Plaid

"... and a synth sampler called Falcon."

"...Falcon has a lovely built in scripting language based on Lua which is very simple to code. You can write your own scripts that become sequencers or modulation sources adding randomisers, Markov chains and various probability based methods. It's one of the fun, unique aspects of electronic music that we almost feel obliged to explore."

"This time we've worked a lot with a synth called Loom..."

"We've done a fair bit of MaxMSP over the years..."

"We use Reaktor a little bit, and any little interesting bits of software we can get our hands on, really. We're not that radical with our sound design... if we like an electric keyboard sound we'll just use an electric keyboard sound. But I like the fact that you can build a synth from the bottom up. You can actually design your own synth, say in Reaktor, which would obviously not be possible with hardware, well, it would take years to design and build it so... that's the ease of it, the customization of it, really."

"Yeah, you get a very particular effect. There are a few new types of vocoder that are out at the moment. There is one called Razor, which has a very particular and quite unique sound, and it uses a new method for vocoding, which is very nice."

"There’s a few little bits of software that we keep going back to. There’s DrumSpillage, which is like a drum synthesizer that we use quite a lot."

In an article on the Arturia website, Ed Handley of Plaid mentions using Arturia Pigments 3.5.

"The main acid lines are made with Audiorealism ABL3 and we also used their drums in part. The more original sounds perhaps were made with Tone2’s Icarus using the ‘3D Wavetable’ functionality and other layers using UVI’s Falcon synth which is incredibly versatile"

"The main acid lines are made with Audiorealism ABL3 and we also used their drums in part. The more original sounds perhaps were made with Tone2’s Icarus using the ‘3D Wavetable’ functionality and other layers using UVI’s Falcon synth which is incredibly versatile"

"What do you remember of the hardware setup you had in the early days?

Andy: We had an 808, 303, 202 and 101, a monophonic digital synth, Akai 950 sampler and a few other analogue keyboards. We hired in an Akai S1000 to record the first EP.

Ed: Also the Oberheim Matrix 12 and Matrix 1000, which were pretty important. Sequencing was initially an Alesis MMT-8 then Dr T’s on Commodore."

"There are some great synths for it now and we recently got the Tenori-On app for £12, which is crazy! Such good value for money and I’ve heard that the designer says the iPad version is more accurate to his original concept than the hardware one.”

"We used a synth by Newfangled Audio called ‘Generate’ quite a lot on this album. I think that has a main role on several of the tracks. It would be a crucial one for me."

In an interview with Testpressing, Plaid mentioned their experience with Linux, highlighting their interest in music over computing tasks like networking.