I went through a creative period recently, in my manic way, and came out of it with about 6 or 8 songs that I felt were worth keeping. In the process, I tried some new instruments and rekindled my interest in some of my old ones.

I went through this strong desire to visit my roots in moog synths. My Prodigy got some play and I wound up purchasing the Minimonsta VST synth after trying several demos. It gets really hard for me to pick one or the other. Arturia's Mini has a very authentic sound and I may wind up getting it at some point. What eventually sold me on the GForce Mini was the fact that I could buy it online, they don't have a dongle or other tedious copy protection, and in terms of the voices that I could get from it, I thought that although it was a pretty good emulation of the MiniMoog, I could use it for all kinds of other things - it being versatile rather than just a copy of something old. Lots of VST synths are just a dull copy of something you'd rather hold in your hand. To me, the Korg legacy stuff is like that. I have a Poly Six and the idea of recreating just that is boring to me.

I'm not really enthused by most of the Native Instruments product line. If I was more of a traditional rock guy, I'd be into the B4 organ, but I have never been that kind of organist type. Massive and Absynth are interesting for textures I believe, but I'd almost rather build my own textures from first principles than to buy a synth that I would only use for the first 10 seconds of a song now and again. Kore sounds interesting, but I'm not sure what the advantage is. Maybe it is like a patch librarian, which could be helpful, but not if it can only organize NI product's sounds. I don't know enough about Battery to know whether I would rather have that than Guru. I've got lots of drum loops on my powerbook from GarageBand and Logic 7, and have used a few of those. I have been using a freeware drum kit called Grizly that seems to be as useful as those other two, just from what I've read.

So I supported GForce and haven't regretted it. I wound up getting ImpOSCar and Oddity too, which I didn't originally intend to do but now I am in this sound auditioning mode where I go through all the preset banks and try to remember which bank has the stuff that I like. Eventually these will make their way into my songs, but it may take a while for that creative spark to come around again. In the meantime, the sounds I'm hearing lend themselves to the kind of mood I've been in, where I don't want sampled "real" instruments - I want sonic silly puddy that I can squash around and make shapes with.

ImpOSCar has really grown on me since getting it. I can hear a lot of the rich sounds from it as being useful for all kinds of things. It is really more versatile than MiniMonsta or Oddity, but all three of them make a nice little triad of virtual instruments for me to tinker with as I convalesce from hip surgery and try to think creatively during the healing process.