Hey everyone. I'm a singer and sound dabbler from Germany called Frank. My first Virus was a Virus b bought in 2000/2001. It was the beginning of a new band/project called the Spiritspiders which was supposed to blur the divisions of electronic and rock music. The Virus was something like a founding member and the backbone of the sound; the one constant element when everything from influences to band members fluctuated wildly. The Virus provided strings for the ballads, bubbling arpeggios to pop songs and creepy pads to fluff up and warp guitar textures. We spent many trippy nights, exploring astral space and the netherworlds, always returning with new patches. I used the Virus b for almost 15 years, on 7 demos, 2 EPs and our album length debut. It had to get repaired once in all that time and having used it for almost half of my life I'd never thought of it as something that would go away. But in early 2015 it had problems booting up, its display began to flicker and finally in February 2015 the spirit left its oscillators and departed to the next world. It was like losing a friend.
The TI series had always been on my radar, since I upgraded my homestudio to professional and completely computer-based recording. I wouldn't have ditched the Virus b EVER, but somehow it felt that its time was up and left. Now its grandson sits on my desk fresh from the box, having received a MIDI dump of its grandfather's RAM banks and wondering what kind of a weird place this is. May this be the beginning of new tales.