Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2020 i Electronic Musician

One recent soft synth release stood out above all others recently – not least because it was free. Newfangled Audio's first foray into synths, Pendulate is distributed by Eventide, as is the paid-for version Generate, over the page. Pendulate takes its oscillation inspiration from the physics of a double pendulum – a theoretical setup where a pendulum dangles from the end of another pendulum, with the oscillation of each feeding back into the other one's movement. When used as an oscillator source, the idea is pretty functional, but by turning up Pendulate's Chaos sliders, you can introduce more real-world unpredictability to the signal. The signal runs through a West Coaststyle combo of a wavefolder and a low-pass gate, and there's modulation on tap for most parameters thanks to envelope and…

01 AUDIOTHING BLINDFOLD EQ MAC/PC/, 32/64-BIT We just love the philosophy behind this EQ, inspired by a quote from Matt Wallace in Sylvia Massy’s book Recording Unhinged that says, “if you have no idea of what frequency you are boosting or cutting, it doesn’t matter what the number is. It matters how it sounds”. So there are no numbers on AudioThing’s Blindfold UI; just use your ears… audiothing.net 02 IGNITE AMPS PTEQ-X MAC/PC, 32/64-BIT Ignite Amps’ PTEq-X doesn’t just recreate one classic Pultec piece of hardware but three, along with, Ignite say, “some circuit improvements and additional features to increase its versatility”. It takes on the original MEQ-5, HL3C and PEQ-1A Pultec hardware, accurately capturing the character of the overall Pultec sound with some aplomb. There are nicely controlled, beefy…

Last month, we had a look at the basic inner workings of tonal harmony and how chord progressions actually progress. In this issue’s Easy Guide, we’re going to examine a different approach: modal harmony. In contrast to tonal harmony, where there’s a definite hierarchy of chord types, with the tonic at the top, followed by dominant and then predominant chords, when dealing with modal harmony, this hierarchy goes out the window, as there’s no such harmonic function involved. We saw last time how tonal music mainly uses just major or minor keys, also known in ‘mode speak’ as the Ionian or Aeolian modes. In contrast, modal music doesn’t just exploit major and minor keys, it uses all of the seven available modern modes – not just Ionian and Aeolian, but…

$999 roland.com Roland’s full size piano action MIDI keyboard controller, the A-88, has many fans and rightly so as the action is excellent and the ivory touch key finish feels great. Nevertheless, time marches on and with almost a whole decade on the clock a refresh was clearly on the cards. And now the result is with us: the A-88MKII. First impressions 88 key controllers are by nature long and if you throw in a weighted piano action, they’re heavy too. However, much like its predecessor the A-88MKII is shallow front to back, has a reasonably low profile and has a modest controls section to the left. So, the overall footprint is reasonably compact, which is good news if you’re trying to accommodate it in a studio environment or transport…

You should now be ready to press the record button, safe in the knowledge that you have the sound of the drums completely nailed. Of course, there’s a whole bunch of stuff to do post recording to turn the raw drum takes into a mixed kit, but we’ll cover that in future features. First, though, we have to make sure we record everything we need. There’s nothing worse than putting up your drum recordings, long after the drummer has packed up and left, only to find that the bottom snare mic hasn’t recorded or that your middle section has click track from the headphones spilling all over it. That’s why a test take is important; here are a few tips on how to get the most out of the session.…

“There is a button labeled Loop, but as far as I can tell, it does not actually loop your audio input, nor could I perceive what any of the buttons or knobs in this section did” Montreal Assembly’s 856 for Zellersasin pedal (don’t ask me what it means), is a looper which allows playback of three-layered copies of a single recording. Each layer can be manipulated in various ways. Portions of each loop can be played back in various rhythms and at different pitches. Though offered by the people who created the well-respected Count to Five, this pedal didn’t quite inflame interest in the same way, possibly because it is big, expensive, and complicated. The 856 Max for Live plugin by Oldtoy, on the other hand, is free, and less…

