Innehållsförteckning för 02/2024 från Beat English

Synth beast on steroids! GForce impOSCar2 The OSCar from 1983 is one of the most outstanding vintage synths from Great Britain. With its unique sound, digitally controlled oscillators and analog filters, it inspired Ultravox, Orbital, BT, Underworld and Jean-Michel Jarre. And soon, you, too? Why not try it out with your new impOSCar2, which brings the sound of this cult synth to your DAW. Download: see page 9 | Info: gforcesoftware.com win | mac All serial numbers safely accessible: The Beat Serial Center To ensure that none of your serial numbers are lost in the future (for instance, in the event of a new installation, Outlook crash or disk crash), you can now conveniently manage them online. The advantages are obvious: The editorial team can send you targeted software updates,…

Customize your videos If you rely on short clips for the platforms Instagram, TikTok and YouTube (Shorts), you can produce all of your videos in vertical format. The bad news is that every social media platform works differently and you may need to adapt your videos to each platform. On TikTok and YouTube shorts, for example, you should rely on quick cuts. Make sure that the videos are short and concise and feature a quick narrative style. Experiment with TikTok‘s built-in effects and filters to give your video an extra creative touch. On Instagram you can make your videos a little longer and quieter. Also pay attention to the visual aesthetic of your Instagram feed and adjust the thumbnails to fit the overall look. Faceless Videos Not every musician is…

Capcut Capcut is a free video editor that you can use both on your computer and with your mobile devices. After you have created a user account, you can start editing your videos. The user interface is very simple and the operation is intuitive, which is why even beginners should find their way around very easily. I particularly liked the automatic subtitles. Capcut analyzes the spoken text and places it under your video. You can then further edit the text and appearance of the subtitles. The paid Pro version comes with a few more contents such as new transitions, templates and effects. www.capcut.com SpliceApp With the SpliceApp you can quickly and intuitively cut exciting videos on your smartphone. Since this video editing program was developed for mobile devices, operation via…

Beat / I know it‘s been out for a year now, but I still think that your first studio album Sentio is a really strong release. Looking back, what were the challenges at the time and what are you taking from the experience of that project towards a follow-up? Martin Garrix / Thank you! I’m such a perfectionist that it’s hard for me to feel like songs are ever really finished, let alone a full album. The idea for Sentio was born when I was sitting on a lot of unreleased club music after the pandemic. We decided to drop the first track of the album, „Follow’’ with Zedd, right after Ultra Miami with other singles following short after. Beat / It‘s like the pandemic released a lot of pent-up…

When I think of Vince Clarke, I think in colours: The rainbow palette on the cover of the Erasure album Circus. The hyper-real purple on Loveboat. Even the sounds have a garish and quirky quality to them – after all, weren‘t the duo‘s last two studio works called The Neon and Day-Glo? When I think of Vince Clarke, I also think of the video for „Chorus“, in which he and Andy Bell spent a fun day on the beach and Vince doubled as a mad professor turning the knobs on a gigantic modular. „To be honest, it wasn‘t a synth,“ Vince says with a grin when I ask him about it, „It was an old telephone system!“ Which makes for an even better metaphor. After all, if anyone can be…

1 Get your mix right! Before we load the Mastering Assistant via the Mastering button on the Stereo Out, we need to make sure that our mix sounds good. It is important to leave enough headroom so that the plug-in can work properly. At around -6dB, you‘re on the safe side. Make sure that your mix sounds balanced and dynamically consistent. 2 Analyze the song After we‘ve loaded the Mastering Assistant onto the Stereo Out, it analyzes the audio material independently. Here, you can decide whether the plug-in analyzes a specific cycle area or the entire song. We let the plug-in listen to our entire song in order to achieve the best possible result for all parts of the song. 3 Let the magic happen After analyzing the audio material,…

1 Vocal chain First, load your podcast, radio play or audio book recording into Cubase. Clean up the voice recording, remove pops and annoying noises. With VocalChain, Cubase 13 comes with an excellent tool for optimizing the sound of vocals or speech. Load VocalChain as an insert effect in the audio track and activate the Cut Filter. 2 De-Essing Set it so that the frequencies below 50 Hz are filtered out. You can tame sibilants with the De-Esser I. A Reduction of 5.0 and a Threshold of -40 dB are good starting values. You can use the Diff function to hear which signal components the De-Esser is filtering out. Adjust the settings if necessary and activate EQ 1. 3 EQ & Compressor In Studio Mode, the Equalizer is a great…

