Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2020 i Electronic Musician

ACID Pro 10 DAW lands with new features, and the Suite version includes Xfer’s Serum soft synth We’re slightly confused as to how it differs from ACID Pro Next, which was announced last year but now seems to have disappeared, but Magix has announced that ACID Pro 10, the latest version of its loop-based DAW, is now available. This includes an “all-new” version of Zynaptiq’s Stem Maker audio separation technology, which enables you to extract individual elements (drums, vocals etc) from mixed audio. Stem Maker 2 promises refined separation and better overall sound quality. There are also ACID Morph pads; assign audio tracks, instruments or busses to a pad and you can then morph sounds and effects, giving you a new creative option. The MIDI Playable Chopper, meanwhile, gets a…

ROLAND TR-909 SOFTWARE Rhythm Composer $19.99 Roland have never ceded to demands for an analog recreation of their lauded analog beatboxes, but they have seen fit to recreate them in various digital guises over the years. Of great interest to our readers, this particular incarnation comes as part of the company’s monthly Cloud subscription service. Take a look at the walkthrough later in the feature for a closer look. rolandcloud.com D16 GROUP Drumazon $99 A constant resource for killer clones of classic kit, d16 Group have given us their take on quite a number of Roland classics, including the TR-808 (Nepheton), TR-606 (Nithonat), and this, a 909 knock-off. As ever, the sound is pretty much spot-on, and the interface will be familiar to users of the original. They’ve added in…

This month we’ll explore using both hands to learn to play rapid repeated notes and two-handed figures that can be used to build some cool high points into your solos. Think Like A Drummer To get started I want you to think of your fingers like drumsticks, and learn to play crisp, detached short notes. Use a mono synth lead sound that has no release tail, and an immediate, percussive attack. See Example 1, and alternate your right hand and then left hand on the same note. One hand will have to move forward on the key just a little so there’s room to fit both hands over the same note. As you get comfortable with that, try switching up the rhythm to triplets (the second example), and then sixteenth…

Arturia Prophet V $149 The masters of mimicry strike again. Arturia clone not only the Prophet VS, but the venerable Prophet-5 as well and sandwich them together in an interesting hybrid. All of the original 96 factory waveforms are here, as are the VS’s extensive modulation options. Better still, you can mix the two Prophets for unique timbres. www.arturia.com SmartElectronix Augur FREE If you’re in a bind for cash, you can seek out Augur, a freeware clone of the Prophet VS. No longer being developed, it offers vector synthesis in the form of a virtual joystick along with a very nice modulation matrix. Smartelectronix no longer host it, but you can find it with a little digging. We managed to track it down at… bit.ly/SEaugur UVI Vector Pro $199 Like…

In contrast to the Matriarch’s ‘Grandmother’ sibling, featured here is the Moog 500 series delay (in glorious stereo and clock-syncable). Moog delays are some of the finest around (their Minifooger Delay and 104-SD are mainstays in my setup) and this module doesn’t disappoint. It’s smooth, classy and textured (and can be grainy at longer time settings) and can sound like a reverb at shorter settings as well. You have ping-pong and standard modes, time, feedback and spacing controls, a tap tempo for jamming with and you can sync it to the internal clock to work in time with the sequencer and arp too, which is all very handy. Of course, it’s also patchable with six inputs in total (audio and CV) which all makes it a great external delay processor.…

$350 novationmusic.com Strengths Flexibleandpowerful sequencer HardwareMIDIIn/Out/Thru Velocitypressuresensitive RGB pads with poly aftertouch DAWtransportcontrols Limitations -Hasaslightlysteep learning curve -Sequenceronlyhasfour tracks Novation’s Launchpad range of controllers for Ableton Live have been a well-deserved success, bundling smart looks and impressive functionality into robust, versatile and affordable packages. Hot on the heels of the significant recent ‘Mk3’ updates to the Launchpad Mini and Launchpad X, the range-topping Launchpad Pro has now had a refresh of its own. There’s a bunch of new functions and features, but what exactly is it that sets this machine apart, and is that ‘Pro’ moniker worth the extra investment? Good form The new Launchpad Pro Mk 3 is much more than just a face-lifted version. Totally redesigned, the Pro now conforms to the aesthetic of the other two Launchpads,…

