Down at the BPM Show, I managed to meet up with a guy who has designed and developed a big arsenal of my production virtual instruments in my library.

Rob Papen, has released many software plugins such as Predator, SubBoomBass, Blue and the more recent Blade. He took me through some pointers of Predator, probably his most versatile and usable soft synth. Here he touched on features that were new, including the new patch banks within a new update. But the real tips came from features that were already in there from the beginning.

One of those features was the chord recorder, something so simple and easy to do, yet very powerful and often overlooked. So if you haven’t used this feature I suggest you go look for it and try doing your own. Also the use of the built in effects like LowFi and others are really handy and can seriously reshape your sound. Again something that you shouldn’t forget to use as the built in effects are actually serious workhorses.

My lesson from this meeting is to always remember the simplest of features in a soft synth, and if you forget maybe brush up on your reading skills from the manual ;)

Many thanks to Rob for giving up his time and also to Iain from Time and Space.