After bonding over mutual tendencies to take gear description to a place I like to call "parts unknown," Galbanum founder Andrew Souter took the time to answer some questions about himself, his company and Galbanum's new Synth Expansion line.

Andrew's hard work has paid off as he has contributed to and worked with most of the digital music giants, and his commitment to dichotomic balance, both inside and outside the world of audio make Mr. Souter one of the most versatilely interesting people you'd ever expect to see for someone who spends a lot of near-complete days tied to his work the technical world.

First off, would you tell us a little about your own history with gear and how Galbanum came to be?

I was not a child protege who performed Bach blindfolded with one hand at age four. In my younger childhood years, I was an athlete in school. Fairly late into high school in the US around the age of 15 or 16 and in the middle of my classic rock and heavy metal phase, a friend of mine, who is today a lead global fashion designer, came across a radio program here in the US called Hearts of Space which he shared with me. It is a nationally syndicated public radio program that specializes in ambient music of various forms. This music was a new world for us and literally transformed two average suburban kids from central Pennsylvania into creative idealists who dared to dream the impossible and exercise the fortitude to follow that path.

Hearts of Space was the gateway into electronic music, and served as sort of a spiritual impetus, as the selections chosen by founder Stephan Hill, while diverse, all shared a certain introspective life essence that has never escaped me. These and many more were my initial influences and first love. It was also a gateway into dance music, via transitional groups like, The Orb, Aphex Twin, Orbital, Enigma, and early Prodigy.

I come from a loving and supportive family that always encouraged me to push myself, but I was not a silver-spoon kid, and in my early development I could not afford to buy a synthesizer. Not one to be deterred by small obstacles, together with my friend I resolved to teach myself piano on the beat-up, out-of-tune upright pianos we had at our disposal. Having no formal training, it was not an easy task, but I feel this path has blessed me with an intuitive sense of the emotional language of music. In the beginning that is all there was: an emotional construct that worked itself out on a dusty keyboard; hunting and pecking at first, then more gracefully, and finally after thousands of hours in a refined personal language that was built upon solid listening experience and sincere passion for learning and perfection of form and function.

The technical side of things came easier. I've always had an aptitude for math and science. My first synthesizer was a borrowed Korg M1 which belonged to my high-school girlfriend's family. By my senior year of high-school I had saved enough money to buy a Kurzweil K2000R and was given an 88-note weighted controller by my parents which I still use today. I spent much of my senior year of high-school reading technical MIDI books -- fun stuff like SysEx and BinHex -- usually during Calculus class which I regret now to some extent since this is necessary knowledge for many areas of DSP, and I find myself refreshing this knowledge regularly. I picked up a copy of MOTU's Performer on the Berklee Music campus on a visit there looking at college choices during my senior year of high-school. I rented an old Mac since I still could not afford one. By this time I had written several piano compositions and scored my high-school's fall play using Performer, the K2000R and the M1.

I went on to college at USC in Los Angeles. I was accepted for computer science on academic scholarship, but changed majors to obtain a business degree and go through the prestigious Entrepreneur Program where I wrote the initial business plan for Galbanum. I spent my free time scoring student films. While many of my peers where at keg parties, I practiced piano alone in an empty church on campus -- not because I was antisocial and afraid of people or because I had some external pressure making me do it, but because I was committed to my goals. I got a student job in the music school's library so that I could read the journals and expand my musical knowledge. I subscribed to technical journals like Computer Music Journal from MIT, AES publications, Just Intonation Network Papers, etc and read them over and over again until they started to make more and more sense. I got a student job in the campus computer store so I could learn as much as possible about computers. I surrounded myself with brilliant minds in film, graphics, technology and fashion who remain friends today. I took ethnomusicology classes, a few basic digital audio classes, and a few others as electives and in some ways was much more passionate about them than the music majors. The simple difference was I did not HAVE to be there; I WANTED to be there. I obsessively absorbed everything and anything like a sponge, and still try to do so to this day.

I started getting involved with many of the lead software companies at that time. MOTU was the first, I believe. I typically started my involvement by helping them with beta and grew the relationships from there. Today I have close relationships with 90% of the leaders of the software side of our industry. I help test and guide some of the most innovative products in our industry and I have direct communication channels and influence to see things that interest me get developed. My work with U&I Software and Eric Wenger was particularly rewarding and I am well known for my MetaSynth related activities. It is quite beneficial as a working artist / producer / sound-designer to have access to the latest and greatest before the general public; it is a strategic advantage in some ways, but comes with a whole pile of NDAs and pro-bono sweat equity to pay for it. I like being in the trenches in this way even now that I do my own development. It gives a bird's eye view of the industry and is invaluable experience and has helped tremendously both in the formation of Galbanum and in my artist work. I have always known that I wanted to form my own company to achieve my personal vision and develop things that may be too future-forward for the larger companies. This experience and network still remain active today and help advance my cause in many ways.

