, since it allows us the opportunity to be doing what we love as our career too!

Darren: Any final words?

EP: Never stop creating and sharing your gift. It makes this crazy world a better place and its my belief that this simple act also pleases it’s creator.

Thank you Eric for your time!

My pleasure…

All the best,
Peace! -EP.

Interview brought to you by Darren McEntee.

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