Danish musician and producer Rasmus Littauer has spent much of the past decade behind the drums for acts such as Mø and Major Lazer. Recent years have seen Littauer focus his attention on his own project, School of X, resulting in the self-produced debut album Armlock. We caught up with Littauer to talk influences, creativity and more. When did you start making music? I grew up outside of a town in Denmark called Aarhus. I have three brothers, two musicians (Yangze and Simon Littauer). They work with complicated synths, modulars and algorithms. I think this scientific way of looking at music made me want to do it differently, but I’ve been really inspired by their approaches; they’re the main reason I started making music. I started playing drums aged 5…

A standalone version of Native Instruments’ Maschine beatmaking platform has long been rumored – particularly in light of Akai’s decision to take the MPC range back out of the box – and now it’s here. Maschine+, as it’s known, is a pad-based groovebox that can be used with or without a computer. This is a Maschine that’s been a long time coming. NI tells us that it had a proof-of-concept prototype as long ago as 2014, but only now has it created a product that it’s happy to put on release. We’ve got our hands on one, and ahead of a full review next issue, let’s take a look at how it works… A familiar face From the outside, Maschine+ looks strikingly similar to the Maschine MkIII, but under the…

The commercial half of this synth pair, Generate houses new choices of oscillator algorithm, of which the 'Double Pendulum' is only one. The Wavefolder section also has a choice of algorithms and the ability to switch in an analog-modeled VCA. Another difference between the two synths is that Generate adds in a set of effects (EQ, Chorus, Delay and Reverb), and performance controls like Mono, Legato, Poly, Unison and Voice settings to give you plenty more to play with. The additions combine to be more than the sum of their parts, of course. Again, Generate has a very specific sound – a distorted, raspy quality that would be great for lead and bass work in many up-front genres, although more subdued tones are still possible here. When considering the two,…

01 VALHALLADSP VALHALLASUPERMASSIVE Mac/PC/linux, 32/64-bit ValhallaDSP makes some of the best reverb and delay plugins going, with the likes of ValhallaRoom, ValhallaDelay and Vintage Verb all essential tools and excellent value at $50 a pop. The developer has a great line-up of freeware too – Space Modulator is a musthave creative modulation effects. SuperMassive is Valhalla's best freebie yet though. It sits in the space between delay and reverb, specializing in extreme, drawn-out effects and all-out ambient madness. It's the kind of plugin that can completely reinvigorate sounds. valhalladsp.com 02 VALHALLADSP FREQ ECHO MAC/PC, 32/64-BIT Another quality freebie from Valhalla, Freq Echo is a little older and less stylish looking than SuperMassive, but it boast just as much sonic power. The effects engine here combines analog emulated delay with a…

When Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn formed electro-pop outfit Sylvan Esso in 2013, Meath was performing with her traditional folk vocal trio Mountain Man and Sanborn was creating Flying Lotus-esque electronic grooves as Made Of Oak. Despite these disparate seeming backgrounds, the duo’s musical tastes and ambitions clicked pretty naturally, resulting in a pair of attention-grabbing albums – 2014’s Sylvan Esso and the Grammy-nominated 2016 follow-up, What Now? Much like synth-tinged pop luminaries like Robyn or Christine and The Queens, Sylvan Esso are at their best when pairing infectious dancefloor grooves with rich, emotive motifs underpinned by a hint of tonal ambiguity. That contrast has never been more clear than on their third LP Free Love, released this month, which pairs the optimistic pop of tracks like ‘Ferris Wheel’ or…

Polyphony was something of a holy grail for the synth makers of the late '70s. Weened on a meagre diet of monosynths for nearly a decade, synthesists longed for a workable way to play polyphonically – that is, with chords. There were a few string machines, but these were paraphonic, employing octave dividers to produce multiple pitches and then running the lot through a single filter and VCA. For many, Sequential Circuits’ Prophet-5 was the answer to their polyphonic prayers, offering five-voice polyphony and instant recall of user patches. A huge seller, the slick and elegant Prophet-5 received a lot of attention in the press and graced many a stage. Yet Yamaha had been there first. Let loose in 1976, the bulky, garish CS-80 was the antithesis of Sequential’s Prophet.…