1 Kickstart The biggest secret behind LoFi‘s recipe for success, apart from the playful, anti-hectic melodies and beats is, of course, the retro feel with elements such as the typical crackling of vinyl, 12-bit drums and low sample rates for the sounds used. These are no problem at all and we even use a LoFi Reverb to round things off! 2 Piano Lead We start typically with a piano melody at 75 BPM, so you can‘t go wrong to begin with. We‘ll use a simple piano from Reason‘s ID8-Rompler, but any other piano will do. And if - like us - you‘re not a keyboard virtuoso, feel free to help yourself to the LOFI PIANO MIDI FILES folder in the workshop downloads. 3 Muffled sound For a muffled sound, we…

HOFA IQ Series Limiter V2 A limiter is a limiter, right? And yet HOFA promises innovation with its new IQ-Series Limiter V2. Will the plug-in really succeed in setting new standards? The appealing and contemporary new look of Version 2 of this limiter raises high expectations right from the start. The interface is scalable and accommodates generously dimensioned control elements, an X/Y pad, as well as level and LUFS displays and a real-time diagram of the signal. The input and output amplification can be finely adjusted. You can select the desired algorithm directly above this - an initially inconspicuous feature that nevertheless plays an important role. The Hard, Transparent and Electronic modes are tailored to different styles: Electronic is ideal for pumping mixes and Hard specializes in the highest possible…

For many years, Cubase has been the first choice for many musicians and producers worldwide for composing, recording, editing and mixing. Version 13 of this DAW is once again available in three versions: Pro, Artist and Elements [1]. At the heart of the update is the redesigned mixer, which catches your eye at first glance. Cubase 13 also comes with five new effect plug-ins and an extensive Orchestral Library. Of course, the usual detail improvements and workflow optimizations are also included. The wild 13! Even during the first test flight with Cubase 13, it is noticeable that projects can be loaded and closed more quickly. When you close a project, the plugins are immediately unloaded from memory. This means that crashes when closing large projects are a thing of the…

When the test monitors were delivered - in two huge boxes - the first thing you notice is that they are damn heavy. Each box weighs around 25 kilograms. With a size of 537 x 292 x 367 mm, they are significantly larger than other nearfield monitors. For small home studios, they might be a bit oversized, right? Not necessarily, because the developers have thought ahead and built the woofer into a large opening at the front, so that the speakers can also be placed close to walls without major problems with bass reflections. This was confirmed in our test. Want some more key data? The speakers are an 8“ woofer with a W-sandwich composite cone, a 5“ midrange driver (TMD-Tuned Mass Damper) and a 1“ beryllium tweeter with waveguide.…

Versatile oscillators impOSCar2 replicates the OSCar‘s unique feature of generating its own additive waveforms with the two digital oscillators. Pulse width and ring modulation provide a wide range of expressive sounds. You can also feed external signals through the synthesizer. Flexible filter impOSCar2 comes with two 12 dB Filters that can be combined into a total of nine modes. High resonance and drive values produce screeching sounds. Filter modulations sound particularly impressive if you set an offset between the two filters using the Separation Control. Unison sounds and chords For modulation, there are two Envelopes and two LFOs available. A hot tip for powerful stack sounds and lively textures are the Unison, Glide and Pan Spread functions. Additive waveforms and GUI Size With the two impOSCar2 User Waves, you can…

1 Transparency in the mix The most common application is to place a compressor on the bass track and feed the kick into the sidechain. This way, the bass makes enough room for the kick, which is the main element in dancefloor productions. As a starting point, choose a ratio of 5:1, an attack of 4 ms to avoid clicking and a release time of 60 ms. 2 Assertiveness In order for the kick to assert itself even more in the mix, space should be created for the transient of the kick. To do this, place a compressor with kick in the sidechain on the instruments in the middle and higher registers. Set the ratio to 4:1 and select a short attack and release time. The lower you set the…

1 Tropical Vibes With a predefined structure and prepared tracks, sounds and effects, project templates can help enormously to implement musical ideas and turn them into a song. Well, let‘s create a template for a Tropical House track [1]! Start with a new Studio One project at a relaxed, groovy tempo of 110 BPM. 2 Groove at the Start With the loops and samples from the House category of the Studio One library, you can quickly create a groove foundation. Place the Bass drum on every quarter beat and the Snare or Clap (such as Clap Classic) on beats 3 and 4. Use a top loop to create a lively groove. Now we want to build up the basic harmonic structure. 3 Chord foundation Starting with the chords has proven…

Ableton Live set out from the beginning to revolutionize music production and live performance. With a focus on creativity and efficiency, each new version has been developed and brought up-to-date. The upcoming version also promises to open a new chapter. The first time you open the program, the modernized and tidy interface immediately catches your eye - this is a promising start for sure. And it went on like this - in our test, 12 absolute highlights emerged without prioritization: 1 | Everything in view The Mixer view is now freely scalable and also visible in the Arrangement window. This eliminates the annoying switching between Session and Arrangement view. And in the Session view, all editors, that is, the Clip, Device and Mixer views, can be opened simultaneously. A clear…

