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  • the next move?

    Having finished Rho Ophiuchi and after I finished two more tracks for a current customer I’ll be taking some time away from the music, apparently. A hard problem needs solving soon, and all my attention will be likely dedicated to it. Still I’d be happy to hear suggestions on what synth should I do banks

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  • rho ophiuchi

    RHO OPHIUCHI is a full preset bank for Adam Szabo’s VIPER – 128 patches, mostly dialed up from scratch or from each other. There is a few exceptions – more of them later. VIPER is a synth that makes a valiant attempt on emulating Access Virus A/B/C/TI hardware synths, and is partially compatible with them.

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  • adam szabo’s Viper

    adam szabo’s Viper

    Bought this beauty just before New Year, and now rabidly stack new patches for it. While it can read (with limitations) patches and soundbanks from Access Virus TI, it goes way further: aside from VA oscillators there are Multisaw, Wavetable, Grain and Formant oscillators, and you are not limited to Virus’ hardwired selection of waveforms,

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  • Just relaunched and heavily updated the website, changing theme/design, removing the redundant section (‘Soundware’ is linked directly to Gumroad now), and making it more suitable for mobile users. So – welcome again!

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  • MATRICES is a preset pack for Native Instruments FM8 software synthesizer, one of the absolute pinnacles of 6-operator FM-synthesis. The synth is old: next year it hits 20, but the only thing obsolete about it is its unscalable interface. Otherwise it’s still a hell of a synth with a very broad sonic palette, and immense

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  • Site update

    Actualized quite a few pages here, including ‘bands’, ‘solo works’, and ‘soundware’ sections. Added all recent releases – it appears I had as many as four full-lengths this year, and the new items at blacksidedsun.gumroad.com. This was a very productive year, and more is in the works.

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  • Absynth 5 Troubleshooting

    Finally managed to revive Absynth 5 in my system. Native Instruments dropped it from their active roster, and even those who have purchased it earlier may have hard times installing it on Windows 10. In my case it was kinda outrage: Native Access (a controlling/licensing/updating software) would download an .ISO file, then report installing it…

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  • ‘Chromatography’ is the presets pack for Cherry Audio Rhodes Chroma software synthesizer. The demo below features several instances of Chroma. Other than a master bus limiter (ReaLimit from Cockos Reaper), no external effects are used. Rhodes Chroma was a seminal instrument from early 1980s developed by ARP shortly before their demise. The design was purchased

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  • ‘The Day of Life Forgotten,’ the experimental electronics net-label, have released black-sided sun’s latest album ‘Summa Timorum’ (The Sum of Fears). As per label’s message: ‘Dark ambient, post-industrial, experimental electronics. New album by black-sided sun delivers exceptionally dark and precisely detailed sound scape. An epic, and hopeless, sound canvas, both startling and attracting at the

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  • Developers of Surge XT, a fantastic software synthesizer that I use religiously these days, have included a bunch of my patches into nightly builds, which means they will be featured in the next version of the synthesizer. Many of those patches have been used while making the next album by black-sided sun due to arrive

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  • Autumn hits hard: temperatures are down, if it rains, it pours, and the intense live season is basically through, although Sombra Del Mar isn’t going to slow down: we’ve booked for a month ahead. I believe over these recent months I’ve played more live shows than ever before – I mean, probably more than throughout

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  • An anti-AI rant #…

    An anti-AI rant #…

    I’ve blogged recently about the AI muzak from YouTube that I have to hear every time as our band’s scrambling for live performing. It looks like there’s kind of a development. Expectedly unexpected – or vice versa: the AI ‘reimaginings’ of classic rock music – or any other. I’ve bumped into a flick of Scorpions’

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  • Metallic groans, clangs, tinklings, jinglings, blips, radio static with something alien coming through, – PHI MU LABS: COLD FOUNDRY is the soundbank for KORG WAVESTATE & WAVESTATE NATIVE assembled specifically for creating the unsettling, dystopian, grim cinematic atmospheres. It largely consists of field recordings, including those created back in early 2000s. Some of them (not

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  • Dronology – a new library after months in the making

    PHI MU LABS: DRONOLOGY is a library of presets for KORG WAVESTATE hardware synthesizer and KORG WAVESTATE NATIVE plugin. This library’s primary emphasis are multisamples and programs, as per WAVESTATE’s nomenclature. 16 Performances are available too, but largely for demo purposes. Each multisample is basically a soundscape on its own, so the majority of programs

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  • I’ve been pretty silent recently simply out of fatigue. A lot of things is happening, some good, some bad, some neutral. We had a hellish gig last Wednesday, when my keyboard’s LCD display nearly died (I’ve kind of fixed this later), a loudspeaker standing on a subwoofer literally fell off it almost right on my

