Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2016 i Future Music

WELCOME Back to the old school Here at FM, we’re not the types to overlook an open goal on the wordplay front. As such, issue 303 was always destined to come adorned with Roland’s classic computer controlled bassline synthesizer. It’s an opportunity we won’t get again for at least another 303 issues (assuming we’ll probably gloss over the fairly lacklustre TR-505). Rather than spend too long waxing lyrical about the history of that one bit of gear, however, we’re using it as a jumping-off point to explore the old-school production techniques behind the late ’80s and early ’90s Rave genres it (at least in part) inspired – from (naturally) Acid House basslines, to Jungle synths, Hardcore-style beats and beyond. It’s not just about retro nostalgia, however – we’ll show you…

In The Studio With… Luke Solomon “The studio was in a bedroom of a place we were sharing. It was in a madhouse. Perfect for Freaks, to be honest. “We’d gotten a bit of money for equipment by that point. We’d always begged, borrowed and stole before that. “ Beat Diaries was recorded first on Matthew Herbert’s Mackie, then it went to Jon Marsh from The Beloved’s mixing desk. We also used Jon’s Akai S950 and S1000 samplers. And we sequenced everything on the Atari ST, using Cubase – we always used Cubase. “For all the drums we had a Novation DrumStation. A lot of the weird, noodley sounds came off a Novation Bass Station, We also had a Roland VS-880 – that was the hard drive…

Creating A Layered Rave Stab Using Korg’s M1 The obvious way to incorporate Rave stabs in your music involves sampling the classic hits from old records – but synthesizing your own stab is easier than you might think… > Let’s create a custom Rave stab using several bespoke layers from Korg’s M1 plug-in. Start with a typical M1 piano layer, then program a minor chord on the track by either drawing in MIDI notes or by using a ‘chorder’ MIDI plug-in. > Many old-skool stabs feature a hint of choir or vocal, so duplicate the first M1 instance and seek out a suitable preset within this second instance. We’ve chosen to disable the preset’s overt effects, giving a cleaner result. > Now it’s a case of layering another one or…

Three Classic Rave Bass Sounds Everyone loves a bit of ’ardcore bass, so let’s create a trio of classic ’90s bass sounds that are guaranteed to put a smile on old ravers’ faces Bass sounds are usually the most simple to synthesize from scratch and, although most Rave artists used samples, the sounds they were pilfering are child’s play to build using any standard synth plug-in. For true authenticity, you’ll want to stick to synthesizers with a similar architecture to those around in Rave’s heyday – so think TB-303 emulations, simple subtractive designs such as the Roland Juno or SH-101, or perhaps digital or FM offerings that replicate Yamaha’s DX7 or Korg’s Wavestation. In this tutorial we’ll take a brief look at a handful of classic Rave bass sounds. All…

Junior Boys Since 2004, Junior Boys have produced a series of deceptively simple yet addictive Electronic Pop albums, culminating in their new LP Big Black Coat. Danny Turner meets the duo ahead of their gig at London’s Oslo © Kevin Lake Junior Boys twosome Jeremy Greenspan and Matt Didemus have been universally acclaimed for their unflappable brand of melancholic, yet accessible, Electronic Pop. After a five-year break working on their own projects, a new album, Big Black Coat, hinges on the soulful Pop sensibilities that have remained at the core of their sound, while embracing their love of Techno and the ‘strangeness’ of Synthpop icons Yellow Magic Orchestra. With their new-found love of modular gear finding its way deep into the production, and a courageous admittance to using Auto-Tune, Big…

THE TRACK Marc JB Botany Bay 2016 © Will Ireland INCLUDES VIDEO VAULT.FUTUREMUSIC.CO.UK “Having this has been my dream for ages. It’s like having a shed, but a shed on wheels, with a music studio in it. I’m looking forward to going on location and recording some interesting sounds to inspire new things. It can get a little stagnant in the studio and sometimes you find yourself repeating the same old stuff. This little set-up has been really inspirational.” “This is a lovely set-up to use. It’s amazing that the interface can do all the mobile recording with the iPad. It’s really exciting for me, as in my proper studio at home I’ve a really nice Bechstein upright piano downstairs, but to run leads from the top floor…

