Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2020 i Electronic Musician

Make Noise has premiered its latest hardware controller, the 0-CTRL. If that name sounds familiar to you, it’s because this latest gadget is designed as the ideal partner to the company’s excellent 0-Coast semi-modular. The 0-CTRL is a patchable, clockable controller and step sequencer for voltage-controlled synthesizer systems. The tabletop device is fully Eurorack compatible, so it will be right at home patching up to your modular systems and semi-modular synthesizers. The controller allows you to sequence the pitch, strength, and time of your synthesizer voice on a per-step basis, and can sync with other hardware via clock in, or clock other machines with the clock and/or gate outs. Following on a similar design path laid as the company’s Pressure Points and René modules, the 0-CTRL also features Pressure and…

Moving on but staying with iZotope, another plugin found as part of the company's Neutron pacakage is well worth investigating: the Visual Mixer represents your entire mix (or at least those elements you've added an iZotope plugin onto) as 'pucks' around a 2D surface, and lets you control gain, panning and width of everything via a single graphically minded layout. Sure, on a real mixing console (or even a virtual one), you can see your faders and panning knobs together, but for tough-to-manage projects, the Visual Mixer can often be preferable. With Neutron 3's latest update adding the Balance Assistant into the software, the Visual Mixer is now a great place to go to make changes to your mix once Neutron's artificial intelligence has made its decisions, giving those virtual…

In the digital world, almost anything is possible, and keen-eyed software developers have managed to harness this idea and rethink the concept of what a delay processor should be. Just as you map out your music visually in the piano roll, with multitap delays you can do the same thing for individual echoes (or ‘taps’) for the delayed signal. It’s time to get a grip on the power behind multitaps, drawing, spiking and ‘sequencing’ your own delay patterns to taste, for every track-building scenario. The bog-standard, ‘normal’ delay processor that we’re most likely to encounter uses a delay time to determine how often it repeats, and feedback to determine how many times. Here’s Soundtoys’ EchoBoy in its ‘Single Echo’ mode. Simple stuff. When we put EchoBoy into its trademark Rhythm…

112dB Morgana $137 Taking inspiration from the Mirage, Morgana brings the feel and sound of 8-bit hardware samplers to the desktop, but without the limited RAM or clunky interface. Dual five-stage envelopes, a 24dB filter and support for WAV, AIFF and ReCycle formats round out this cross-platform package. At $137, it’s slightly less than a second-hand Mirage! 112db.com Siegfried Kullmann SQ8L Free Though not a Mirage emulation (or even a sampler), this 32-bit Windows plugin will put the Ensoniq sound into your VST host for free. Based on the Mirage’s wavetable synth sibling, it combines lo-fi digital oscillators with a classic four-pole filter for a crunchy '80s tone. Crispy tuned percussion and bit-reduced bells are a speciality. www.buchty.net TAL-Bitcrusher Free The simplest way to approach the sound of the Mirage…

$85 timespace.com The latest from creatively-minded plugin developer Boom Library is a fully synthesized (no samples) virtual instrument, dedicated to the production of crowd-pleasing tempo-synced (or not) risers, falls, drops, etc. LiftFX is entirely preset-driven, with the under-the-hood parameters for each of its 275 presets already dialed in, but a degree of adaptability is provided for you by four macros and two filters. You won’t be designing your own sounds from scratch, then, but the presets are a pretty diverse and reasonably tweakable bunch. Sending LiftFX a held MIDI note triggers the loaded preset, which sweeps through its rise or fall (as defined by the aforementioned parameter start and end points) in a manner governed by the Progress section, and the Pitch Range and Duration controls to the right. Sending…

$299 auddict.com The first deployment of erstwhile Kontakt developer Auddict’s new proprietary sample playback engine, PercX (VST/AU/AAX/Standalone) is a multitrack percussion ROMpler currently aimed at soundtrack and media producers, with more pop/dance-orientated content in the pipeline, we’re told. Combining conventional one-shot triggering and MIDI sequencing in a hybrid interface, its headline feature is the unification of programed loops and real-time performance and recording. ’X marks the spot First, let’s get the one big disappointment out of the way: PercX is a ROMpler in the truest sense, in that it can only work with its own bundled sample library and add-on expansion packs, with no way to import external sounds into it. Said expansions currently number four and are all included with the Pro version of the instrument, amounting to 9GB…