We live in exciting times when it comes to music and AI. Where does artificial intelligence help musicians and producers in their day-to-day work? Which tools will fundamentally change the way we work and produce? Some tools create entire songs, others separate the vocals from tracks, still others change the timbre. Musicfy transforms a hummed melody into an epic synth or a wicked guitar riff. What is Musicfy? Basically, Musicfy is a website where you upload recordings of your voice and Musicfy then lets AI voices sing them almost perfectly. You can choose from 29 voices in different genres. There is also a whole range of parody voices such as Spongebob, Eric Cartman and Mickey Mouse. In the paid version, you can also train an AI model using your own…

The Fantom EX upgrade package offers a variety of new functions and workflow extensions that are intended to give Roland‘s already well-equipped top model synthesizer even more creative power. Fantom EX brings the current best Roland analog modeling technology ACB into the synthesizer, including emulations of the vintage classics Jupiter-8 and SH-101. There are also two new grand pianos as well as the JD-800 and n/zyme model expansions and new studio-quality reverb effects. This sounds like a must-have for all Fantom users, especially since the price of $199 is quite moderate by Roland standards. New model expansion Since version 2.1 you can use the ZEN Core model expansions in Fantom. Model expansions recreate popular vintage Roland synthesizers based on the ZEN Core Engine. The analog classics Jupiter-8, Juno-106, SH-101 and…

1 Load MIDI effects Load a synthesizer preset, such as a synth piano or synth key from Drift, into a track. Place the MIDI effect, expression control, in front of the synthesizer. Next, load the standard preset of the chord effect into the track. You can find it in the MIDI Effects chord category. This allows you to add six additional notes to the basic note played. 2 Expression control Select Expression Control and set the Source to Random for the first four MIDI inputs that you select in the Push menu using Select. Next, in Ableton Live, map the first MIDI In of the expression control to Shift 1 of the chord. Then, map the second MIDI In to Shift 2 and repeat the procedure for Shift 3 and…

Test: Behringer Kobol After the crises of recent years, production at Behringer is back in full swing. In addition to legendary classics, Uli throws in exotics here and there, in this case a monophonic analogue synthesizer inspired by the RSF Kobol Expander in a eurorack-compatible desktop case. Like the French original, Kobol has a fairly simple structure with 2 VCOs and a low-pass filter, but a semi-modular design and therefore offers more sonic possibilities than you would expect at first glance. Interview: Grossstadtgeflüster With cheeky lyrics and snappy, sexy beats, the Berlin Electro-Pop trio Grossstadtgeflüster has gained a large fan base. Their new album “Das Über-Icke” is not only exciting in terms of content, but also in terms of production technology, so we will present you with a detailed chat…

ARP clone with 450 presets from Cherry Audio Experienced synthesizer enthusiasts may remember the ARP Pro Soloist ana-log synthesizer from 1972. Now Cherry Audio has created the Pro Soloist, a 16-voice virtual clone that exactly reproduces the 30 original presets of the hardware model. Up to two sounds can be layered. In total, however, there is a generous selection of 450 presets. The VCO offers a choice between sawtooth and pulse waveforms, as well as a „Super Wave“ for fatter sounds. The sound can then be further processed with the 24 dB filter. An ADSR and an AR envelope help to shape the sound. There is also a modulation matrix with six slots that invite you to route between 22 modulation sources to 58 destinations. Thanks to three different views,…

Punchlines are your friend Especially among rappers, provocative punchlines are very popular to get one over on other artists and generate attention. For example, through blatant comparisons and assertions, listeners are made aware of the weaknesses of each opponent. In many cases, this attracts a fair amount of attention and has already brought in millions of streams for one or two tracks. You can also use the punchline principle – albeit in a more family-friendly way – in your videos. When it comes to short videos on Tik-Tok, Instagram, etc., the first few seconds are crucial. So why not start with a statement that immediately provokes or makes you think? This way you can encourage new viewers to continue watching and stand out from the crowd. For example, start your…

Beat / Hi Christian, why did you build and set up your studio like this? Christian / The studio should be ergonomically designed and suit my way of working. Every piece of equipment must be quick, easy to reach and immediately usable. Some of us are probably familiar with this: if a piece of equipment is in an awkward position or needs to be converted, it is rarely used or not used at all. Beat / What special features did you have to contend with when setting up the studio? Christian / As I only had a limited amount of space to integrate my studio in my apartment, everything had to be „built“ in a functional and more vertical way. However, I used the space very efficiently. Beat / Where…