Which are your favourite hardware synths to use? RB: “The Roland SH-01 is my favourite; you can link that up to the 808 and you don’t even need MIDI. You just put in your sequence of notes, decide how to trigger them from a drum on the 808 and it triggers your sequence of notes. It’s a really nice way to make a groove.” NH: “We’ve got this Roland SH-5, but you have to use all these MIDI converter boxes. It’s got some nice sounds in it, but it’s pretty hard work. We got that about three years ago from some Polish or Bulgarian builder dude in Forest Hill who was selling loads of gear. He had loads of synths and was a bit frustrated because he had nowhere to…

The New Melodyne Sound Editor The Sound Editor lets you peer inside a note and tweak its harmonic makeup. This is the place to go when looking to change the timbre of audio rather than simply alter its broader pitch or timing characteristics. And there are some things here that are useful for any production/mix project. The Emphasis control adjusts the overall harmonic spectrum. Notes can be made to sound more tonally similar by sliding it to the left, or more divergent (emphasising spectral differences) by moving into positive percentages. The Dynamics parameter does not change the relative levels of notes, as you might expect, but enhances or subdues the timbral envelope of a note. Listen to sustained sounds with a noticeable attack (such as piano) to get a sense…

Melodyne Correction Basics Accessing the features of Melodyne from within your DAW is now much quicker and easier than in the past 01 Here we’ve added the Melodyne plug-in to each track that has audio required correction. Now it’s simply a question of opening one of the Melodyne plug-in windows, switching on Enable Transfer for each track and pressing play. Audio is transferred and analysed automatically. 02 Let’s work on the vocal. In the track list to the upper left of the Melodyne window we can select the track to edit (and which other to view for reference). Select some notes and head for the Correct Pitch Macro and tweak to your satisfaction. 03 More specific corrective tools are available from the toolbar menu at the top of the window.…

The Range Brooklyn producer James Hinton’s latest album is inspired by vocal samples extracted from the deepest recesses of YouTube. Danny Turner discusses the evolution of a concept that has moved beyond the mere creation of an album © Daniel Byrne Possessing an inherently nonconformist approach to music production, James Hinton’s debut album as The Range, Nonfiction (2013), triggered the notion of avoiding archetypal singer-songwriter structures by syncopating vocal samples with rhythms rooted in Hip-Hop, Drum ‘n’ Bass and R ‘n’ B. Extending the concept on his aptly titled sophomore release, Potential, Hinton used various algorithmic processes to scour the video-sharing platform YouTube. By searching for the most remote user uploads, Hinton found he could tap into the authenticity of the emotions behind the vocals he’d discovered and translate them…

Modulation And Control There’s plenty in the way of sound-shaping onboard and you can dial in subtle or complex modulations. DCO1 and 2 can have their frequencies modulated by the envelope’s ADSR and/or by the LFO, while DCO2 has a cross modulation dial with two depths of oscillator sync, two depths of Metal modulation and classic ring modulation. Envelope mod and LFO mod can be sent independently or simultaneously in varying amounts to both oscillators too, enabling you to dial in some very detailed textures, though there’s no dedicated PWM onboard. In the filter section you can dial in simultaneous envelope and LFO mod and send it to the filter in varying amounts; the LFO has five waveforms plus noise as a mod source for more chaotic textures.…

EXPERT CONTRIBUTORS THIS MONTH… Joe Rossitter musician, producer As a Drum ’n’ Bass producer and DJ, Joe’s music making style owes a significant debt to the hardware tweaking pioneers of Dance music’s early years. So he’s the ideal man to dive into the sound of Rave for this issue’s cover feature. Bruce Aisher musician, producer This issue’s Producer’s Guide tutorial sees Bruce tackling the latest update to one of the most impressive software tools we’ve seen in recent years – Celemony’s polyphonic audio editor Melodyne. What’s new? Find out on page 69 . Dan ‘JD73’ Goldman musician, producer There’s not one, not two, but three different recreations of classic Roland polysynths on our test bench this issue, and Dan has been rigorously examining all of…