DrumComputer can be employed as a ‘static’ sound source for triggering with your MIDI controller and DAW, but it also has its own 16-step/16-pattern sequencer built-in. You can adjust the relative step value of each engine’s lane independently (from 1/1 to 1/64), as well as the number of steps and the direction of playback – forwards or bouncing forwards and backwards between start and end points. Global parameters comprise Swing and Humanize (random step offsets that reset with each cycle), both of which are applied literally to the actual note positions in the sequencer. Pattern randomization and left/right shift are available to both individual engines and the whole pattern. The 16 sliders at the bottom of the sequencer set the per-step value for Velocity, trigger Probability, Roll subdivision, note Offset,…

iZotope Ozone Imager 2 FREE A recent update to iZotope’s free stereo imaging plugin, ripped from the iZo flagship Ozone software, Ozone Imager 2 is a dab hand at visualizing, collapsing stereo signals to mono, and widening mono signals into stereo. Visualization is available in three types: the filledin Polar Level, the dotty Polar Sample (pictured), or geometric Lissajous, with a stereo correlation meter. The main Width control starts at 0 (normal), reduces to -100% (mono), and increases to 100% (extra stereo). The Stereoize slider, meanwhile, helps turn a mono signal into a stereo one, with a choice of two algorithms; check the correlation meter, which should ideally tend towards 0. Putting a couple Ozone Imagers in series can lead to some crazier stereo effects. A great utility for most…

With their 2015 debut Eternalism, Berlin-based duo Evvol showcased their gloriously dark take on synth pop. Last month the pair returned with a new LP, The Power, another equally strong set of electronically-rich, emotive tracks. We caught up with guitarist and producer Jane Arnison. When did you start making music? When I was a young kid with two boom-boxes I used to overdub from one to the next and mess around like that and do little tape experiments and stuff. But my first serious gear was when I got my start in electronic production in the late ’90s. I bought a PC and Emagic Logic v2.5! I also bought an Akai S2000 sampler. I was really inspired by the rave scene at the time and was trying to make breakbeats…

Moog’s Subharmonicon synth has existed in limited numbers for a couple of years. This compact, semi-modular originated as a DIY build project for VIP Engineers at Moog’s 2018 Moogfest event but now, much like the DFAM before it, it’s been repurposed for the mass market and is available to buy in fully pre-built form. The Subharmonicon is the most leftfield and esoteric of Moog’s recent semi-modulars, with an emphasis on polyrhythmic sequencing and sub-harmonic tone generation. Sound creation is handled by two analog VCOs linked with four subharmonic oscillators. The relationship between these subharmonic generators and the main oscillators can be set in a variety of different ways, offering quantized intervals for chord generation, an Equal Temperament setting for creating Just Intonation intervals – ie whole number ratios of the…

Apple Logic Pro X 10.5 adds Live Loops, new samplers and fresh beat creation tools In what’s being described as “the biggest update to Logic since the launch of Logic Pro X”, Apple has unveiled version 10.5 of its flagship DAW. This adds Ableton Live-style clips launching in the form of Live Loops, Remix FX, two new samplers and several tools that are designed for beat creation. The Live Loops functionality promises to let you create music in new freeform and nonlinear ways, and enables you to organize loops, samples and recordings on a musical grid, from where you can perform and capture different arrangement ideas that can then be viewed and edited on the timeline. Remix FX can be used in conjunction with Live Loops and performed in real-time…

Great delay effects aren’t just about the controls in your delay itself! The signal you send through your delay processor is key too. Note lengths are massively important. Compare a quick, ‘blippy’ signal to a long, evolving one. A note longer than the delay time will bring the delayed signal in as part of its sound, fusing everything together. When the note changes – however gradually – a subtle echo follows, adding atmosphere. With a ‘blippier’ signal, the delay is heard after each note ends, so the two are heard as separate sounds – more literally ‘repeats’ in this case. For this reason, try to time some new notes to hit at the same time as the delayed signal from a previous note, letting things build up and fuse into…