To try and sum up the sonic side of Triton is hard because of the sheer numbers involved. This is very much Korg’s take on music making at the turn of the century and obviously includes much of what went before in the Trinity range. So, as we found with the XV-5080 module from Roland’s Cloud last issue, you’ll find a heck of a lot of acoustic and electronic options. You’ll also find that when a big company like Korg tries to do the ‘cool’ sounds of the time, it doesn’t always pay off – some of the dance stabs should have stayed in the vault, and the drum & bass options are quite ‘90s’ in terms of their attitude. But we’re getting the original Triton here, warts and all,…

Lil Erebus €260 Sibling to the Erebus v3 – available for a while as a DIY kit, and also in Eurorack form – this patchable desktop synth still packs a punch. dreadbox-fx.com BEHRINGER Neutron £99 Fun, flexible and great value for money, the Neutron has 56 patch points to achieve deep sound exploration. behringer.com ARTURIA MiniBrute 2 £399 The second version of the MiniBrute added an additional oscillator and patch panel to an already strong keyboard-based synth – and it can be integrated with modular gear using Arturia’s RackBrute system. arturia.com…

Parisian composer Jean-Gabriel Becker and Japanese multi-instrumentalist Susumu Mukai (aka Zongamin) have each had musical careers in their own rights. The former is well known for his cinematic work, and has partnered with the likes of Massive Attack and John Foxx, while the latter has collaborated with musicians Alexis Taylor and Floating Points and remixed releases from Trevor Jackson and Air. Together as Becker & Mukai, they’ve now released a wonderfully genre-agnostic album, Time Very Near. We caught up with the pair to find out more… When did you start making music, and how did you first get started? We’d known each other for a while before we started making music together. We were talking at a party once about two drum machines, the 707 and the 727. We both…

Polyend Tracker is a different kind of portable music production device Following numerous teases, Polyend has finally taken the wraps off Tracker. This, unsurprisingly, is a hardware tracker, though not, as Polyend says, “the first hardware tracker in the music world”. What Tracker does appear to be, though, is a refreshingly different kind of standalone, portable music-making device. It offers a sampler and wavetable/granular synthesis (plus an FM radio to grab random sounds from), a step sequencer and song arranger so that you can put together complete tracks, and a performance mode that enables you to take your Tracker productions to the stage. Tracker doesn’t have to work in isolation, though; bi-directional MIDI means that you can use it with the other software and hardware in your studio, too, while…

Here’s a recent software release that sees the process of audio frequency shifting taken to its extremes, While the better-known pitch shifting effect is all about multiplying or dividing signals, frequency shifting is all about addition and subtraction. While the former can give musical, harmonically sensible results, frequency shifting is much more, shall we say, irrational. Tonsturm’s Frq Shift plugin does the frequency shifting basics, but it also takes things further with feedback controls, effects added in the feedback loop, and modulation from a choice of sources to practically any destination. Let’s take a look… 1. Pitch shifting Most pitch shifting is just that – we use a pitch shifter plugin (as shown on the left) to increase or decrease the pitch of a whole signal. Start with a 100Hz…

01 Shift button Even as long ago as 1983, tabletop gear was plagued by the ever-present Shift button. Then, as now, it was necessary to access a secondary level of functions below select dual-purpose buttons. You can tell which ones they are by the field of orange that surrounds some of the legending across the panel – Track and Pattern Write functions are among them. 02 Tempo Knob/Display Window Unlike many drum machines that came before it, the TR-909 at least gave some indication of global BPM via the Display Window to its left, assuming that the various external sync functions weren’t being used. That three-digit LED display was also used to indicate the current measure, among a few other helpful indicators. 03 Transport controls These buttons likely need no…

In this month’s Easy Guide, I’m looking at one of the most compelling mysteries you come across when exploring music theory for the first time: what is an octave, and why are they called octaves when they contain twelve notes? OK, that’s two mysteries, but to address one means addressing the other, so let’s start picking at the thread and see where it leads. It’s become a sort of unofficial Easy Guide tradition to start off with a diagram of a C major scale, largely because an understanding of how a scale is formed is integral to so many other aspects of music theory. An explanation of octaves is no different, but what you’ll have noticed if you’re a regular reader (and why wouldn’t you be?) is that sometimes I’ve…

