I:Scintilla are a Champaign (and soon to be Chicago)-based act that started the musical trek in 2003. Most of that year was spent writing and recording without a vocalist.

"Luckily, Brittany (Bindrim) popped into the picture and we were playing shows by early 2004," says Jim Cookas, the band's cofounder along with Chad Mines. "We self-released our first album, The Approach, in mid-2004. We signed with Alfa Matrix in early 2006 and Vince (Grech--the band's drummer) came aboard shortly after."

Cookas says he would describe the music simply as "electronic-rock."

"I think that allows us to write electronic songs, rock songs, and electronic-rock songs without being too full of shit," says Cookas. "We've been called goth, industrial, metal, EBM (hah!), techno, and Rob-Zombie-meets-The-Cranberries. But I keep it at electronic-rock."

The band has recently released their second record, Optics and played at the Treffen Festival in Germany. They changed some things from the recording of their first record with one change having an especially big impact.

"The biggest enhancement this time around was my switch to Steinberg Nuendo. It really made a huge difference in every aspect of the production, from editing audio and MIDI to its efficient use of VST instruments to how it simplifies common tasks," says Cookas. "Wade Alin, our producer, uses it and we could easily bounce session files off each other via email. I also use Nuendo to run backing tracks during our live shows."

There were more differences in recording from CD number one to number two. New software, borrowed synths and a 1975 Les Paul were also added to the mix.

"I also expanded my collection of software instruments significantly. For synthesizers, I generally used Albino (Linplug), Absynth (Native Instruments), and Atmosphere (Spectrasonics)," says Cookas. "Wade also contributed some of his synths along with his impressive sample collection. All bass was done with the phenomenal Trilogy module, also from Spectrasonics. All guitars tracks were recorded with a beautiful 1975 Gibson Les Paul running through a Line 6 HD147. From there, Wade and I would add effects as needed with plugins. My vocal rig stayed essentially the same, consisting of a modest collection of mid-priced microphones, pre-amps, and compressors."

Cookas and Alin wanted to update the band's sound and "mix things up." They did used plugins and did a few unorthodox things with instrumentation.

"Wade and I really wanted the album to have a modern sound. To do so, we threw plugins on everything. We made guitars sound synthesizers. We made synthesizers sound like guitars. A lot of the sounds came from the effects plugins and not necessarily the source instrument," says Cookas. "That's why I simplified things by using just a few synths and the same guitar/amp combo for everything. Basically, it was one huge mad scientist experiment when we were mixing."

When we asked Cookas to describe the most surprisingly useful piece of gear I:Scintilla used in recording the new record he said it was Linplug Albino software.

"The Linplug Albino software synthesizer ended up on Optics much more than I had anticipated. It's very easy to program and it doesn't eat up resources, so you can run a lot of them," says Cookas "In fact, a couple songs were done entirely with Albino. I love it, but I'm going to move on to a whole new crop of instruments for the next record."

More from I:Scintilla on live gear soon.