Delay isn’t just behind the overt effects you hear in a mix – it’s also responsible for far more subtle treatments that producers have been using heavily for many years. And it all started – as do most things in music production mythology – with those pesky Beatles. Legend has it that the Fab Four had requested a method of double tracking vocals automatically. After Abbey Road engineer Ken Townsend came up with a solution – duplicating the vocal signal on tape and modulating one copy – the ‘flange’ effect was, supposedly, born, and used liberally on the appropriately titled Revolver. Flanging isn’t too far removed from the sister effects of phasing and chorus. The three stem from the same simple process, and it’s easy to make your own with…

One thing common to all pieces of music is the time signature – the pair of numbers at the start of a musical score, right next to the clef and key signature. The time signature tells us how many of what type of beat we can expect to find in each bar of the music that follows. But there’s another, more basic layer of timekeeping involved in music, and that’s the meter. The meter tells us how the pulse of the music is counted and how the beats within it are grouped together. Depending on the numbers it contains, a time signature can be identified as either simple or compound meter. And this month I’m going to attempt to demystify this notoriously confusing topic and illustrate the difference between the…

Si Truss is the Editor of Electronic Musician and Future Music magazines $599 polyend.com Ever since Ultimate Soundtracker arrived for the Commodore Amiga almost 30 years ago, trackers – the subset of music production applications that were inspired by that original piece of software – have existed as a minor, albeit influential, alternative to mainstream music production tools. Distinctive for their vertical sequencing layout and numerical programming, trackers were originally popular as they offered a cheaper, self-contained alternative to early music software and MIDI gear. That USP diminished somewhat as conventional software became more accessible, but trackers have maintained a cult popularity, thanks in part to their often free and open source nature, and their links to the demoscene sub culture. They may have fallen out of favour a little…

€39/$44 cableguys.com CableGuys updated ts modulation-focused multi-effect tool ShaperBox towards the end of last year, and now the developer is adding a new processor into the mix. CrushShaper is a bitcrusher designed to make use of the same customizable modulation tools as the rest of the ‘Shaper’ family. It runs within ShaperBox 2 and comes as part of the full ShaperBox bundle, but you'll find it's also available as a standalone purchase. Seasoned producers will, no doubt, be fully familiar with the general principles of bitcrushers. These digital distortion effects reduce the resolution and bandwidth of the target audio to achieve effects ranging from a subtle lo-fi quality to full-on destruction. It’s a common enough effect, achievable via the stock plugins in most DAWs, so what does CableGuys’ take have…

PercX’s MIDI editor is a full-on piano roll affair, but with the Y-axis representing each instrument’s enormous stack of robin samples, rather than pitched notes. By default, the editor gives a detailed view of the selected track’s MIDI data, but clicking the ‘All’ button switches to a multitrack view, showing the ‘flattened’ hits in place on all eight lanes, like a traditional drum editor. A track can house up to four switchable sequences, all running up to 32 bars in length, and you’re free to mix up sequence lengths and time signatures within a kit for polyrhythmic fun and games. The dedicated Velocity lane at the bottom works exactly as expected, and the track’s Volume, Pan and three Shaper FX can be modulated by velocity and/or a dedicated multi-stage envelope…

$199 acoustica.com Acoustica’s Mixcraft DAW is one of those quietly successful applications that doesn’t seem to blow its own trumpet, yet scores consistently well whenever it’s reviewed on these pages. In short, it does the job well, so doesn’t need to shout from the rooftops about it! It might also not be on your radar because it’s a PC-only DAW, but if it is on your radar, you’ll know it comes packed with enough features to be a serious PC contender, and at just $199 for the top-end Pro Studio version on test here, it’s a bargain to boot. There’s also a cut-down Recording Studio version at $99 that lacks the Celemony Melodyne integration, a lot of the included plugin instruments and effects and other features, so we think Pro…