The A-88MKII Control (PC/Mac) app has plenty of options. First up, you get graphical editing of the Layer/Split settings so it’s much easier to visualize what’s going on. Next, you can modify the CC assignments for the pedals and the modwheel, and also the function of the two control change buttons (S1 and S2), which can act as either control change or program change buttons. Finally, you can edit the pads and control knobs including backlit color settings. With three categories, 16 banks of eight pads and CC options for the knobs that’s quite a few potential parameters. Options include MIDI learn for note assignments and latch and monetary function for CCs. The app makes setting things up easy. Talking of MIDI, the A-88MkII is one of the first to…

$29 babyaud.io Baby Audio is an LA-based boutique software developer with a handful of plugins, including Comeback Kid, which is highly flexible delay with in-built transient shaper, tape saturation and modulation, and Super VHS, which is a multifaceted tape saturation and noise effect. Last year they released I Heart NY, a flavor-filled black box-style parallel compressor designed to quickly inject some classic Stateside punch and colouration into your sounds. Emboldened by the success of this simple plugin, their latest release, Parallel Aggressor (AU, VST2, VST3, AAX) sticks with the parallel concept – see right – but ups the ante, extending it to two separate processing chains. Parallel Lines Parallel Aggressor’s two processes are compression (Spank) and saturation (Heat) which alongside the original dry signal are balanced using a 3-fader mixer.…

When setting up a recording session, the first thing you need to sort out is the room in which the drums are going to be recorded. The question is: live or dead? If you’re making a rock track, you’ll need a ‘live’-sounding room or an adjacent live-sounding room where you can put ambient mics. If there’s a rug on a wooden floor, get rid of it – drums always sound better on a hard surface. For a dry, disco-sounding kit, you’ll need a ‘dead’ room, like the lounge or bedroom, where soft furnishings help to calm the sound. A good drummer will know how important it is to get the kit sounding right. Freshly tuned, new heads will have a crisp attack and make the drums nice and loud. Loud…

Klangfreund Multimeter $59 Multimeter is a fairly broadcast-focused analyzer, but one that lets you get a great view of your signal’s loudness. If you’re trying to get with the new-school measurements of LUFS and True Peak, you can consider it a trusty ally. The left-hand main meter displays your peak to short term level ratio, which turns green when at ideal levels, or other colours when the range is too hot or cold. Peaking marks and red lines on Multimeter are retroactive, meaning that if you change the setting of the output level slider, you can make all the red you’ve previously encouraged go away – or bring it all back if you push things too far. Multimeter brings together six rule-ofthumb measures of your audio’s fit-for-purposeness, recording them over…

Native Instruments goes back to Guitar Rig as it announces Komplete 13 Having skipped an update in 2019, Native Instruments has announced a new version of Komplete, its chunky collection of software products. Komplete 13 adds some of NI’s biggest releases of the past couple of years, and includes a surprise update to Guitar Rig, the company’s suite of guitar amps, effects and cabs. Guitar Rig 6 Pro promises an overhauled interface, new amps, new effects and Intelligent Circuit Modelling. The last ‘full’ update was way back in 2011, so a new version wasn’t really on our radar. Intelligent Circuit Modelling is “a machine-learning technology that can provide greater realism when emulating classic hardware.” In Guitar Rig 6, it’s used to power a range of boutique and vintage amps. Komplete…

01 DISCODSP OB-XD 2 Mac/PC, 32/64-bit We’d stress that this list is ‘in no particular order’, so this number one does not actually mean ‘the best’, but DiscoDSP's faithful emulation of Oberheim's iconic OB-X is certainly up there with the top tier of freeware synths. Sonically, this can sit alongside the most convincing analog emulations on the market. OB-Xd builds on the design of the original too, adding a blendable multimode filter and chorus, reverb and delay effects into the mix. A must have! discodsp.com 02 GREEN OAK CRYSTAL MAC/PC, 32/64-BIT Almost as old as this magazine’s editor, Green Oak software Crystal has, like Synth1 after it, been a mainstay in the freeware music scene for many a year. And it’s easy to understand why… at least once you look…

