Mentioned in this October 17, 2016 Music Radar interview.

"Getting into Pro Tools, and eventually getting my own Pro Tools rig, was a five-year process, and it was another six years before I was using it exclusively to make music. I guess that's why it wasn't an abrupt change; it was more a case of not needing the MPC because I could do anything I wanted in Pro Tools. I remember making an album on Pro Tools and enjoying it, and using a lot of other Native Instruments stuff like Battery and Absynth to texturise; then at a certain point I decided I missed the MPC and would go back to using it, but that lasted about a day and a half. Once you learn, you can't unlearn."

How did you come across Native Instruments?

"That was by recommendation from Martin Ware of Heaven 17. We worked together and he recommended Absynth and FM7 to me. I loved Absynth right away because it was so different from anything else. Then I got into Reaktor through Gareth Jones, who was another producer I worked with. He explained to me how it worked. At first I was a bit put off by the idea of creating your own synthesizers. Initially, I couldn't be bothered to do that because it sounded like a lot of hard work. But I soon found out that it was also a lot of fun!"

Absynth is included in the list of software synthesizers.

Richard says in this interview that he used Native Instruments Absynth on the album "Things Buried."

"I use Battery quite a lot for my drums. I like the Model E, I like the Arturia stuff, that's really nice. For the fourth track on the album ['Huis Clos'], I used [Edirol's] Orchestral for the piano. What else do I like? Absynth of course and the Waldorf and the FM7. Lounge Lizard has great Rhodes and stuff like that."

"Gareth Jones is especially in-demand for his outstanding knowledge of Logic Audio, but is also extremely well versed with NI software like FM7, BATTERY, and ABSYNTH."

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Marius de Vries

The Grammy Award-winner shares an immersive sci-fi pad for MASSIVE X. Share

Los Angeles-via-London composer Marius de Vries has had the kind of career most producers yearn for. Since the early-1990s, he’s helped shape the sounds of artists like Madonna and Massive Attack, overseen the scores and soundtracks for major motion pictures like Romeo + Juliet and La La Land, been nominated for more than five Grammys, and won two BAFTA awards. One of the secrets behind de Vries’ remarkable body of work? A workflow wedded to plugins and soft synths.

For our newest edition of Patch and Play, we sat down with the musical polymath to discuss how he uses Native Instruments in his music, how he creates film scores, and the inspiration behind his exclusive preset for MASSIVE X. Two Left Feet, blends bleepy sci-fi sensibilities with crumbling, crackling organic sounds courtesy of the synth’s two Noisetables – with a result reminiscent of an ambling robot exploring a mysterious planet’s rocky crags.

Listen to de Vries demo the patch and download it for yourself below.

You’ve been a Native Instruments user for many years – since the beginning. What was your first plug-in?

Yes, I was there from the start! I got really into Reaktor when it was called Generator in, I don’t know, 1997? Massive was a long way in the distance then. Back then, Generator was tremendously exciting; to have that complexity and configurability in the box was pretty unprecedented, and I’m really happy that 25 years later, Reaktor is still thriving and sitting there solidly underneath all the other great Native Instruments stuff. The Reaktor community is still a treasure trove of odd, imaginative, envelope-pushing goodness. It didn’t take long to meet some of the people involved in those early Native years, and I’ve enjoyed a wonderful friendship with the team and the product ever since.

The next thing that properly sold me was Absynth, which I was a fan of since I had it as a beta v0.1. I got to know Brian Clevinger, who invented it, and just loved the synth from the start. When Native Instruments picked it up – and didn’t mess it up – it was a sign of very good taste. I also used the B4 Organ II and the old FM7 all the time.