Freaks The Beat Diaries Music For Freaks, 2000 When Luke Solomon and Justin Harris first started producing beautiful music together as Freaks back in the mid-’90s, their brand of bar-raising House stood out from the crowd. Through a clutch of classic 12s, bonkers DJ sets, and inspired remixes, the pair blew through the scene like a breath of fresh air at a time when the predictable and formulaic ruled the roost. “Back then most Dance music sounded exactly the same,” says Luke. “I had thousands of pieces of vinyl that basically could all be the same record. It sounded awful. Me and Justin suddenly realised that when everything sounds the same, you have a licence to do whatever you want.” This freewheeling spirit reached its peak as debut album time…

LIKE IT? TRY THESE… Luke Solomon Space Classics Mini Mix SoundCloud mix up the kind of “old and noisy records” that used to make Luke’s legendary nights at Bar Rumba go off. ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: Naked Music NYC – It’s Love (Joshua’s Vocal Mix), Kenlou – The Bounce, OBX – It’s All We Know (Trippin’ On Air) (Positive Science remix) MFSB Mysteries Of The World Sterling Disco album by the famed Philly collective. Just one of the bits of wax in Justin and Luke’s vinyl collection, and sampled on Mysteries.com . ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: Manhattan Skyline, Mysteries Of The World, Fortune Teller Powerdance The Lost Art of Getting Down A recently announced New Wave Disco album by Luke Solomon and members…

Rave breaks and beats Before sampling, House producers sequenced and tweaked basic beats in live via hardware drum machines, recording the tracks directly to a multi-track tape recorder or DAT. Once the sampler became affordable, Rave producers began to expand their sonic palette by sampling entire drum breaks from old records, often layering these vibe-laden grooves with four-to-the-floor drum machine patterns for maximum dancefloor impact. Either the original breakbeat would be sampled directly from the source record, or artists would lift breaks from their peers’ tunes, which had been layered and processed further. For authentic Rave breaks, fill your hard drive with as many breakbeat samples as you can: obvious examples are the iconic Amen, Funky Drummer and Think breaks, but there are hundreds more. Sampler time-stretching wasn’t as advanced…

QUICK TIPS > Be sure to scour eBay for great deals on secondhand kit from the Rave era. Obviously analogue classics such as Junos and Jupiters are continually soaring in value, but ’90s digital synths and rack gear can be picked up for peanuts. > Of course, if you don’t have the funds to kit your studio out with the actual gear used, then you’ll want to fill your hard drive with plug-in emulations that do a similar job. One of our favourites is TAL’s BassLine-101, which admirably replicates the SH-101. > Apply medium-length reverb to a stab, resample the sound with the reverb baked in, then cut off the end of reverb tails abruptly for a choppy, sampled feel. > Use your sampler’s looping features to extend short samples…

Hoover Resampling Seeing as the hoover is best mangled within a sampler instrument, let’s take a look at how to resample it effectively The hoover was created by Spectrasonics boss Eric Persing during his time as chief sound designer for Roland back in the ’80s (read the full story at www.musicradar.com/news/tech/spectrasonics-eric-persing-talks-omnisphere-2-sound-design-and-more-616236 ). Originally designed to be a quirky, animal-like ‘roar’ effect that sat at the rear of the synth’s preset bank, the Alpha Juno preset quickly gathered a cult following when a twisted, processed hoover riff appeared on Second Phase’s Mentasm . It’s rumoured that the sound, dubbed ‘the mentasm’, was then lifted from that track by The Prodigy, who brought it to a wider audience through its use in Charly…

Do you have many hardware synths? MD: “The Minimoog and a Roland SH-1000 with some mods on it. The thing with Roland gear is that it always sounds good, especially if you use it together. I love the Korg MS-20M, the tabletop one. I like the added function of the hard sync and the FM stuff; they’re really great for doing bleepy, squelchy stuff. I have some Eurorack modular too. About ten years ago, we were on our way to play Coachella and stopped at this place called Analogue Haven outside of Los Angeles, with the intention of buying maybe a pedal, and came out with about 6,000 bucks worth of Eurorack.” JG: “My studio is in Canada; we do all the mixing there, so I have an SSL XL-Desk,…

