I returned to the studio today after a week-long stay at my mom's house while recovering from hip replacement surgery. I had a good rest at my mom's house, but couldn't wait to get back to the studio.

I'm in the middle of my "alien influence" album. Most of it will be instrumentals, and started out as more melodic, but since I've been out of the hospital, I keep going industrial on everything. I hear machines talking to machines and telling people what to do. I want to put some meat into this, as the first few songs are more like temporal transposed songs from the middle ages played by VST synths. I've got to put some impOSCar and Oddity lines in there. This isn't one for the pocket orchestra.

A friend of mine, Neil Fellowes, told me about a nice little VST synth called Pokegy. I had to hunt one down because the original website is vaporized. Anyway, it is a nice emulation of a Moog Prodigy, which I've ranted about here lately, and though I have a real hardware version of one, I prefer not to have to power it up and plug it in if I don't have to. The Pokegy sounds pretty true to the real thing and even has a few mods like an FM modulator. It has polyphony, so there's something you can't do with the real deal.

I used it in a short atmospheric piece to start with, and am pleased with it so far. I fooled myself into thinking that it wouldn't work with Sonar, but it turned out that I had inadvertently turned off the option that creates the audio playback track for new instruments and didn't realize it. Geeze, these pain killers are crippling my brain!

Back to pokegy, it sounds more like a Moog Prodigy than Minimonsta for my tastes. It has that dual oscillator feel to it. There are times when that is what I want, and it cuts through the mix when needed. I'm finding that Minimonsta is good for the very rich textured synth-type sounds that can't quite be accomplished with impOSCar. ImpOSCar is pretty amazing, and has some very lush sounding textures of it's own, but even though they are both VST synths, Minimonsta just has that very analog feel to it, while impOSCar sounds like a Casio CZ-1000 with analog filters. I don't mean to sell the impOSCar short, but the way it generates sounds is different from anything I've ever used before.

I love them all.