Phaedra was primarily born out of 2 of my frustrations....

1. The lack of raw sonic power in virtual emulations of analogue synths

2. Sloppy midi timing of external analogue synths under modern computer operating systems (all is forgiven Atari ST1040).

I set about making a personal library for the dance releases I was working on at the time. A few of my producer friends managed to try out some of my presets and ended up using them a lot on their releases.

After finding myself more and more unable to satisfy my producing needs with soft synths I found myself more and more relying on the small number of sampled presets I had made from my old Minimoog D for bass sounds. 1 oscillator from a Moog seemed to sit so nicely in a mix without me having to throw loads of EQ or compression at it.

It seemed that to get the same amount of sonic energy for a bassline using 1 oscillator on certain VSTi analogue emulations required a lot more volume and headroom that I wasn't about to give up, not to mention the time taken in compressing and eq'ing just to get the virtual synths to sit right in the mix. The analogue samples just seemed to sit in the mix so much easier.

I was also getting very frustrated with so called "sample accurate" midi interfaces that were anything but sample accurate. No matter how I tried to set up the interface it was never tight on timing. In the days the Atari it was tighter but also there was no sample accurate audio then so much as there is now. And midi just comes across even looser when put up against a modern sequencers sample accurate audio and VSTi's.

So..... I spent a few weeks making a load of my favourite patches in Kontakt 1. This worked really well, and I was really considering selling my analogues again (been there before though lol). After constant pestering from friends to make more presets I decided to pitch my idea for a library based on analogue synths to Zero- G. Nothing new I hear you say.... but I wanted to go about this with the same attention to detail as say an orchestral sample library developer would:

1. Hand looped and hand edited, with loops being very long so as to extract that lovely analogue randomness magic.

2. Nearly every single preset has every note sampled to eliminate aliasing within the instruments range.

3. Very high-quality A to D converters used for library.

4. Unique velocity/modulation source to sample start in order to use the actual analogue synths filter bringing great flexibility and playability.

5. I feel that I came at this library from a composer/producer's point of view so presets are designed to be used and not to just sound good on their own.

6. Convolutions were made of the actual units I use in my productions, other devices were hired in to have convolutions made from them, but FX have NOT been plastered all over this library, they have only been used when they are a part of the sound rather than making a normal preset sound better by just sapping reverb on it!

7. With Kontakt's engine being pushed totally to the limits I was able to get a library that was not just for playing back recordings but is a full synthesizer in its own right. This gives the product huge longevity as I feel its strengths are in using the presets as building blocks or starting points for your own presets.

8. I wanted the library to be able to be controlled by external controllers. All parameters use smoothing so as to eliminate stepping.

9. All the presets move i.e. can have the sound altered by either velocity, mod wheel or aftertouch.

10. All the samples were taken raw from the analogue synths with no enhancing or eq'ing. I prefer to let the producers who will use this make their own decisions on eq.

11. 20,271 individual samples were recorded over a 12-month period (yes I now have RSI lol), over 4.1gb of raw samples.

12. No duplicates in any of the raw recording samples, this library is not padded out to make it look bigger.

13. I stopped at 770 presets in the following presets folders: Synth 1, Synth 2, Bass, Leads, Pads, Seq, Fx, DnB (bonus), Synth Builder (for starting off with raw settings for your own creations) and a Multi folder.

14. Multi is where the magic happens by stacking presets on top of each other.

15. This library is very efficient due to the lack of re-sampling needed by Kontakt because of a total overkill in multisampling :)