BT

The V-Synth Takes Flight

BT

He’s known around the world the “Father of Trance,” but Brian Transeau (BT) is no one-trick pony. Whether he’s mixing electronics with orchestral scores (for films such as The Fast and the Furious and Stealth), collaborating with mega-stars like Sting, or creating epic remixes for Sarah McLachlan, Tori Amos, Madonna, or Seal, BT consistently balances creative and memorable songwriting, sonic innovation, and the latest technology for a cutting-edge, yet organic sound.

One of the newest instruments added to BT’s studio and live setup is the Roland V-Synth, which BT describes as one of “the most exciting and overlooked technologies in the last couple of years. It’s exciting because it does things that no other synth does, and it’s overlooked because people tend to judge synthesizers by their preset sounds, like its piano, etc., and they underestimate the V-Synth’s potential. The V-Synth’s core technology and application is amazing for both stage and studio.”

When BT took delivery of his V-Synth, the first question he asked was, “How do I erase everything?” Building custom sounds from square one is the way he prefers to work with his synthesizers. “When we first got the machine, we threw in AIF and WAV files, and started manipulating them with the synthesis engine. Loading waveforms into the V-Synth from computer is really seamless and easy to do. Interesting things happen when you start combining the V-Synth’s technologies — PCM, analog modeling, and external input — in several ways: mixing them, frequency-modulating them, envelope ring-modulating them, etc. There's a plethora of sound design possibilities with the V-Synth.

“External input is a killer thing when using the V-Synth with streaming audio,” he continues. “It’s great for sound designing as well, because you don't have to spend hundreds of hours writing code to get esoteric effects. It's just a killer tool to do stuff like this. And having the D Beam and TimeTrip pad opens up new areas of expression. The HOLD button allows the parameter value to stay where you last touched, so you can tap the pad like a drum pad and play rhythmic things for interesting effects. You can grab a loop and freeze it real time, and then pass it through the Resonator. There are good timestretching in plug-ins on the market these days, but with the V-Synth you can do real-time live manipulation, and that's what an instrument should be. An instrument shouldn’t impose its will on us — we should impose our will on it!

“The V-Synth is a killer synthesizer,” BT concludes. “Working on the film [Stealth], I dug under the hood like crazy. It's magic.”