I bought my Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 many years ago in Woodstock, NY. I drove from Manhattan to a band’s rehearsal space where they just could not figure out what to do with it. I think I paid about $1,000 for it. It was in fair condition at best. I brought it to a well-known NYC synth tech named Takeshi who went through it and got everything up to spec. I wanted a Prophet-5 because it was on so many of my favorite records, like Peter Gabriel’s “Security,” Japan’s “Ghosts,” Phil Collins’ “I Don't Care Anymore,” Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place,” and the pads on New Order’s “Blue Monday.” Also, all the high parts on Devo’s “Whip It” and the entire soundtrack to “Creepshow” were done on a Prophet-5. It…

ARTURIA MatrixBrute $2,299 A three-voice paraphonic analog monster with versatile ‘brute’ oscillators, ladder/Steiner filters, killer analog effects, presets and hybrid matrix. arturia.com SEQUENTIAL Pro-3 $1,599 Upcoming for review, the Pro-3 is Sequential’s latest hot-rodded ‘mono’! It combines two VCOs and a wavetable osc, a multimode filter, 16-step sequencer, three LFOs and powerful effects. Up to three-voice paraphonic too. sequential.com BEHRINGER Poly D $698 The fully analog Poly D puts four Ds into a single box with 37 keys, four-voice paraphony, a Juno-style chorus, a 32-step sequencer, an arpeggiator and a variable distortion circuit. behringer.com…

ERICA SYNTHS Pico System III $479 A full analog synth with a 2-3-4 step sequencer, two VCOs, mixers, syncable modulator, two ASR envelope generators and more. Pretty cheap too. ericasynths.lv MOOG Mother-32 $649 A semi-modular with expandability, so while it might only have a single oscillator, it can grow. Its semi-modular approach means lots of sonic flexibility and, well, it’s a Moog. moogmusic.com PITTSBURGH Modular Microvolt 3900 $629 Featured as the number one semi-modular on MusicRadar, Pittsburgh’s ‘love letter to the analog monosynth’ features some of the best elements of both west and east-coast synthesis. pittsburghmodular.com…

No doubt the most significant addition to the Launchpad Pro’s feature set is the polyphonic, 4-track step sequencer that connects via MIDI to external hardware such as drum machines and hardware synths. This means you can use the Pro as a standalone device without hooking up a computer. If you’ve used any other kind of hardware step sequencer – especially Novation’s Circuit – you’ll be familiar with the layout and workflow here. You get four tracks, each with eight-note polyphony, and can have eight 32-step patterns per track that can be chained together into longer sequences. To create a song, patterns and chains can be assigned to up to 16 scenes, each of which can be triggered from a single pad. However, the Pro also throws in a few advanced…

Denis Tihanov OrilRiver A man, a plan, a reverb, Oril. This well thought-through free reverb plugin (Mac/PC VST) offers separate faders for its early reflections and diffuse stages, as well as dry and wet faders to balance its processing (although that dry fader resets when changing presets, making it less effective on a bus). The usual reverby suspects are here, including Decay Time, Pre Delay, etc; plus you get modulation and EQ controls. Reverb algorithms are selected from a list of ‘variations’, with 12 choices for the ER stage and five for the LR stage. With names like “Variation 2” and “Variation 9”, as well as the unintuitive EQ controls, this is a reverb that encourages you to use your ears – important when setting a sense of space. With…

It’s 2008, and EDM is beginning to explode in the USA, where acts like Deadmau5 and Avicii will soon be household names. After years of toil, staring at blank screens and slaving away on tracks and remixes for little reward – a feeling most of us are familiar with – all Morgan Page needed was one spark to ignite his career. Fast forward to 2020, and the spark has been and gone, leaving Page as one of the seminal acts of the EDM explosion, with an enviable string of achievements under his belt. So how did it all happen? We talked with Morgan to try and pin down the roadmap for a journey to stardom… We’re talking just after one big release in the software world, reFX Nexus 3. You’re…

With the relatively recent announcement that Dave Smith, the man behind Sequential Circuits, had reacquired the Sequential name, we were reminded of the company’s contributions to music technology. We’ve already covered the seminal Prophet-5, the programmable polysynth that put Sequential on the map back in the 1970s, but it wasn’t the only innovative instrument to trundle out of the factory. The company was also responsible for the very first MIDI synth (Prophet-600), a brilliant monosynth (the Pro-One), one of the first multitimbral instruments (the Six-Trak) and a super-cool drum machine/sampling workstation called the Studio 440 that predicted the later MPC series from Akai. However, only the company’s Prophet VS, released in 1986, would be held in anywhere near the same reverence as the beloved Prophet-5, and for good reason. Sequential’s…