Also while at USC, I got more involved in dance music and the club scene (not because of the drugs like much of the industry -- I have always generally had an aversion to the drug scene and what it represented) because of the social phenomenon of the early US rave scene. It was like Woodstock for my generation: a technologically inspired spiritual awakening. Again I was fortunate to share in this experience with close friends and bounce ideas around among future-forward thinkers. We promoted several events in the Baltimore-Washington area. They were "chill-out" "Ambient Raves" which equally espoused being digital along with transcendental meditation and post-modern virtual agape! We financed these events with credit card offers given to college freshman such as myself. We were reckless and naive and out to change the world, and the results were not immediately what we had hoped for, but at least we had the balls to try it.

I explored the US super-clubs of the mid-to-late nineties a lot: 1015 Folsom SF, Twilo and The Tunnel NYC, Space and Mansion Miami, Giant, Spundae, Avalon LA, Buzz DC, Sona and Guvernment in CA, etc. I produced my first dance music album in 1997 when I was 21, titled "Time Can Also Be A Place," but I never released it as I was too much of a perfectionist at the time to let go, and the sound is dated now. I traveled to Amsterdam and started working with a DJ partner who was the resident of the Dutch super-club Kremlin. We released our first work on Paul Oakenfold's Perfecto Records and additional works on Cyber records. This work was my baptism into big-room peak-hour club sound -- the harder, faster phase. My experience and tendencies prior to that were more ambient given my background and the fact that I was also doing some scoring work with companies such as Centropolis Entertainment and its game division by this time.

I thoroughly explored the club world and got involved in the trenches to supplement my academic and technical knowledge of composition and sound-design. There are many people who are very good at underground club music, and there are many ivory-tower academics who do really brilliant intellectual work that only a handful of people in the world can understand, but there are few who can do both. I personally try to stay balanced between both worlds and fully respect both. I don't mind being called a "nerd" or being told "you need to take more drugs" by the underground -- both have happened often. Similarly, I don't mind being perceived as too pragmatic, results oriented, or fashion conscious by the academic community. There is power in both areas and I strive for a balance and wish to excel in both. I want always to pursue mastery of both "sonic science" and "aural allusion": the technology and the human element.

These life experiences along with my exploratory soul and passion for learning are responsible for guiding and forming my career path on a personal level. They represent a summary of my early influences and personal history up to the formation of Galbanum. To give the complete story, I would need to add a summary of the last five years or so as well and include the corporate interests and influences of Galbanum, but I will save that for another time. A few recent personal career highlights include working with Sasha on his upcoming album, scoring for Discovery Channel, History Channel, and TLC; licensing partnerships with NI, Cakewalk, FAW and others; and the near term release of a bunch of my artist material. I am also working on some exciting plugin development with a true hardcore coding genius who does Diff-EQ and Linear Algebra in his sleep and dreams in assembly language! Exciting things are coming.

The sounds on your new Piscis Rapture Expansion aim to elicit creativity. How do you go about designing and selecting sounds that best achieve this goal?

Well as I've said before, music is a balance between predictability and surprise: too much predictability and you have boredom; too much surprise and you have chaos. This balance is also dependent on the listeners experiences. In electronic music, dance music and related genres, surprise often comes in the form of interesting timbres, textures, and constructs that extend the reach of what is possible with traditional performance alone. So generally, when I design a waveform or program a synth patch or work on a music composition, I am looking for new ways to creative some element of surprise. The ripe area is always on the edge of predictability and surprise.

Of course no man is an island or lives in a vacuum, and I am fortunate enough to work with some of the leading electronic and dance artists and companies in the world, and I am very well aware of the market conditions. So if a certain sound is hot at the moment, I am not too proud to explore it. I don't try to simply copy, however. I again try to understand why it is hot and what aspects of it can be modified and evolved into something new. I try to participate and expand the creativity offered by my peers and of course I have no shortage of my own strange ideas as well.

What does the process of creating an expansion pack embody? How long of a process was the creation of Piscis from start to finish?