1 Kick We set the tempo of our project to 140 BPM. Then, we start with the kick. First, we create a pattern with a length of two bars. The kick always hits on the first beat, then takes a longer break until it starts again on the seventh and eighth beat. At the end of the pattern, it can play more often to create a kind of fill. 2 Snare With the snare, the choice of sound immediately plays a decisive role. It should be relatively short, but have a sharp transient. Dry, muffled snares are also characteristic of Drill. Unlike Trap Beats, the snare is not played on the third and seventh beats, but on the third and eighth beats. 3 Closed hi-hats Let‘s move on to what…

1 Few drums, lots of groove The basis for our automatic groove is an effects rack that we use on one of the MPC‘s four return tracks. This has the great advantage that the groove can be applied to any track and even mixed in separately. So let‘s start right away: Call up the CHANNEL MIXER via MENU + Pad 12 and select the Returns at the top. 2 Two delays In its INSERTS we load an AIR Delay in Slots 1 and 3, an AIR Lo-Fi in Slot 2 and an AIR Filter in Slot 4. For the first delay, we set TIME to a slow 5/4, FEEDBACK to 60% and MIX to 50%. For the second delay, set TIME 1/4D, FEEDBACK 30%, MIX 50% and DELAY RATIO to…

1 Goodbye boredom! For our workshop, we dug up a melody that‘s nice, but doesn‘t have a particular groove and is very obvious in its progression. Nevertheless, it has something; and the sound we found is not bad either. Let‘s make something of it! In Method A, we create a question-and-answer game from the melody, so let‘s duplicate the track. 2 Method A Our melody is an arpeggio in which only the top note changes; the lower notes always remain the same. For this reason, we remove the top notes from the original and vice versa for the duplicate. Then we look for a different sound for the copy. This creates a lot more tension. Tip: Delete every second note from the copy. 3 Method B This leaves more space…

DiscoDSP OB-Xd 3 DiscoDSP is giving OB-Xd, a very successful Oberheim emulation, a new update. The virtual Oberheim OB-X synthesizer is still offered free of charge and without compulsory registration, at least if you can do without VST3 and oversampling. This is because in Version 3, DiscoDSP will charge €49 for this in future, and not just as a voluntary donation as before. The original dates back to 1979 and is a polyphonic synthesizer with classic subtractive synthesis. Two oscillators and a noise generator are fed through a 2-pole lowpass filter; two ADSR envelopes and an LFO are used for modulation. PWM, Sync and Crossmodulation expand the sound spectrum, while a unison mode can provide even fatter sounds. The plug-in is based on the original, but offers some improvements such…

Many people may know Pro Tools more as a recording program and wrongly less as a powerful program for modern music production. However, Pro Tools has long offered many interesting features, instruments and effects for this purpose. This is even more true with the Sketch Window. Efficient shortcuts and the ability to work in detail with audio files and add effects directly to them have long set the program apart from others. Pro Tools Sketch You can now create a new document in Pro Tools either as a „Session“ or as a „Sketch“. In a Sketch, you can compose ideas as loops on the fly in a new user interface in the style of NI Maschine or Ableton Live, combine tracks into scenes, transfer files via drag & drop or…

Doja Cat – Paint The Town Red: 808 w/Minimal Audio Current 1 Megahit with 808 Doja Cat has created one of THE tracks of the year with „Paint the Town Red“. Since the Summer, this song has been playing on Tik Tok and then up and down the charts. In itself, it is very simple: sample, Doja‘s rap and the mighty 808. The basic building blocks are very simple - but making the 808 sound exactly like the song takes some finesse. 2 Sine and Pink Noise The basic ingredient of every 808: a Sine Wave. Set this in Osc A in Current and load the wavetable, Analog Folded Sine 1, and set the Position control below it to 6%. This should make the signal a little scratchier so that…

It wasn‘t so long ago that Korg attracted attention with the Volca series of mini synthesizers. Other manufacturers, such as Roland with the Boutique series, took up the idea and also faced some criticism for it. Many users, especially lovers of classic synthesizers, consider the compact devices to be difficult to use, inoperable or even useless toys. Micro synthesizer If you share this opinion, you don‘t need to read any further. The debut synthesizer in Behringer‘s aptly named Micro series is a good deal smaller, just half the size of a Korg Volca. The miniature synthesizer measures approx. 13 x 9 x 3 centimeters (at the highest point) and therefore undercuts the Modal Craftsynth, which is unfortunately no longer available, by a few centimeters. Design and feel The JT-4000 Micro…