$1,999 moogmusic.com Strengths Itsoundswonderful and it’s beautifully built and designed Thoughcomplex it’s surprisingly intuitive and the patchability allows for full modular exploration Cancoverall manner of classic analog and futuristic/spacey tones Limitations -Its not cheap(but you’re essentially getting a self-contained Moog modular) -Thecolorfulpanelmight not be to everyone’s tastes (but it is very practical) -Nopresetsmeansonce your sound is gone, it’s gone forever! Moog is still the most well-recognised name in synthesis, some 67 years after launching. The company has gone from strength to strength since it launched the Voyager in 2002 (which is now regarded as a modern classic). Following on from the Voyager came the Little Phatty (the last synth design Bob had a direct hand in before his death), the Sub and Subsequent range, the flagship One and the ‘Mother’…

$199 pspaudioware.com Strengths ThreePSPold Timer MEs in one! Sonicallyversatile from transparent and gentle to saturated and punchy Improvedvalvesaturation algorithm Approachableandeasy to use Limitations -Stillnoexternalsidechain -Youcouldgetvery close using three PSP oldTimer MEs Released in 2010, PSP Audioware’s original PSP oldTimer still ranks as one of our favourite vintage-style ‘analog’ compressor plugins. It was followed in 2011 by the more versatile PSP oldTimer ME, and now, almost a decade later, there’s an, er, new oldTimer on the block in the shape of the MB edition. This is, essentially, a multiband PSP oldTimerv ME, racking up three frequency-limited instances of the compressor for more complex dynamics processing than ME’s single band can handle. The GUI simply replicates and divides the PSP oldTimer ME control set (plus a few additions) between three individual bands…

$249 korg.com Strengths Hugeandvaried sound Greatbrowserto select your sounds Properrose-tintedsonic experience! Usablefora wider ange of genres EightcustomMIDI controller layouts Limitations -Expensiveassinglepurchase -Somenot-so-coolsoundsnow There is a whiff of a 90s revival in the air. To some of us of a certain age, of course, that decade might not seem that far gone, but Calvin Harris’ recent track, 'Hypnagogic (I Can’t Wait)', under his Love Generator moniker reminded us of everything we loved about that decade (and indeed, much of what we didn’t). And it does seem to be the latest in a line of throwbacks to the 1990s, that could include this latest softsynth release, the Korg Collection: Korg Triton. The original hardware Triton came out in the latter part of the decade and variants of it were released well into…

Trap music is an offshoot from hiphop, and originated in the southern USA during the late'90s and early 2000s. Generally starker than hip-hop, both in its lyrical content and production, trap takes its name from the trap houses in which illegal dealings occur, with crime being a key lyrical theme. Unlike many classic hiphop beats that major heavily on sampled breaks and one-shots for the rhythm track, trap instead uses classic Roland TR-808 samples for the drum track, often with thekick and bass combined into one musical, yet percussive element. Musically, trap records generally feature a lot of synth pads, drones and leads, with sampled one-shot stabs or loops also used in places. However, a basic trap rhythm track can work well with musical ideas from a wide variety of…

01 Noise Generator Start by creating a group consisting of a noise generator and an output block with an amp envelope. Select the colored noise output and notice how the slope changes the frequency content like a filter. Next, adjust the envelope so that it has an immediate attack, short decay/release, and no sustain. 02 Resonator Set the first Lane to Poly, to perform the patch polyphonically. Then, add the resonator Snap-In to the Lane. Note that there are two icons: Sawtooth and square. These are slightly misleading, as their purpose is to change the phase of the feedback. Sawtooth is in-phase, while flipped phase is the square wave. 03 Keyboard Tracking Add a MIDI Note object to the bottom modulator row, then assign it to the pitch of the…

The guitar synthesizer has had a fraught relationship with players over the years. Tracking issues and sonic fashion have limited interest in the past. Today, the sheer number of products on the market dedicated to making your guitar sound like a synthesizer is a firm indicator that this is changing. In this series, I will cover some of the new effects pedals designed to simulate synthesizers. So far, we have touched on the Source Audio C4, which allows you to create a full-featured synthesizer from scratch, and next issue we'll examine Electro-Harmonix’s Attack Decay pedal that teaches you about one aspect of synthesis while offering more than a few cool sounds. This month we will look at the Boss SY-1 pedal. Like the C4, the SY-1 serves up plenty of…