Well my process is a bit more involved than an average expansion pack, I would guess. For me, I first develop a library of new low level resources, which I brand as Galbanum's Architecture Line. Some of these resources I sell as commercial products to other sound-designers and more enterprising and adventurous artists and producers. These include things such as the Architecture Waveform collections for various formats. I think the largest number of commercially available waveforms is currently 2,500 in the CE edition. Privately, I have over 50,000. This is just one example; I also have samples, LFOs, custom tuning files, etcetera, etcetera. I am interested in trends in High Performance Computing, DSP and mathematics when I develop these things.

For Piscis and my Rapture expansions in general, I have generated about 25GB of custom content so far that I can use to develop presets with. This was not a fast process and involved many 18+ hour days challenging myself with technical things which are initially outside the realm of my formal training. I've always enjoyed research though, and am not daunted by complex math and have a great passion for learning. In summary, my Architecture efforts represent the technical and academic side of the process. When I design the patches, I pull from these resources, and when I am done I include whatever I have used as part of the final commercial product. Thus, there are many waveforms in Piscis, for example, that are not available anywhere else.

When designing the patches, I am then able to go into a more creative mode and build the higher-level structures. My brain is thinking more creatively, less technically here, and I concern myself more with musical ideas and creative metaphors. I have done many different things in the music industry in addition to sound-design including dance music with Sasha and Oakenfold, global scoring projects, and I am a self-taught psuedo-classical pianist. I also have a business degree from USC in LA, and friends high up the the fashion industry. What's the relevance of all of this? Basically I am fortunate enough to have worked with the best of the best in many different fields. I have diverse musical experiences and am passionate about them all, and I have a good understanding of market conditions. I pull from these experiences when doing higher level creative tasks such as patch creation, and music production.

My birthday is June 9, which means I am a Gemini, and thus bipolar! This may explain the balance of my technical and analytical aptitude with my creative, metaphorical and alliterative abilities! I was also born in Harrisburg PA, home of Three Mile Island, the US equivalent of Chernobyl. Maybe the radiation did something to my brain!? All in good fun!

The Piscis Rapture Expansion kicks off Galbanum's Synth Expansion Line. Can you clue us into what to expect from future installments? Will they aim for a similar sound conceptually or will upcoming sets have different goals in mind?

I like the idea of having themed releases. Piscis concentrates on pads and ambiances; it does not offer much of anything else, but it really excels at its stated purpose -- amazingly novel and musically useful pads and ambiances, not necessarily astral projection, just to clarify! There are lots of sounds available these days. I am not interested in making another general-MIDI, jack-of-all-trades, product. I want to offer something that is targeted at a specific use and really accomplishes this goal and goes above and beyond customer expectations. There is another Rapture expansion that is pretty much done already. It will be released shortly. It is also themed and concentrates on another different but specific theme.

Is there any reason in particular you chose Cakewalk Rapture as the first virtual synthesizer to expand?

Cakewalk actually proposed the idea to me at a Remix Hotel event in NYC where I was showing MetaSynth. This was shortly after the release of my Architecture Waveforms CE product, which is designed to work with Rapture and Dimension Pro.

I am very impressed with the power of Cakewalk's Expression Engine, it's anti-aliasing techniques and the power of using SFZ definitions. Furthermore, I really like the way waveform browsing is handled in Rapture. It is useful for me as a designer to be able to see both the visual representation of the waveform and its name. This helps guide me to wisely choose patch mutations based on family traits of timbres and such that share certain common characteristics. Rapture LFOs can also be extremely long, which allows some non-traditional use and abuse of them.

What synths can we expect to see beefed up by Galbanum Synth Expansion Line software in the future?

I am currently working with Native Instruments to create some amazing Kore Expansion packs. I worked with them in the past on Massive and Absynth 4, and it is always a pleasure. They are very talented and obviously have a great following. I reconnected with them at NAMM and Musikmesse this winter, and we are working hard to make some really cool things.

I will also continue to work with Cakewalk on Rapture and possibly its other instruments. Rene, the lead mad scientist there, is extremely gifted, and our ideas compliment each other very well.

Apple and I have talked a few times, and I would love to do something more involved with them.

I will continue to support and be involved with U&I Software's MetaSynth, which is one of my first loves, something that I use every day, something that often assists my other developments and something that I have been closely involved with for close to ten years. Eric Wenger has one of the most unique visions in all of digital art and software.

I recently licensed some waveforms to the new Irish startup, Future Audio Workshop for their Circle product. They are cool guys, and we had a nice dinner in Frankfurt at Musikmesse. I have done the same with a few others, but these are not public yet, so I can not discuss them. I am always open to these kind of relationships, as I enjoy working with new talented people.

You may eventually see some direct offerings as well. Time will tell. . .

Can you soothsay anything about the future direction of Galbanum as a whole?

I could tell you, but I've have to. . . It's classified.