Although EDM (Electronic Dance Music) is used as a catch-all term by many in the music scene to describe Dance music, it also refers to the kind of big-sounding music produced and played by the likes of Skrillex, Steve Aoki and Marshmello at huge festivals like Ultra and EDC. While EDM shares similarities with styles like house, including a tempo ranging from 120-130bpm and the 4/4 drum patterns often used, there’s also influence from styles as diverse as dubstep, RnB and pop, clearly heard in the arrangement, synthesis and vocal production techniques used. Although EDM music is heavily pitched towards club or festival situations, the catchy hooks and huge vocal lines make it well suited to commercial radio too, with the concise arrangements made for exactly this purpose. All of…

01 Wavetable Pad & Envelope Start by creating a group that contains a wavetable generator and output module. We’ll use wavetables since their harmonic complexity adds a lot of flavor to the sound, so take some time to listen to these options, also scanning their frames. From there, add some unison and soften the attack and release of the envelope. 02 Pad Filter If you’ve selected a particularly bright wavetable, it can be useful to add a lowpass filter to soften the highs slightly. This will leave room for the upper frequencies created by the inharmonic layer and allow for easier blending. Leave the filter slope at x1 for a more gentle effect. 03 Inharmonic Layer + Filter Once the basis is in place, create a second group consisting of…

A new and improved Akai MPC Live has been on our radar since we saw a leaked design image back in March, and now it’s here. As we suspected, the MPC Live II is very much an evolution of its predecessor. Like its predecessor, it can be used with or without a computer, and comes with a 7-inch multi-gesture touchscreen. It promises all the features that you need to create a piece of music from start to finish. MPC Live II adds five hardware buttons for a better editing workflow, and now comes with built-in speakers. It sounds like these are more than just an afterthought, too: Akai says that it’s a proper monitoring system that delivers dynamic response across the frequency range. On the connectivity side, there are now…

An iZotope tutorial double-header kicks off as we learn more about two parts of the company's Neutron and Ozone packages. Tonal Balance Control was previously only available as part of either Neutron 3 and Ozone 9, but with version 2, it's available for purchase individually… although it makes a lot of sense to use it with those packages for best results. Tonal Balance Control, in a nutshell, is a metering plugin designed to compare your track to commercial standards, as measured by iZotope in a separate project. By looking at the readout across TBC's spectrum, you can see where your track is lacking or overpowering compared to contemporary standards. In a lovely twist, if you're running it in a DAW project alongside iZotope's Neutron 3 package, you can make tweaks…

When delay lines are synced to your host project’s tempo, everything lines up perfectly. It’s a brilliant way to keep things in line… but it’s not always actually desirable. Sure, those echoes hit exactly as other beats of the bar happen, but isn’t one of the goals of mixing to separate elements in the mix? By programming your delay processors in milliseconds, you can nudge things a little off the grid. To do this, though – unless your delay has an ‘offset’ parameter – you’ll need a little calculation. Your tempo is measured in ‘beats per minute’, and one beat is a quarter-note. Take 60 (seconds in a minute), and divide it by your tempo to get the number of seconds per beat. If you’re working with eighth-notes, divide by…

The Orb’s latest album, Abolition of the Royal Familia, was put together in two London studios. One of them is in Notting Hill Gate and was used for a lot of the live recording – strings, drums, some vocals. Initially, Orb-founder and creative linchpin, Alex Paterson, wanted to conduct our interview there. “It’s actually just an empty room with a few patch bays,” he explains, eyes twinkling with impish glee. “I thought it would be interesting to see what you made of a setup that had no gear at all. I suppose I could have claimed we did it all wirelessly.” In the end, he decided to come clean and invited us to the south London studio owned by multi-platinum producer, Martin Glover – aka Youth, bass player with goth/punk…

Ah, the '80s! A decade drenched in hairspray and carried aloft on the padded shoulders of the first wave of MTV video idols. New wave and synth-pop ruled the airwaves, and hip-hop was maturing into a serious artform thanks in no small part to the democratization of sampling technology. Before Ensoniq hit the scene with their Mirage keyboard, sampling was restricted to moneyed popstars and the lofty environs of the professional studio. Fairlights cost upwards of £18k, and “affordable” samplers like E-MU’s Emulator were a mere $9,800! The Mirage, at $2,000, put sampling within reach of the average musician. The Mirage was Ensoniq’s first product, released ahead of the company's intended debut, the ESQ-1 synthesizer, to capitalize on the then-burgeoning sampling craze. However, it shared with that synth the one-two…