Maximum Control Let’s explore the added menu features of the Vectr, scaling, slewing and quantising our gestural performances INCLUDES VIDEO Double-tapping the bottom of the sensor on the Vectr brings up the menu options, and this is where the added fun kicks in. LEDs around the sensor guide you through the simple menu system settings options for each of the three axes X, Y and Z. Using its scale and quantisation, you can turn the broad voltages created by the module into a single octave of a musical scale. Hitting the illuminated switch starts and stops loop recording and, as soon as it stops the recording, the loop will play back. Using specific gestures (similar to those on a smartphone) you can manipulate the loop, for example circling a finger…

Is it worth getting these vintage pieces of gear repaired? RB: “I’m a little wary about sending things off since we did that once with a Clavinet and it came back in pieces – apparently it fell off the back of the lorry taking it to the repair place. I’ve got a Wurlitzer upstairs, and that’s a beautiful instrument to while away the hours on. I tried to get that fixed on the cheap. The guy said he fixed it, but it doesn’t seem right to me, so I think you probably have to look to spend almost as much as it’s worth just to fix it.”…

Multi-Track Tempo Tools Melodyne 4 has seen a complete overhaul of the tempo algorithms which make tempo and time signature detection much more reliable Tempo detection can be a tricky process at the best of times, but Celemony have done an excellent job with the latest update – certainly with more finesse than your average DAW. Whether or not you intend do further manipulation in Melodyne, detecting the fluctuating tempo of multi-track material recorded free-style (without a click) seems to work incredibly well. This information can then be used to create a tempo map, for use in your DAW, or as the basis for tempo editing or all-out correction. These features are, understandably, only available in the standalone version. The Tempo Editor is accessed via the Options menu. Edit Tempo…

Music is sometimes seen as bit of a throwaway commodity, yet you clearly want people to go beyond the surface with this record… “I’m really hoping that people will come along with me. I don’t see it as a concept album, but I think both legs of the stool need to be standing so that both the theoretical and musical parts are equal; although it’s definitely a bit of a risk in an age where it’s tough to maintain people’s attention. The record would definitely fall down if it wasn’t musical or at least capable of grabbing people in the classical form. I don’t think the music is immediate in terms of it being a Pop record, but I think there’s enough hooks in there that will allow people to…

Modulation And Sequencer One of the most enticing aspects of the Jupiter-8 was its plethora of mod options. Performance section aside, these are still intact. You’ll find an audio rate-capable LFO with delay and six waveshapes that imparts a growly distortion upon sounds when pushed to its limit. The beauty is the LFO can address several destinations at once in a flexible way, including the VCOs (LFO frequency modulation of just VCO1 or VCO2, or both together, plus PWM), the VCA with three levels of depth and the filters too. VCO2 can also be used as a secondary LFO, and you can simultaneously use Cross Mod (VCO2 waveshape modulates VCO1’s frequency) and envelope modulation for the filters and VCOs too, allowing more detailed modulation to be set up via the…

Notable Features The JU-06 also works as a convenient 2-in/2-out Audio/MIDI USB interface, so you can connect it directly to your DAW without additional cabling. You can also run other gear/audio into the stereo minijack input, though unfortunately it bypasses the sound engine and chorus and runs straight to the output, which is a real missed opportunity. Other than this, the modelled Chorus effect (taken from the original Juno range) sounds extremely close to the original circuit. The Juno chorus is one of the most revered chorus effects around and it really can transform any sound into something lush and warm with plenty of stereo width and movement. Also, you can press the Chorus 1 and 2 buttons together to get a third chorus mode (unique to the JU-06) and…

