Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2018 i Future Music

The Future Of Music 6 cool things in Live 10 you might have missed Aside from the new devices, many of the best things in Live 10 come in the form of subtle workflow enhancements and minor tweaks 01 Automatic backups Whenever you save a Live Set, the application will now automatically store up to ten previous versions in its backup folder. You can roll back to one of these using the Show Old Version option. Plus, a project’s undo history now remains active even if you fully close down a Live Set and return to it later. 02 More bass from EQ Eight Live’s main EQ now has an extended low-end frequency range. This means EQ positions and frequency cutoffs can now be set as low as 10 Hz.…

ALBUM OF THE MONTH Khruangbin Con Todo El Mundo Night Time Stories The psychedelic Texan trio Khruangbin return with their immersive and expansive second album. Following on from 2015’s widely acclaimed debut, The Universe Smiles Upon You, an album that drew largely upon Thai funk cassettes from the ’60s and ’70s, the new record takes a more outward-looking, global approach. Con Todo El Mundo still takes in those south east Asian influences, but also branches off to delve into undiscovered funk and soul sounds from the Mediterrean and the Middle East, most notably Iran. Fusing their idiosyncratic strain of non-white world music with classic soul, dub, global beats and reverbdrenched psychedelia, the free-flowing band strike up an addictively sensual record that explores as much as it entertains. Laidback but full…

RECOMMENDED Tune-Yards I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life 4AD The bold and ambitious fourth studio album from eclectic Oakland based outfit, Tune-Yards. The band, operating as a duo for the first time on the new record, find a fiercely passionate and upfront sound that puts their distinctive approach into clear focus. Bandleader Merrill Garbus and long-time collaborator and drummer Nate Brenner launch into their innovative concoction of drum loops, vocal cut ups, burning synths and DIY FX brimming with confidence. That self-assurance is encapsulated not just in Garbus’ defiant lyrics, that bristle on topics encompassing politics, race, feminism and the environment, but also in album’s glistening sound palette. Robotic 80s beats collide with gleaming synths, scattered rhythms, complex structures and Garbus’ trademark alto screeches. Written and produced…

PRODUCER SPECIAL 2018 Marc ‘MK’ Kinchen’s 10 ESSENTIAL STUDIO LESSONS Aspiring producers, you don’t want to miss this… House music legend Marc ‘MK’ Kinchen has been topping the charts for decades with his own productions and remixes – we tap him up for his ten pro tips © Dan Wilton Lauded for his signature house sound based on stylised piano melodies and cut-up vocals, Detroit-born Marc ‘MK’ Kinchen was nurtured by The Belleville Three – techno legends Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. By the early ’90s MK had put that knowledge into practice, topping the US dance charts with hits such as Always and Love Changes alongside classic house anthems including Burning. Today, MK is a prolific remixer and producer with a 500-strong discography and a hi-tech studio…

PRODUCER SPECIAL 2018 Femme Angel TAPE Music, 2017 © Joe Branston Laura Bettinson’s music juxtaposes involved rhythms and intriguing sonic textures with catchy vocals, making it an engaging listen for beard-stroking electronica enthusiasts and lovers of pure pop alike. Future Music descended on Laura’s West London studio to find out how she created the balmy, house-inspired Angel and learn more about her unusual songwriting process. The idea for Angel came from an ad lib that you did for a different project… “Yeah, it was like a random topline for a thing that I got sent. I quite regularly get sent instrumentals from people looking for vocals. I can’t even remember what the original instrumental was, but it was one of those ones where you bang a…

PRODUCER’S GUIDE Reason 10 The new features in action We may not have properly covered Reason in-depth for a while in Future Music, but that doesn’t mean that development has stopped on Propellerhead’s venerable virtual studio. Quite the opposite in fact – a groundswell of new features have been added in recent years. Version 9 introduced Player Devices, Audio-to-MIDI, Bounce In Place and Pitch Editing features, bringing Reason more into line with some of the best today’s DAW world has to offer. We’ll expose Reason’s excellent Player Devices in this article, giving you a window into the creative potential that’s available. Next, version 9.5 did what had previously been unthinkable, adding VST support to Reason. We’ll show you how to get the most from your third-party plugins, and even give…

