Tools of the Trade lets an artist share their love for their favorite piece of gear.

In this edition, we asked Tristan Whitehill—the multi-instrumentalist behind Euglossine—why the Korg MS2000b is his favorite synthesizer.

Well to start , I was given the MS2000b by a close friend who had since fallen out of music and was busy with school. I eventually got around to learning how to program it in depth and fell deeply in love. I have had it now for about 3 years and use it in every band I’m in.

The MS2000b has a great pallet of colors and can make a huge variety of sound. I mostly use it for creating pads and harmonic noise in combination with the SP555 sampler’s effects and looper, which is a pretty dreamy team. The synth has 8 note polyphony and the possibility to layer 4 oscillators, which is plenty fine for me. I use it much more simply live i.e. monophonic leads or bass and funky stabs, but it definitely goes deep in the studio.

The best elements of the synth in my opinion is the fact that all of the routing and most of the parameters are on the front panel and can be easily changed at any point. This is very nice because if you record a MIDI performance, then the actual audio tracking can be an additional performance of parameter shifting. This can get super-dimensional and expressive because it has a pretty nice delay section, a good example of this would be on the Orchal and Vir song (me and my best friend Kane Pour’s Elestial Sound release) “Ospreys and Molasses” during the b section.

The synth part is a lead that seems to be warping in and out of directions, portamento, and fidelity all while dipping into different depths by changing the delay speed. The modulation section is fun because you can make pretty dynamic arpeggios with 3 different step parameters like pitch and cutoff and so on.

I use this for glitchy pulsing pads on my new unreleased album Iridescence, but not so much on Dance District. The rubric for Dance District was obviously 120 bpm, but also each song had some sort of sampling keyboard vocal patch. Each vocal patch was usually doubled with a microkorg patch which I also spend a lot of time programming (I’m pretty sure it has the same synth engine as the MS2000b).

The drums I used on Dance District were mostly old kits I made on my Roland SP555 before I had a computer. My source material included a lot of MS2000b filtered noise, lo-fi tape noise, beatboxing, and a few classic breaks, but my favorite drum sound I have and still constantly use is the Roland CR 5000. I borrowed, sampled, and returned it to Davis Hart of Elestial Sound. The kick and snare are so taut, punchy, round and squishy at the same time. A total classic.

Dance District was composed in about a week but was the culmination years of groundwork being laid via backing up gigs of whatever I was making on my SP555 for years. I then got a computer that my buddy and long time collaborator Charles Rye built with Ableton 6 on it and the universe kinda voltroned for me, as I could now manipulate and mash up all these sounds I had collected.

Euglossine’s Dance District is available via MJ MJ Records. Stay tuned to Elestial Sound‘s website as Whitehill’s next two records will be released before 2014.