How It Was Made: Rony Seikaly's Ephemeral

Omnisphere and Prophet. 

I love Omnisphere, its very simple to use and has so many sounds to choose from! The depth of the synth is just incredible too. You basically can’t tell its not an analog Synth. 

Prophet Sequential is a beast - it gave me the Polyphonies for Ephemeral that I was looking for very long! 

That exact sound I had only in my head, but I couldn’t produce it with anything except with the Sequential. So when I found that preset I had to tweak it to get to the sound I really needed to complete my song.

Sometimes I just go to Splice for samples and other times it could be sample packs from Vengeance. 

In this particular track it was a mixture of my Roland Drum Machine and Samples from Vengeance. 

I chose this Drums to give me the overall warmth and depth I wanted for Ephemeral to go with my melancholic melodies.

Learn More About Splice Here

Most of the time it’s trial and error. 

But for this track the lead sound was created with Prophet, I had to tweak a preset to the sound I wanted. It took me a while but I was happy I could finally find that sound I needed. 

When I received the vocals I knew I needed something more deep to go with them. I love how the vocal and lead supplement each other.

I don’t really have any tricks. It’s all about feeling for me… not sure if this is a trick but I doubled the kick drum and pitched second sequence to really low so it has more low end. 

That really works if you need some extra Frequencies down there - but watch out it can get very muddy quickly! 

Learn more tricks for beefing up your kick drums here.

That no matter how much I feel a track, the crowd has the last say. I had a first draft of the track and I loved the way it sounded in the studio, I was vibing very much to it. 

After I tested it at a show and it didn’t work the way I imagined it would, I had to go back to the lab and edit it. What I learned is that the real test is always on the dance-floor.