VST/CV TRICKS 1 Now that the Pulsar Dual LFO comes free with Reason, you get two LFOs to call up instantly to modulate any control in a plugin. 2 To use Pulsar’s envelope, add it to a Combinator with your instrument, select Pulsar in the Programmer and tick Receive Notes. You can send this signal to any other device in the rack, including VST effects for sidechain setups. 3 The Matrix Sequencer can sequence any parameter. Program it in Curve mode and output the Curve CV. 4 Gate signals can be a real inspiration. Using Kong’s Gate outputs to drive VST parameters is especially fun if you’ve got an MPC-style pad controller connected. 5 Use Combinators to save VST instrument and effects chains – including their CV routings – for…

PRODUCER SPECIAL 2018 Kevin McKay The Glasgow Underground boss tells FM about his life in electronic music © Joseph Branston “An amazing studio, plus an amazing engineer. That’s the dream right there” Kevin McKay has been producing and DJing on the Glasgow club scene since the early ’90s. He’s arguably best known as the boss of Glasgow Underground, the label he founded in ’97, which has racked up an extensive release list featuring the likes of Romanthony, CamelPhat and Mateo & Matos, alongside Mckay’s own tracks. In the mid ’00s, he found himself working behind-the-scenes on several chart hits, as a co-producer in Linus Loves and behind the ’boards for Mylo’s breakthrough LP Destroy Rock & Roll.FM caught up with him at ADE 2017. How did you get started making…

FMCHOICE 6 Great MIDI Effects Ableton Live Random Random lets you control how much unpredictability is applied to Pitch. With the Scale and Choices dials, you can create anything from random octave jumps to chromatic madness. Kirnu Cream | 35€ A third-party MIDI processor for creating arpeggiated sequences, chord triggers and pattern sequences. Available for Mac, PC and iOS hosts, and with a standalone mode. Five12 Numerology | £114 A standalone program which can be integrated into DAW environments. Now on Version 4, Numerology offers step sequencing aplenty with myriad modulation options. Logic Pro X Arpeggiator When Logic Pro introduced MIDI effects, it did it in style, with several highly useful processors. The jewel in the crown is probably the Arpeggiator, which offers great flexibility. SugarBytes Thesys | 99€ This…

REVIEWS Roland Boutique SH-01A £349 You wait for ages and then three Roland Boutiques come out at once. Bruce Aisher tests out the third of the most recent trio The early years of the 1980s were an interesting time for synthesizers, and few manufacturers summed-up the changes taking place better than Japanese legends Roland. Prior to this, most synths were large, heavy and with obligatory wooden trim. Inside they usually featured multiple printed circuit-boards (PCBs) containing large numbers of discrete components. Move into the ’80s, however, and single PCB designs became easier and cheaper to create. In turn, smaller custom-designed plastic casings were employed. Taken together, all these changes meant that buying a synthesizer became increasingly affordable. Despite this, polyphonic synthesisers were still relatively costly, making monosynths the likely first…

THE ALTERNATIVES Pioneer DJ SP-16 £1,320 Pioneer’s sampler packs twice as many sampling channels, but lacks the overall depth of the Octatrack MkII. www.pioneerdj.com Akai MPC Live £999 Impressively, the Live is battery powered. It also boasts full audio track recording and fluid DAW integration. The Octatrack is, arguably, the better live tool though. www.akaipro.com Native Instruments Maschine Mk3 £479 If you’re not dead set on being 100% free of the laptop, then NI’s Mk3 does a good job of bridging the gap between software flexibilty and hands-on interaction. www.native-instruments.com…

Toontrack Superior Drummer 3 £287 Does a 230GB footprint and revised interface make this the last word in sampled drum libraries? Jono Buchanan makes room Toontrack’s Superior Drummer 3 (SD3) has been a long time in development. Its previous incarnation was released back in 2008, and whilst several updates and new sound content has been made available in the intervening period, Toontrack have clearly decided it’s been long enough. However, SD3 is no mere ‘update’. George Massenberg was tasked with engineering the drum recordings for this completely revised approach to the Superior Drummer concept, and the result is 230GB of new sample library, across a total of seven drum kits, all recorded at 44.1kHz/24-bit at Galaxy Studios in Belgium. However, it’s not just the sample content which has been reimagined…

