how cool I thought the LABS idea was, from Spitfire Audio. A totally free set of great sounding instruments and packs, allowing anybody to write with professional sounds in any DAW. Spitfire had management changes in the last year I believe and LABS has now changed. While they offer free sounds still (and all the old stuff will remain usable), they also now have paid products that are arguably more premium versions, which sort of defeats the LABS purpose and just gives you another Spitfire product for sale. With these changes came a redesign of the VST UI, pictured below. I don't think it's nearly as nice and sleek, its got a weird, childlike sorta vibe to me, and navigating through the instruments is WAY worse as you can ONLY scroll down alphabetically. They removed all the instrument/sound type folders. But, they have new free stuff that does sound good so... whatever, I can deal with all that other stuff haha. I started with their "Intimate Grand Piano", and was just kinda spacing out to some TV, playing on my laptop when I found the little chord progression seen above to the right. This is the basis for the whole tune. Track 2 just adds some background ambience, weird little effected vocal hits. Track 3 is a Spitfire instrument included with Ableton, the String Quartet, which I think turned out nice here. It definitely isn't mixed properly at all yet, but I like the direction. Track 4 is a flute from Albion (another Spitfire product, haha), which just fades in single notes once every 2 bars; I need to edit the fade out as it is a bit abrupt but I like the vibe. Finally we have Track 5, which is another new LABS instrument, the "Expressive Strings", just providing a single note bass part. As of now, I think this is the length I want, though I'm gonna keep playing with this and see where things go, maybe add some more stuff like Tracks 2 and 4, very sparse details that help make repetitive parts a bit more unique. I'll share the results!