While there’s a retro influence to Tracker’s ethos, fortunately the hardware itself feels pretty modern. The device itself is compact and lightweight without feeling cramped. Most of the buttons have a ‘clicky’ feel, true to classic computer hardware, but they also feel more sturdy and responsive than an old-school keyboard. Most programming duties are done using the pad grid and bulky rotary encoder. These generally work nicely together to make inputting and editing patterns relatively speedy. The pad grid itself is a little cramped, and it’s not up to much as a playing surface – you can play and record parts ‘live’, using a variety of scale modes but it’s never the most expressive experience – but, broadly, it fulfils multiple functions well. It can get confusing using the pad…

ShaperBox 2 added envelope followers for several of its processors, and that feature is carried across to CrushShaper 2. This tracks incoming audio, either from the main input or a sidechain routing, in order to apply the selected effect depth in a dynamic manner. There are individual envelope followers for each of CrushShaper’s four modulation-controlled parameters, each with attack, hold, release and threshold parameters for shaping the response. These can operate in a mixed manner with the custom LFOs too, allowing users to draw a modulation curve on the grid and then use an incoming audio signal to dictate the overall modulation depth. Envelope followers adhere to the effect’s multiband structure too, so can operate separately for the low, high and mid bands. Another winning feature of the ShaperBox design…

$119 sugar-bytes.de In a market awash with hard-hitting sample-based drum instruments, the release of any serious synth-powered alternative is always something to celebrate. While DrumComputer (VST/AU/AAX/Standalone) does use bits of audio samples as raw sound sources, it’s a synth in the purest sense, and the upshot is a beatbox with real character and personality. OK Computer DrumComputer is an eight-channel/engine drum machine with onboard step sequencing. All eight engines are identical in their parameters and layout, and each hosts a trio of drum-specific synth modules, which are blended to make the individual elements of your kit. The three modules are the “808-inspired” Resonator, the dual-mode Wavetable/Analog, and the wholly digital Resynth. Although there are no rules as to how they’re used together, the general idea is to define the transient…

We’ve focused on all the newcomers in Mixcraft 9 Pro Studio, but actually it was already pretty fully-featured in the plugin instrument department already. On the synth side, there are some rather impressive emulations including ME80, a great rendition of the Yamaha CS80, plus the Memorymoon Moog-a-like. Between these two, you already have a very decent range of classic sounds, but continuing the more vintage theme is Kastelheimer Veldberg XD, a pretty basic-looking but decent-sounding analog synth. The Acoustica Pianissimo Virtual Grand Piano is another big highlight of Pro Studio, a piano ROMpler that has a varied range of models, from uprights to concert halls. Omni Sampler 8 is a decent performance-based sampler that has some added extras under the hood, while also exclusive to Pro Studio is Glass Viper,…

$129 audient.com Audient made its name with huge mixing desks, but has been gaining a great reputation for small-to-medium sized interfaces – the ID range. These utilize some of the technology from those big desks – notably the ASP8024 preamp – for their high quality sound. At this year’s NAMM show Audient announced the EVO range of interfaces which are not designed to replace the ID range, but more to be a completely new and compact interface solution. Is this ‘the world’s smartest audio interface?’. Maybe we can answer that… EVO more We have the 4in on test here – the larger 8in is currently streeting at a higher price, but they look to be pretty similar, having ‘one focus in mind, to make recording easy!’ And on the face…

01 Pad Envelope Start by using envelope 1 (the amp envelope) to create a pad shape. In addition to extending the attack and release, try changing the curve of the attack segment to a more rounded, logarithmic shape. This will give the pad a smoother feel than a linear or exponential shape. 02 Envelope+ Waveform While a sawtooth wave certainly works, try searching for a single wave from a wavetable. This will add harmonic complexity and make the core pad element sound more unique. From there, add 4-5 voices of unison detuning for thickness. 03 Inharms Serum’s noise generator includes an array of inharmonic sources in the factory “FP_Inharms” folder (yes, that’s me). Find one that suits your design objectives, turn keyboard tracking on, and then find a tuning that…