THE ALTERNATIVES Korg Kronos LS-88 £2,999 The Kronos is a heavyweight workstation and features several great engines for EP, organ, piano and synth fodder. The LS model offers a lightweight waterfall-feel keybed and this reduces the overall weight too. www.korg.com Yamaha Montage 7 £2,899 Yamaha’s newest flagship sounds immense and offers an upgraded sample-based AWM2 engine, along with a high-fidelity FM engine (FMX) plus comprehensive effects and a Super-Knob for morphing several parameters simultaneously. uk.yamaha.com Roland VR-730 £1,309 Roland’s answer to the NS3 Compact. It features a 73-note waterfall keyboard for controlling organ, piano/EP and synth engines, along with splitting, layering and effects. Great price too! www.roland.com…

CLASSIC ALBUM Caspa Everybody’s Talking, Nobody’s Listening! Fabric, 2009 Words by Roy Spencer From the moment UK reggae legend David Rodigan, bathed in reverb and echo, asks, “Are you listening? Because Caspa’s playing,” on the album’s intro, you know you’d better pin back those lugs. What follows is a right earful of dubstep. It’s the sound of late 2000’s West London. But via ’90s jungle, Houston ‘screwed & chopped’ music, a bit of Only Fools and Horses, and a lot of doing whatever he wanted. “It was still an ‘anything goes’ time for dubstep,” says Caspa. “Not a lot of albums were floating around, not a lot of compilations. I knew people would look at it and judge it going, ‘So, this is dubstep?’ I wanted to show people what…

Albums Nils Frahm All Melody Erased Tapes Two years on from his last album, Solo, unconventional German composer Nils Frahm returns with his seventh studio album. His most fascinating and absorbing work to date, All Melody is a wonderfully atmospheric and nuanced take on his idiosyncratic cross-pollination of classical and electronic music. Recorded in Berlin’s renowned Saal 3, but only after Frahm deconstructed and the reconstructed the entire space, the album is full of beauty, emotion, and his trademark cinematic sound. Honing in on emotive melodies, spine-tingling tones and warm but spacious textures, Frahm harnesses a cosy, intimate sound that feels very personal. Full of warmth and dream-like memories, the entire record has a nostalgic feel whilst also showcasing the composer’s futuristic leanings. Always an artist to take full advantage…

PRODUCER SPECIAL 2018 Emika Berlin-based electronic musician Emika long harboured dreams of writing her own fully-fledged orchestral symphony. Danny Turner chats to the aspiring DJ and producer about Melanfonie’s host of unpredictable challenges © Adam Krena “Logic is my pen and paper. I hear a melody in my head and can pencil it in super-quick” With three successful electronic albums under her belt, a collection of classical piano compositions and numerous writing credits for film and TV, Ema Jolly, better known as Emika, undertook what she considered to be her most ambitious project, writing and recording a full symphony comprising conductor, soprano vocalist and 70-strong orchestra. Untangled from her record contract and free to release music on her own Emika Records, her first move was to seek funding via Kickstarter.…

PRODUCER SPECIAL 2018 Ellen Allien DJ, producer, label owner, vinyl champion… FM meet up with the multi-faceted artist © Joseph Branston “Now I try not to bring out so much; just stuff I really love” Ellen Allien forged her career in the early ’90s in the DJ booths of Berlin’s legendary club scene. Since, she’s maintained her position at the heart of Europe’s dance music scene, running her influential BPitch Control label since 1999 and keeping up a hectic schedule of DJ dates. 2017 saw the release of Nost, her first album in four years, which saw her returning to her club roots, after excursions into the worlds of ambience and electro-pop on the records that preceded it. FM caught up with Ellen at the 2017 Amsterdam Dance Event, ahead…

PRODUCER SPECIAL 2018 65daysofstatic Much more than your typical instrumental rock band, 65daysofstatic embrace electronic music to create a vivid fusion of thrashing post-rock and cerebral architectures. Danny Turner chats to founding member Paul Wolinski Formed in 2001, Sheffield-based rock band 65daysofstatic have always had an experimental edge. Their debut album, The Fall of Math, broke the mould by pairing visceral processed guitars with bristling Warp-era sound design. The band continued to evolve on subsequent albums, merging glitchy beats and driving riffs with atypical ambient backdrops. Always guaranteed to do the unexpected, in 2011 the band released an alternate soundtrack to the 1972 sci-fi movie, Silent Running. This was followed a few years later with a soundtrack to the video game No Man’s Sky, where they employed generative music techniques…

