Dear Bill.

It's not I've not got the stuff, it's just I don't know what I'm doing wrong using it. I mean I watch YouTube videos. I set my oscillators/ gates/whatevers (highly technical term, that!) exactly the way they do on their VST (usually it's a different VST, true, but it's got saw waves, I got saw waves, so if I do to my saw waves what they do to theirs, I should get the same results, right?

Wrong. They get lovely pads, I get bull seal farts. Every time. And I've absolutely no idea what I'm doing wrong. So I asked a New Age label owner/composer how to get the sounds and he told me to buy Omnisphere. You seen the price of that thing? So I looked up reviews on it and - sounds from a burning (literally!) piano - check. Guitars made to sound like aeroplane propellors - check. Voices from an African village, check. Who's that thing written for, Luke Cage and Harrison Birtwistle (if you don't know them, they're the kinda guys who hit all the notes on a keyboard at once, smile sweetly and call it Free Composition!)

Then I listen to people like Yakuro, Aeoliah, Yellow Brick Cinema, Medwyn Goodall and hear lovely background pads again. Please, Bill, if I showed you pictures of how my most capable-looking (I say LOOKING cos I've never really gotten the hang of it) synth VST is laid out, could you help me come up with a few presets I can actually USE?

I promise I have really, really tried for years. Can hear all I want in my head and in others' compositions (no, I'm not ripping 'em off, it's just like you hear a violin tune for example) but I can't make the synths. do it. Like you, I know they COULD - if only I knew HOW.

Yours hopefully - same question goes out to anyone else who reads this, if they're prepared to talk me through using the things they'd have a really grateful guy this end of the keyboard -

Chris. King of creating Bull Seal Farts (and strangled cats, tortured leopards, alien bullfrogs.....!!)