Innehållsförteckning för September 2020 från Computer Music

Together with mid and high click, the balance and length of the sub, punch and honk elements are what shape the bass drum sound. These combine to give you a either a long, subby, 808-style kick, a house-esque, clicky all-rounder, or a top-heavy Metallica rocker. Start with the nearest thing you can find to what you ultimately want – whether that’s a sampled sound or a synthesised one – then go ahead and sculpt away. Sub happens at around 60Hz. Make sure you cut or boost in this area using a narrow Q, otherwise you might unhelpfully add or remove frequencies on either side of your chosen range – even small adjustments at 30Hz or 100Hz will have a surprisingly big effect on the sound. The sub element is what…

The hi-hats are a pair of cymbals mounted on a stand, one upside down and the other the right way up, both held in place on a central spike and connected to a footpedal at the base of the stand. By operating the pedal, the drummer brings the hi-hats together. If you watch a jazz drummer play, you’ll see that the hi-hats spend most of the time closed, but open and shut quickly on the second and fourth beats of the bar. In just about all other modern styles the hi-hats are kept closed or half-closed and played with sticks, anchoring the drum track by beating out eighth-notes. The role of the hats is to give life to the kick and snare pattern. Acoustic hats vary from small, thin and…

Music technology in the 1980s, went through a transformative period. The arrival of MIDI and digital synthesis on the scene superseded ‘old-fashioned’ analogue equipment such as the Minimoog, and sampling and sequencing were on the point of revolutionising the way that records would come to be made. New Order and the Eurythmics were just two bands whose experimental forays into commercial electronic pop music, with tracks such as Blue Monday and Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), spearheaded a radio-friendly revolution in how popular music was now meant to sound. Fast-forward almost 40 years and you only have to listen to current releases by Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga or The Weeknd to realise the influence that 80s music is now exerting on current releases. But how do you go about…

Dylan Levitt is a senior sound designer at Sound Lab, which specialise in creating custom sound design for movies, video games, TV shows and location-based entertainment. Sound Lab has been involved in huge projects including the Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Gears of War, Fable and Epic Mickey franchises, and with developers including Riot, NC Soft, Tencent and Square Enix. Dylan’s role can be as varied as supplying ‘real’ sound effects for a film or game character’s movements, or imaginary audio, created in software for creatures in fantastical environments Computer Music: Explain the concept behind sound design… Dylan: “There are two major philosophies: one goes back to the famous film and sound editor Walter Murch who coined the term ‘sound design’ – which is essentially how the sound in a film…

There’s been a decades-lasting joke among members of the Computer Music team – and indeed between us and many other music gear magazines – that whenever we attend a music equipment show, we are guaranteed to hear someone, usually of middling age, either demoing or auditioning a new synth by playing the intro to Van Halen’s Jump. At least five times. A day. And considering we’ve been going to gear shows for two decades now, that’s an awful lot of times that we have heard that intro. It’s fair to say, then, that when we finally get to review an emulation of the synth behind it, the Oberheim OB-Xa, you can surely understand that we are approaching said review with some trepidation. Actual anxiety and shaking, if you must ask,…

Quad includes various ways for oscillator 1 to control osc 2 and vice versa. In the dropdown box at the bottom right of oscillator 2’s XY pad, you’ll find a choice of 16 modulation types accompanied by two amount controls. Modulation types include typical options such as ring modulation, phase modulation and four types of frequency modulation. However, each type has quite specific features and to that end the function of the amount controls is specific to each modulation type. If you really want to know what’s happening, the manual includes a detailed description of each type, but, as an example, frequency modulation 2 (FM2) is a sample and hold algorithm with oscillator 1 as the sample source and oscillator 2 as the target. The adjustable parameters are frequency modulation…

Last month’s Computer Music had a rather great freebie in the shape of Baby Audio’s Baby Comeback CM, a plugin especially put together for us by Baby Audio and an exceptional delay that is capable of providing sublime results. It is based on Comeback Kid, Baby Audio’s latest delay, so now it’s time to look at this bigger version to see what you get for not such a big outlay. We kid you not As we fell in love with our freebie, you won’t be surprised to learn that there’s a lot more to love in Comeback Kid. Like Baby Comeback CM, Kid has three BPM-synced modes – Straight, Dotted and Triplet – to offer different timed delays, while the main Time dial allows you to select intervals down to…