Get more from VSTs in Reason Hell has frozen over, Donald Trump is the president of the USA, and Reason has added VST plugin support. Now that the dust has settled on 2017, it’s easy to forget how unlikely some things once seemed – we never thought Propellerhead would open up their DAW to the ubiquitous third-party standard, but open it they have, and the results are spectacular. So how does VST implementation work in Reason? For starters, there’s no Audio Units or VST 3 support – only the ‘standard’ VST 2.4 protocol is supported so far. This won’t make much practical difference for the majority of users, who might well find nothing missing compared to the third-party plugin selection they get in their other DAWs. There’s an optional window…

Reason 10 | Producer’s Guide To Wavetable synthesis with Europa Version 10 welcomes this charming, animated synth into Reason’s orbit. Here’s how to get the most from it 01 > Start Europa up on an Initialised patch. At the top-left, only Engine I is on. We’ll keep it that way. In the Wave section, browse the dropdown menu of waves and turn the Shape knob to see how the sound morphs through the types of wave. 02 > Let’s get an LFO involved. In the matrix, there’s a Source set up for LFO 2. Set that row’s Destination to Engine 1 >> Shape, and turn the Amount dial up to 100. Now mess with LFO 2 itself to modulate Engine 1’s Shape. 03 > The Modifier selectors in each engine…

PRODUCER SPECIAL 2018 James Holden Electronic music’s favourite polymath, James Holden, returns with The Animal Spirits, a dizzying modular-fuelled trip around the senses that may, quite possibly, be the album of the year. Hamish Mackintosh enjoys the trip © Joseph Branston “If computers can just play the patterns you wrote at home then that’s such a limitation” On the coldest night of the year thus far, FM are in Islington, London, to hook up with the singular talent that is James Holden who, along with his recently expanded band, is shortly to seriously blow some minds and, proverbially, raise the roof off the rarefied Assembly Hall. Holden’s new album, The Animal Spirits, is a joyous, transcendent whirl, blending Holden’s signature modular synth lines with the drumming talents of Tom Page…

MODULAR MONTHLY Set burst generators to stun! Do you have the rhythmic gumption for Noise Engineering’s Variatic Erumption? Everything we’ve touched from Noise Engineering consistently amazes. Even if months pass without their modules, going back to them feels plugging into an old friend. But not in that way. The Loquelic Iteritas and Basimilus Iteritas have made their way onto the radar of a lot of modular users, but the Variatic Erumption may have slipped by some unnoticed. The module is a dual burst generator with an onboard 1v/oct tracking LFO/clock that can drive the module itself or the rest of your system. It’s not just abouting setting up bursts and then firing off a blast of gates or triggers, but to create far more musical sets of patterns with plenty…

PRODUCER SPECIAL 2018 SQL We meet up with Amsterdam-based producer Pim van Horssen to talk about creating his debut album, Sequel “Ableton just allows me to get more creative. Especially with hardware – it’s really intuitive” Dutch producer Pim van Horssen has steadily been building a reputation over the past decade with a steady stream of meticulously crafted techno releases. In recent years he’s expanded his formerly software-centric workflow to embrace increasing amounts of analogue hardware and field recordings. The fruit of this development has been this summer’s debut full-length album, Sequel. FM caught up with him in his Amsterdam warehouse studio during ADE 2017. What’s your favourite piece of production gear at the moment? “My favourite bit of kit at the moment is the OP-1 from Teenage Engineering. It’s…

Velocity Compression Limiting velocities can get recorded parts under control while producing a more seamless sound Velocity is a control we take for granted these days, partly because it has always felt natural to have a playing surface which offers ‘touch control’ to provide the capability of more musical playing. Just as an acoustic piano allows you to control dynamics depending on the strength of a key stroke, so MIDI keyboards which offer velocity sensitivity (as most now do) let you enhance your performances considerably. However, it’s possible to get too much of even the best things and velocity ranges which are too diverse can be a problem. You can lose notes which are too quiet, while ones which are too exuberant poke out and make their presence felt in…