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  • 100WT – 100+ wavetables pack in .WAV format

    100WT – 100+ wavetables in .WAV format created using Vital, by black-sided sun project. Most of them are resampled from the field recordings with bells and whistles added. Check it out here: https://blacksidedsun.gumroad.com/l/recjc Vital appears to export at 88.2kHz, so there is also a 44.1 version converted using Reaper. Compatibility checked with: SynthMaster 2.9, SynthMaster One,

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  • A quartet of expats from Russia and Belarus. Seen a thing or two in our lives, some even more than they ever wanted to. Nowadays we’re playing music that is in high demand, and surprisingly those are rock’n’rolls above all things. Frankly I’m no big fan of the old rock’n’roll when it comes to listening,

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  • Recent albums

    Static Apparitions has hit 202 collections on Bandcamp now. The highest score, however, still holds 2023: The Longest Road, part I – 312 collections: Its followup landed in 274 Bandcamp accounts: The long-in-the-work Aurtengwl is in 280 collections so far: Other than that there was Detritus, the album released by Russian net-label ‘The Day of

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  • First place in Drone category on Bandcamp, and fifth place in Ambient category right now. Also dropped the special version, as promised:

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  • Static Apparitions – a new release of my project ‘black-sided sun’. Genre – dark ambient. Released by Neotantra label (a lot of gratitude goes to Lee Norris). Released as free download. Tomorrow I’ll launch a special version of this album on my own page.

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  • Dropped the first track from the next album last night. The track is called ‘Sleep’, and the album – ‘Summa Timorum’ (Lat. ‘The Sum of Fears’). Genre: Noise, Dark Ambient, Industrial.Release: TBA The track has been created using Surge XT and Vital, custom-made patches only.

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  • A Mad Train

    A Mad Train

    The onslaught of AI upon the music field is staggering and terrifying. Over the last few days I’ve stumbled upon an incredible amount of the low-effort content on Youtube, covering some unexpected areas: there are AI-generated extreme metal ‘records’, AI-generated krautrock, and, of course, tons of AI-spawned ambient. These genres tend to be less formulaic,

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  • Finally

    I have a mini-amp for Behringers near-field monitors, but a month ago or so its (lousy) power adaptor went South. A new one just arrived so I have the stuff back in business.

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  • A short but fierce hurricane cut our yesternight performance short as we started our third set. Played just one song – during which summer restaurants chairs started flying around. That’s how it was: ‘Titanic vibes’, some people commented afterwards. Well, indeed. Especially when you’re on the stage that has been already crushed down by snow

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  • CYANEA – a library for VITAL

    Cyanea is the bank for Vital I’ve been working on over the last few weeks. Vital is a mighty thing, although I’d love it to have some features of Surge XT. Just a wishful thinking, anyway. The full version of Cyanea pack consists of 56 presets, with half of them being pads. There are also

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  • One more preset library

    Just dropped another preset library – this time for DCO-106, Cherry Audio’s take on Roland Juno-106. Get it here: https://blacksidedsun.gumroad.com/l/pj106 These timbres are re-implementation of my earlier presets for TAL U-NO-LX synth – PJ-6. The initial idea was to set the sliders in the same positions and see what holds. But that just did not

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  • Patch making: U-NO-LX vs DCO-106

    My attempts to translate the patches from TAL U-NO-LX to Cherry Audio’s DCO-106 proved to be way more problematic than I expected. These emulators may cover similar instruments (Roland Juno-60 and Juno-106, accordingly) but some of their aspects, such as LFO, inverted Envelope for the LP filter, Arpeggio settings, Unisono mode – they all are

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  • Equinox

    Equinox

    Back in 2020, during the COVID pandemic, I’ve completed one of the longest of my projects – an LP ‘Equinox: The Rite of Spring’. It tells about a catabasis-type journey through the night of Spring Equinox, i.e. March 20. A journey that followed a catastrophe. It started out in 2011 with a very grim two-part

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  • A new soundpack

    A new soundpack

    Just released PJ-6, a new soundpack for TAL U-NO-LX synth, which is an emulation of the classic Roland Juno-60 hardware synthesizer – beefed up to become a sonic powerhouse, despite its somewhat limited architecture. There is a free introductory version, and the full pack is available at Gumroad. PJ-6: a soundpack for TAL U-NO-LX synthesizer

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  • Juno 6/60/106 emulators

    I see now, how practical was the claim by Enya‘s producer Nicky Ryan that they will never get rid of Roland Juno 60. Dug deep into TAL’s emulator (U-No-LX) and can’t stop tinkering with it. Despite its deceptively simple architecture, the synth is a sonic powerhouse with totally enormous capabilities. Surely it has some upgrades,

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