BILL HOLLAND: Hi everybody. I'm Bill Holland for Gearwire.Com. Welcome back, and I'm here in the studio in Chicago with Emulsion. How's it going, man?

EMULSION: Good. Good.

BILL HOLLAND: We're going to talk about the VST synth plugin, Vanguard. Now you were saying this is mostly used in cheese trance these days for the most part.

EMULSION: That's right. I think it's got a bunch of detuning on it with kind of the idea that you can do giant trance leads, but like any softsynth you can repurpose it for whatever genre you want. I certainly use it in many different ways.

BILL HOLLAND: Great. Well, let's take a look at that plugin right now.

EMULSION: Terrific. So I've got a melody patch up here that I've put together in Vanguard and it uses some of what this synth has to offer. You know, I'd like to stick to simpler sounds and get more complicated than the treatments but you can definitely take this pretty far. This fat knob, which is pretty dangerous when used in excess, can give you that sort of massive echoey detuned trance sound especially when you bring up the number of voices, and pretty soon you can be talking about something pretty out of control. But it still has a pretty distinctive character and I wouldn't say that it competes with the kind of tone you might get out of a Virus or something. It's a little snappier, and definitely you combine that with the overall signal path of Vanguard which has you having three LFOs, each corresponding to one of the three oscillators, and this is a really cool idea because when the speed is zero then when you are changing detune, pulse width, the cutoff all is routed to the filter. When you're changing the placement of the sound -- you know, the tune isn't going to change if you have your speed down to zero, and you can get it up to audio level, you can hear that kind of graininess that comes from the turning it up to 11 there with the speed. And another aspect of Vanguard that can be good, again I would probably say in moderation, is these built-in effects. You throw on this trance gate...

[EMULSION DEMONSTRATING TRANCE GATE EFFECT IN VANGUARD]

...and it's imposing this gated sequence that you can alter as you like. One of the things that I like about it is it doesn't necessarily need to sync in stereo so you can get some of ping-pongy stuff with it going back and forth between the speakers, and that can be nice. I would say other than that, some of the nice features are the glide is kind of cool because you can set a length on that. This might not be a patch to show that off though. I think that the filter types are kind of neat because you can get into some really kind of esoteric stuff. You know, I don't even know what Bands + SHP is but definitely it's kind of a band pass tone there, and, you know, you start throwing in there more digital oscillators, the saw wave variations, and you can get into some pretty interesting places. You know, you can just hear a little bit of a different tone in these different oscillators. Yeah. It's great stuff.

BILL HOLLAND: Well thanks Nate. I appreciate that. It looks like Vanguard's pretty much useful for anything I could possibly be doing and it doesn't have to be limited to trance music.

EMULSION: Yeah. Absolutely.

BILL HOLLAND: Fantastic. Thank you for joining me today at Gearwire.Com, and we will be back with more from Emulsion in Chicago.