THE ALTERNATIVES Roland SH-101 Software Plug-Out Synth €110 Another Roland foray into digitally recreating the sound of the SH-101. It works as an AU/VST plugin, but is also compatible with the SYSTEM-1, SYSTEM-1m and SYSTEM-8 www.roland.com Roland SH-101 (used) £700+ Double you money and you could get the real deal, though you will need to stump up for a CV/ Gate interface to play it from your DAW. ebay.co.uk D16 Lush-101 €149 It may share the same numerical assignment, and whilst capable of a decent SH-101 impression, D16’s Lush-101 is an altogether more complex beast with plenty of polyphonic layering options. d16.pl…

Lewitt LCT 540 Subzero £630 Lewitt’s latest condenser mic boasts a sensitivity beyond human hearing. Robbie Stamp puts his ears in the ring with it Bass-heavy sources come out well as the Subzero extends right down low without any muddiness The Lewitt LCT540’s ‘Subzero’ suffix refers to its acoustical self-noise sitting below 0dB SPL across most of the audible frequency spectrum. For those recording quiet sources or delving into heavy compression, the self-noise of mics and preamps is the major limiting factor, even with de-noising plugins. Lewitt have pitched the LCT540 at just these people, promising a very quiet, sensitive mic with a particular focus on vocals. The Subzero comes in a chunky plastic carry case with the requisite accessories: shockmount cradle, pop guard, windshield, and leatherette bag. The mic…

THE ALTERNATIVES BFD FXpansion 3 £149 Now at Version 3, FXpansion’s BFD3 is another, multi-sampled, hyper-flexible acoustic drum library recorded in meticulous detail. Probably SD3’s most immediate rival. www.fxpansion.com NI Komplete 11 £379 Alongside the myriad other software titles included in Komplete 11, you’ll find Battery 4 as well as Kontakt 5 libaries in the form of Abbey Road Drums, Studio Drummer and DrumLab. www.native-instruments.com Apple Logic Pro X £199 It might sound odd to be including a DAW as a rival to SD3 but Logic’s Drummer, combined with the Production+ drum kits, let you configure extremely realistic-sounding drum parts. www.apple.com…

SOUNDS & SAMPLES Sample Magic Klip £99 Sample Magic are best know for their dance and electronic-focused sample packs, and are regarded as one of the best in this field. More recently however, they have been exploring other areas of sonic provision, particularly in the form of Kontakt instruments such as Bloq and Klip (on test here). Klip combines a substantive library of 4,000, melodic and rhythmic hits and loops with a multi-track trigger/ parameter sequencer and effects-laden mixer section. Unlike many Kontakt instruments, which are little more than a simple sample playback engine shoehorned into a fancy GUI, Klip feels more self-contained. In these regards it is therefore reminiscent of Native Instruments’ Maschine (minus the custom hardware). Samples are loaded into one of the trigger’s pads, and then programmed…

Importing clips with MPC Live I just got an MPC Live and I’m wondering how to set up some clips for live performance? The MPC Live is the only self-contained hardware device to offer clip-style launching in an Ableton-like fashion; basically it’s the only viable standalone alternative to using Ableton plus a laptop. It’s nowhere near as deep as Ableton though (there’s no clip linking and shorter clips don’t allow performing with one-shots over the top, for example). However, with some clever thinking, you can get some great results, and so you can devise a fluid/ flexible clip-based live show. Here’s how to make/import clips and assign them to pads… Start a new project in your MPC Live/X,name/save it to your SD card/USB stick. Set master tempo to match the…

LIKE IT? TRY THESE… Caspa & Rusko FabricLive 37 A typhoon of low-end fury from 2007 that blew open the doors for Caspa, and set the stage for his debut album to continue the destruction. ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: Caspa – Born To Do It, Uncle Sam – Round The World Girls (Tes La Rok Remix), Caspa – Louder DJ Michael “5000” Watts Presents Swishahouse Blow One 2K8 Classic “chopped & screwed” CD from 2008. Was this the one Caspa bought in Houston that influenced his album so much? ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: Tuw Piece – 5000, Paul Wall – Exposed Bun B – Gangsta Various Artists Good Looking Music Volume 2 Classic jungle from ’98, featuring a couple of earlier LTJ Bukem bangers that Caspa held very…

Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto Glass Noton Revered composers and sound designers Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto come together for their seventh collaborative album. The continuous, 37-minute album is a live recording from a completely improvised performance at architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut. The duo, having only rehearsed once the day before, experimented with keyboards, mixers, glass bowls, crotales, gong mallets, rubber heads and the building itself to create a fascinating experience. Stylish and elegantly minimal, Glass has an ethereal aesthetic that seems to let the sounds of nature into the house. Its glistening chimes and melodies evoke the sensation of rain and condensation whilst the ever-present pads inject drama, tension and suspense throughout. There’s a watchful sensation at play, putting the listener in the role of uneasy…

Interview Patrice Bäumel FM catch up with the Amsterdam-based Kompakt affiliate to chat synths, effects and techno futurism… “Make more music, make better music, get better every day” Born in East Germany and now a resident of Amsterdam, DJ and producer Patrice Bäumel has carved himself a niche amongst the upper echelons of European dance music through a solid 15-plus years of hard work and studio experimentation. A hardware synth fan and Ableton Live addict, Bäumel has a brand of gritty house and techno that’s born out of a hands-on, jam-centric approach to creativity, embracing unexpected imperfections. FM caught up with him on his home turf during 2017’s Amsterdam Dance Event... What’s your favourite piece of software? “It is, of course, and always will be, Ableton. It’s like my super-sampler.…

PRODUCER SPECIAL 2018 Purple Disco Machine FM catch up with the German producer to talk synths, studio rituals and new LP Soulmatic “I start my studio day by listening to old disco and funk on vinyl to get in the mood” Few names let you know what you can expect from an artist quite as succinctly as Purple Disco Machine, the moniker of German producer Tino Piontek. Across eight years of releases for labels including OFF, Defected and Spinnin’, he’s shaped a distinctive sound that takes slices of classic disco and feeds it through a filter of sequencer funk and club-ready drum machine grooves. This summer saw the release of the debut PDM album, Soulmatic, which features guest slots from the likes of Kool Keith, Faithless and CeeLo Green. FM…

PRODUCER SPECIAL 2018 Throttle FM sit down with one of EDM’s fastest rising names – ‘dirty disco’ producer Robbie Bergin “Every time I make a synth lead I’m trying to make it sound real” Melbourne-based producer Robbie Bergin first started making music as Throttle in his bedroom at the age of 15. In the space of five years, the ‘dirty disco’ artist has risen to become one of the most talked about up-and-comers on the international club circuit, propelled by crossover hits like Money Maker, Oliver Heldens collab Waiting, and 2017’s Moombahton-inspired Piñata. FM caught up with Bergin at Amsterdam Dance Event 2017 to chat studio tips and positivity… How did you get started making music? “I was a bedroom DJ. I started with Virtual DJ making mash-ups, then I…

Modulate anything and everything in a VST VST support to Reason goes above and beyond what most DAWs can do, with the ability to modulate almost any parameter with CV in the rack As if last year’s shocking news that Reason would finally host VST plugins didn’t blow your mind, Propellerhead’s clever implementation actually goes above and beyond the call of duty. Similar in philosophy to Bitwig Studio and Tracktion’s Waveform, the idea makes use of the DAW being able to access plugin parameters for automation purposes – if the DAW can automate parameters, why can’t it modulate them using its own LFOs, envelopes and sequencers? While most popular DAWs have still not implemented anything like this, Reason now lets you hack using the rack, connecting its CV signals to…

GOING BEHIND THE SCENES Reconvening to the stage, James gives FM a closer look at the Max software nerve centre he’s using to control proceedings onstage… Can you maybe talk us through some of the finer points? “So, LFOs have different phase outputs from them ripped off from the Pittsburgh LFO module and you can inject a voltage into the LFO circuit so other things can then make the LFO flip out or slow down or whatever. Then there’s Buchla-ish random voltages and shapes you can trigger or use as an LFO or a lookup table. Then I have eight Make Noise envelopes that can also be voltage followers or MIDI-triggered envelopes. Here’s the fun bit – there are four polysynths with a whole load of…