Track by track with Luke Solomon and Justin Harris Luke Solomon: “Winging it did play a large part in getting the sound that we got. We’d be time-stretching with no musical knowledge, and making things fit together that sounded good to us but probably, musically, were very wrong. It’s always been an advantage, I think.” Repetition Is A Form Of Change Luke Solomon: “I distinctly remember the sample here – it’s from Slackers, which is one of my favourite films. At the beginning a girl says ‘repetition is a form of change’, and we sampled that. Then, the weird, noodley sound is Justin playing a Novation Bass Station. Then there were just a couple of samples that we added from our trusty Akai S950.” Justin Harris: “Back then we’d just…

ALBUM REVIEWS ALBUM OF THE MONTH Charles Bradley Changes Daptone Records Although being over 60 years old at the time of his debut album, American Soul singer Charles Bradley has gone on to become one of the world’s leading proponents of modern Soul. A master of conjuring highly emotive, profound and sincere accounts of his often hard life experiences, Bradley has garnered a reputation as one of the most expressive artists on the planet. Following on from his much-lauded 2011 debut, No Time For Dreaming and 2013 follow-up Victim Of Love, the 67-year-old now delivers his most confident and accomplished album yet with Changes. Warm and intimate, yet full of loud, shimmering instrumentation, the record is packed full of attitude and heartfelt sincerity. Positivity spills out in equal measure too,…

Classic Rave Vocals The ’90s was the decade of unashamed vocal sampling, so let’s travel back in time and reproduce the effect In contrast to the copyright-savvy music industry of today, early ’90s artists sampled vocals from anywhere and everywhere. Screaming diva vocals extracted from acapellas soared over breaks and piano riffs to give a euphoric edge; Hip-Hop and Rap acapellas were also widely used, and even short snippets of dialogue from movies were dropped in. In many cases, multiple vocals were exuberantly spliced together to form a collage of whoops, roars and rhymes. Vocals were used as a rhythmic or synthesized element as well as a core musical device. Exaggerated chopping, repeating, pitchshifting and mangling were at the core of the Rave scene as sampler manipulation was pushed to…

Building A Layered Rave Breakbeat Rave beats were often created by layering multiple drum loops together, using transposition to get things sitting roughly in time... > Start with a couple of breakbeat loops that are approximately 120bpm in speed. Set your DAW’s bpm to 150, then load these two breaks onto separate channels in a sampler. We’ve added a bitcrusher on the master channel for an added dose of darkness and grit. > Turn on your host’s metronome, then create a bar-long C3 note within a new MIDI region on the sampler channel. Mute the second break, then alter the break’s Transpose and Fine Tune parameters until it’s roughly in time with the click. Repeat the process with the second break. > Next, emulate the crustiness, glue and grit of…

How much do you play live? MD: “It depends on the song. Some are quite simple with just a few chord patterns and five or six different synth sounds. But there’s one song on the previous record that had something like 141 tracks in it and, when you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to do that live, it gets really challenging. Otherwise, you just have to come to a compromise and say, well this isn’t going to sound exactly like the record.” JG: “There are a couple of things that have been very helpful. First, we have a very gifted front-of-house sound person and the other thing we’re doing on this tour is using a Behringer X32 Digital Mixer, which has made it really easy for us as…

ADDAC 101! We meet André Gonçalves, the man behind accomplished and innovative Portuguese Eurorack brand ADDAC System © Vera Marmelo “Five years ago only a few thousand people knew this stuff even existed” How did you first get into Eurorack manufacturing? “I learned music at a young age and always played guitar during my teenage years, but in the mid-’90s I bought my first sequencer/synth workstation and got hooked. My degree was in visual design, while working part-time as a web developer, and I ended up getting involved with the experimental music scene. Somewhere around 1999-2000 I saw the Doepfer website for the first time, and instantly knew I had to dive into it. In 2003 I got an old Paia system from eBay that was kinda working, but I…

Stereo MCs Although they appeared to go missing in action after the success of Connected in 1993, Brixton-based Hip-Hop/Electronic Dance group Stereo MCs have always been busy behind the scenes. Danny Turner gets the lowdown… © Joseph Branston Anyone who was around in the early ’90s will remember the hypnotic grooves emanating from Stereo MCs’ portfolio of Top 20 hit singles including Connected, Step It Up and Ground Level. Struggling to deal with the demands that success placed upon them, the band retreated at their peak to set up their own label and publishing company, and remixed the likes of Madonna, U2, Electronic and PM Dawn under the pseudonym Ultimatum. Headed by founder members, Rob Birch and Nick Hallam, Stereo MCs returned eight years later with a mix album in…