We’re continuing our look at sax players to get some fresh ideas for our playing. These two players were defining influences that took soul and created funk in the late ‘60s, through the ‘70s and beyond. Maceo Parker Maceo Parker first came to prominence playing with James Brown, a position he held on and off over three decades. He can be heard on stone-cold hits such as “I Got You (I Feel Good)”, “Cold Sweat”, “Poppa’s Got A Brand New Bag”, and “Sex Machine”. He also played with Parliament on seminal funk classics like The Clones Of Dr. Funkenstein and The Mothership Connection, and has toured/recorded as a leader for many years now. Example 1 comes from an album Parker released in 1970 under the name Maceo & All the…

$175 orchestraltools.com Orchestral Tools' award-winning Metropolis Ark collections supply everything from bombastic orchestral parts for trailers to deep and epic sounds, while Junkie XL Brass is their ‘artist’ title, a collab with the famous composer and producer. But how do you fancy some Orchestral Tools manoeuvres on the cheap, and a free player to go with them? These creative Soundpacks are just that: distinctive, themed sounds that run within OT’s new SINE Player that you can download for free. It’s a kind of easy-to-use Kontakt player with neat OT touches within which you can download individual parts and presets of the Soundpacks, or the whole lot. You can load them up and play, with extra mixer and dynamic controls and more. Yet importantly for many of us – mainly those…

Parallel processing is a tried and tested, long-established mixing technique that was developed to more accurately combine a processed dynamics signal (often a compressor) and dry signal. It allowed us to take advantage of the coloration created by driving the processor hard, but at the same time retain some of the characteristics of the clean uncompressed signal. Conceptually it’s a simple enough idea, but in practice could eat up channel space and eventually some hardware designers introduced dry/wet mix blend options to streamline the process. Software developers have expanded on this idea and Parallel Aggressor offers a 3-path topology with multiple processing stages in two of the pathways. This clearly goes beyond the simple New York compression emulated in their I Heart NY plugin, and is maybe more akin to…

The most important microphones in our whole setup are the two overheads, which basically record the whole kit sound. Ideally, you’ll have a pair of large diaphragm condenser mics on tall stands two or three feet above the kit and about four feet apart. These are a ‘spaced pair’ of omni-directionals or cardioids. Omnis will give you more of the room sound, while cardioids achieve more focus. Although this setup is common practice and can sound great, it’s not actually the easiest to get right, and it can also sound terrible. The main problem is phase – you need to ensure that the sounds from your drums get to all of the overheads at roughly the same time. The more mics you use, the more complicated the phase relationships get…

Although primarily known as a wavetable synthesizer, Xfer Serum also allows you to stack up simple sine waves from scratch, making it a fantastic entry point into the world of additive sound generation. At the top of Serum’s Wavetable Editor sits the FFT Area. The top row of vertical bars represent waveform harmonics, or ‘frequency bins’: the far left bar is the fundamental frequency, and the bars to the right represent the related harmonics. Octave intervals (2x, 4x, 8x the fundamental frequency) are grayed out. Simply click and drag a bar up to set that harmonic’s amplitude. Using the bars underneath, you can also alter each harmonic’s phase position. ‘Proper’ additive synths (like the ones above) offer more control over harmonic modulation, but Serum’s waveform display helps you visualize the…

Adding Levels to your master track, you’ll immediately start to get feedback on your track’s shortcomings and overabundances, as its six mode selectors turn red or green to tell you how on-track that particular mode is. Said modes are LUFS, Peak, StereoField, LRA, Dynamic Range and Bass Space, and global functions include a mono checker and mid/side auditioning. Dive into any one of the six to get more info about your signal: Stereo Field offers a goniometer, correlation meters and a filter for checking the image of particular ranges; LUFS gives short and long-term loudness readings; Bass Space can advise where in the low end your kick and bass will fit best. Levels represents an intelligent set of tools that you need to check for every track before releasing it…