TOOLKIT MIDI Effects and Arps This month, we look at how, using MIDI effects, we can re-imagine sequences in a diverse range of ways In an industry where effects plugins, software DAWs and hardware technologies are ever-evolving, you’ve got to hand it to MIDI. Who knew that a protocol initially designed to allow hardware keyboards from rival manufacturers to ‘talk to one another’ would endure, with so little change to its protocol, getting on for four decades later? MIDI’s success lies in its simplicity; a single MIDI Note On message contains a line of code containing Note Number (Pitch, to you and me), Velocity (most frequently mapped to volume, but actually a freely-assignable controller, stimulated by the ‘strength’ of a key stroke) and Note Length, which is calculated when a…

MIDI FX and Arps Augmenting a track with multiple MIDI effects We’re looking at three separate MIDI effects here, to transform three ‘predictable’ MIDI sequences 01 We start with three separate parts. The first is a consistent sequence which features running (and identical) 16th notes. The second is a copy of this, transposed down to become a bassline. The third part is a drum loop. There’s lots of power but no variation. 02 We turn the first 16th note sequence into a kind of sample and hold pattern by randomising pitch. We select Note Number (pitch) as the Event Type at the top, then select a note range of 30-90. A Random value of 46 means that each note jumps, at random, to a new pitch. 03 We turn the…

Elektron Octatrack MkII £1149 The Swedish brand update their flagship hardware sampler. Si Truss asks if it’s still the king amid increased competition... When it was first released back in 2010, Elektron’s Octatrack didn’t have a lot in the way of competition in the pro-level, hardware sampler realm. At the time, Akai’s MPC5000 was approaching the end of its lifecycle, soon to be replaced by the laptop reliant Renaissance, and NI’s relatively new Maschine system was proudly flying the flag for hands-on, software-powered sampling. Back then it might have seemed like the age of the hardware sampler was coming to an end. Fast forward seven years though, and suddenly the Octatrack is less of an anomaly, with Akai’s MPC Live and X, and Pioneer DJ’s SP-16 and DJS-1000 all offering…

SPL Crimson 3 £610 SPL’s Crimson audio interface returns as Crimson 3. Jono Buchanan gets his hands on a red devil… SPL have a reputation as a serious audio developer with a specialism in hardware channel strips, monitor controllers and, of course, the much-loved Transient Designer. In a way, its Crimson audio interfaces combine a couple of these technologies, offering a high-quality recording path coupled with a flexible monitor controller, to provide an audio interface at the heart of your recording rig. So what’s new in Crimson 3? First up, let’s have a look around. Available in both black and white finishes, Crimson 3 is a laptop-sized, desktop-based, wedge-shaped interface, with preamp controls on the left-hand side of its upper panel. These provide phantom power and high-pass filter switches for…

Nord Stage 3 Compact £2,999 Nord’s flagship Stage keyboard is now on its third incarnation. Dan ‘JD73’ Goldman welcomes the Nord Stage 3 It’s re-cemented its crown as the most intuitive, authentic-sounding, stage keyboard around I’ve been a big fan of the Nord Stage series since the first Stage Compact was released in 2005, and a huge number of bands have adopted them due to their reliability, portability, hands-on interface and flexible, multi-engined concept. For this review, I’m taking a look at the NS3 Compact, which is the cheapest model in the NS3 range (there are also 76- and 88-note weighted versions). Like the NS2 SW73 before it (and the original Stage Compact), the NS3 Compact features a semi-weighted 73-note waterfall keybed which straddles the massive range of sounds that…

ADVICE Multi-timbral poly analogue recommendations? > If you want a polyphonic analogue synth that is also capable of layering then there are limited options. The Prophet ‘08 and its successor (the REV2) are both capable of polyphonic layering (over two separate layers). Both are very easy to set up/use and the REV2-16 will give you two 8-voice layers. Otherwise, consider the Alesis Andromeda; it’s analogue, with 16-parts. Can I record internet radio into my DAW? > There are numerous ways to capture internet radio streams on your computer but if you want to record audio straight into your DAW, things get slightly more complicated. The easiest solution is Plugin Boutique’s new Radio plugin. This enables you to call up a wide range of internet radio stations and listen to them.…