Lawrence Stone of VTG, is deep in the throes of promoting my current release, Love Is Letting Go, a hard-edged electro-rock album. He is also working on a new record, Dance Floor Game, which is more of a high energy dance record. One of his in-studio "secret weapons" (yes, yes, we know it isn't secret) is the Vengeance Producer Suite from Vengeance Sound.

"There's really no comparison that I've seen in the cross platform VST realm. Using the Vengeance Producer Suite has given me better sounding tracks in half the time. Short of sitting in a studio with a bunch of analog gear and playing all day, these are as good as it gets. I write Electro-Rock and Dance music, so I'm always searching for different ways to create a fuller kick and to setup a side-chain compressor. Those are the two things I use in most of my tracks nowadays," he says. "Before Metrum (kick drum sampler/synth ) and the VPS Multiband Sidechain, I was using Ableton's Drum Rack to load and play Kick samples and a regular compressor keyed by the kick to get pumping on my instrument tracks. Being able to load up these plugins and start off on the right foot is a huge inspiration and they sound amazing."

But what is it that makes the Vengeance Producer Suite unique?

"Let's take Metrum first. The biggest problem I run into with kicks is that I spend too long tuning them and looking for that sweet spot where the kick has the right attack and a fat bottom end. I used to layer kicks in a VST sampler or combine a kick synth with a few samples," says Stone. "This can take from 1-4 tracks in most cases and has me jumping back and forth between them, adjusting levels and EQ. Using Metrum I can fire up a new instance and have a canvas to load up to three kick samples and mix in a sub oscillator. I usually load a body kick in slot 1 and an attack kick in slot 2 of Metrum - then after I'm happy with them - I tune the sub oscillator and bring in some sub shaking low-end."

Stone says it reminds him of a mix class in college. One of the first tricks he learned was to beef up the kick drum with a sine wave oscillator.

"That, of course, was in a studio and required patching the sub oscillator into the board, tuning it and setting up a gate to trigger it with the kick. In Metrum, I just turn up the sub volume knob, tune and'85 done," he says.

The VPS Multiband Sidechain plugin works differently than other ducking set ups stone has seen.

"I think what it's doing is rather than compressing the sound to reduce the volume to the beat it actually reduces the amplitude with a variable envelope. There's no compression going on at all, so the resulting sound is totally transparent, which is a good, or bad thing depending on what effect you're going for," he says. "If you're not looking to use a preset or draw in your ducking envelope by hand, you can use the transmitter plugin to send the amplitude envelope of the keying track (kick usually) to the VPS Multiband Sidechain. It's really flexible. One other really important part of the Multiband Sidechain plugin is the frequency crossover. You can independently choose to duck the high or low frequencies. So, for example, I can duck the low frequencies by 100% and the highs by 30 percent. It's great for freeing up low frequencies in the mix."

But ultimately what makes it unique?

"It's a new approach to kick drum creation, ducking, and it's compressed my workflow into less steps," says Stone. "It's also worth pointing out that before Vengeance released VPS they had years of sample and preset pack releases under their belt and they are some of the best I've ever heard. So you can imagine that the presets are pretty top notch."

The single aspect of the Producer Suite that Stone singles out as his favorite is less technical.

"I'm always searching for ways to make my music writing process more emotional and less technical," he says. "I could easily spend days tweaking knobs or building crazy audio effects racks in Ableton Live, but I'd rather write. The best thing about the Producer Suite is that it's inspiring and it sounds awesome."

He also says that if you are used to working with VST synths and effects it will take you minutes to learn the basics and maybe an hour to sort out the intricacies. The learning curve is not steep. Obviously the slope gets more vertical if you have less overall experience.

The Vengeance Producer Suite has a few bugs according to Stone as well.

"I think it would be really awesome if there was more of a friendly tuning approach used in Metrum. I'd love to see a note detection algorithm employed that helped to tune your kick samples and the oscillator to each other," he says. "For VPS Multiband Sidechain, it would be really cool if there was an FX section there because most of the time ducking changes the sound of the track, but because the plugin actually lowers the volume on a curve instead of compressing the signal (which is how most ducking works) there's no color added to the sound. Sometimes that works out really well, but I'd love to see a nasty compressor in the FX section or maybe some distortion that colors the signal before it's ducked. I'd use that ALL the time."

In addition to the projects mentioned above Stone is working with his other act, Dancefloor Executives

"We've been throwing a monthly electro house oriented dance night in San Francisco (www.forrplay.com) for about six months now and it's been awesome. I think it's the only dance night in SF that focuses on local electronic producers," he says. "I've also been digging into sound design quite a bit and a few months back I put out a VTG signature sound set for Virus TI owners. It's available on the Access Music website. That's it for the moment."