Melodyne 4 What’s new for Version 4? INCLUDES VIDEO AND AUDIO VAULT.FUTUREMUSIC.CO.UK Celemony’s Melodyne has, rightly, been the go-to software for high-resolution pitch editing for many years. Working as standalone software, or as a DAW-based plug-in, it allows you to manipulate and correct intonation and timing issues. In fact it goes much further than this… The program can be used to alter audio in more drastic ways, from harmony creation to all-out mangling. Things took a step-up with the introduction of DNA (Direct Note Access) six years ago – that allowed editing of polyphonic material – with multi-track audio accommodated some years later. Melodyne 4 sees a streamlining of the interface, but also some big new functional changes and additions. The Sound Editor takes Melodyne into less charted…

QUICK TIPS 1 There are five different audio algorithms and they can all yield quite different results. For example, Universal is the one to go for when time-stretching full mixes. 2 Use shortcuts for speed. Setting shortcuts such as zoom in/out to similar settings as your DAW can be helpful. 3 Melodyne may be overzealous in adding separators, or mistakenly miss them out, so note separators may need tweaking to get natural results. 4 When editing multiple tracks, the Spread Unison Tracks button can be invaluable in being able to see notes hidden behind other notes. 5 Always A/B corrected audio against the original. It’s sometimes better to do less (or no processing) and maintain vibe and charm or realism.…

K-25m Keyboard And Connectivity The JP-08 is designed to pair with Roland’s own £75, K-25m controller. It’s basically a metal housing with a velocity-sensitive two-octave mini-keyboard (good to play despite its size) and it allows you to slot in any of the Boutique modules and flip them up (Minimoog-style) or lock them flat for transporting/ playing flat. The K-25m connects to the module via a ribbon/multi-pin connector which connects snugly, though it’s a little fiddly to align at first. Nonetheless, it’s great being able to carry the module plus keyboard in a rucksack and the modules can be swapped out easily as you need. Note that there’s no aftertouch via the K-25m and the JP-08 won’t receive it over MIDI. Now a bit more on the connectivity. The JP-08 (like…

Aston Origin | £199 Aston Microphones’ UK-made cardioid condenser promises high-quality build and sound that will leave change from £200. Robbie Stamp checks out the Origin… WHAT IS IT? Cardioid condenser microphone CONTACT Who: Sonic Distribution Tel: +44 (0)845 500 2 500 Web: www.astonmics.com HIGHLIGHTS 1 Sensitive and detailed response 2 Plenty of headroom 3 Solid build SPECS Transducer: Condenser Polar pattern: cardioid Freq response: 20Hz-20kHz (±3dB) Equivalent noise level: 18dB A-weighted Sensitivity (1kHz into 1kO): 23mV/Pa Max SPL (for THD 0.5%): 127dB Additional controls: Pad (-10dB), Low-cut Filter (80Hz) Weight: 439g The Aston Origin may be competitively priced, but it possesses a degree of originality that is uncommon in this range. The Origin is a fixed pattern (cardioid) condenser and is the smaller of Aston’s two mics: the…

DX100 Solid Bass using Logic? Is it possible to get the famous Solid Bass DX100 preset sound using Logic? The Solid Bass preset on the DX100 is instantly recognisable and has been used on hits such as Janet Jackson’s What Have You Done For Me Lately , Inner City’s Good Life , Orbital’s Chime, and countless other House/Techno tracks. Ideally, you want to use Native Instruments’ FM8 to recreate the patch in detail, but let’s not forget Logic’s humble EFM1 plug-in which can get pretty close too. The DX100 was pretty dirty sounding with loads of noise, so in this example we’ll also recreate the noise from the DX100’s 12-bit DACs. First off, pull up EFM1 and start from the…