Award-winning techno and trance DJ/ producer Joris Delacroix started out making music at a very young age, growing up in the south of France and surrounded by the classic French Touch sound so popular in the late 90s and early 2000s. Last year he debuted what he calls the ‘SuperSet project’, a live show with both DJ and live performance elements, which he premiered at Viertel in Basel and the Electroday Festival. He has produced two solo albums and recently released the track Stay on the Hungry Music label. “I’m just a humble guy from the south of France and I do music just because I enjoy doing it,” he says. “I can’t really say why it became successful, it’s probably a combination of a bit of talent and a…

Bring back Reader Music! Dear A while back you used to feature reviews of readers’ music – in fact I believe it might even have been called, rather appropriately, ‘Reader’s Music’. I just wondered if you could bring it back as I’d love to hear what other readers are producing and put it next to mine as a comparison? Matt S It’s a great idea Matt, and something we’ve been thinking about for a while. If you or anyone else would like to have your music critiqued, please send links (Soundcloud preferably) and a bio to computermusic@ futurenet.com. We’ll round up the best and put them in a feature called, now let me think… Modular DAWs Dear Last month’s discussion about DAW-specific things highlighted what I think is a rather…

Toontrack Erik Phersson CM What challenges did you face in the development of EZbass? EP “Designing good software is a complex and creative process with many twists and turns. So yes, lots of hurdles and lessons learned along the way. One recurring challenge is figuring out the balance between usability and complexity. Traditionally, our EZ Line products have, by design, been fairly limited in what the user can control. This has served its purpose well for EZdrummer, EZmix and EZkeys. EZbass, however, called for more features and user control but we of course didn’t want to make any sacrifices in terms of making the product easy to use. Getting this right took a number of iterations, but I think we hit the sweet spot.” CM What sets EZbass apart from…

Peter Holmström is best known as the lead guitarist for The Dandy Warhols, air traffic controller for Pete International Airport and collaborator in Walls Of Dada. He formed The Dandys in 1994 with singer/songwriter and guitarist Courtney Taylor-Taylor. They have released 11 albums over the last quarter of a century, the third of which, 1999’s Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia, spawned the worldwide hit and Vodaphone soundtrack Bohemian Like You. The band have just unleashed a 214-minute opus of unreleased Dandy’s material called Tafelmuzik Means More When You’re Alone, which is described as: “never-before-tasted Dandies goodness”. We talk to Holmström about how he creates his distinctive sound and what he’s learned from 25 years in the industry… 1 What is your overall philosophy or approach when it comes to music?…

This issue is primarily dedicated to recorded and sampled acoustic drums, but (of course) no programmer of beats should overlook the characterful, sonically expansive sounds of the synthetic drum machine. With a history going all the way back to the 30s, the drum machine has gone through endless changes, fashions, declines and revivals, ultimately finding its natural home in dance and electronic music. Although the sounds made by these electronic boxes might be miles away from their acoustic counterparts, all of them still categorise their sounds as regular drum kit components – kick, snare, toms, hi-hats, etc – and they’re often programmed to play exactly the same sorts of parts that real drummers play, or at the very least interpretations of them. It’s testament to the longevity and continued relevance…

The snare drum is huge! Not that it’s ever been unimportant in the grand drumming scheme of things, but the rise of several forms of dance music has seen more attention focused on the snare than at any time since the massive T’pau-style extremes of the late 80s. In the real world, the snare drum is the one placed between the drummer’s legs, with a band of sprung wires stretched across the bottom head to give it its unique crack and sizzle. Add to that some lively resonance from the top skin and you have an instrument that’s capable of producing a huge variety of sounds, from the warm, deep ‘doosh’ of the 70s to the high ‘ping’ of nu-metal, and everything in between. In terms of rhythm, the snare…

PHYSICAL REALISM ‘Be’ the drummer! If you’re aiming to program realistic sounding hi-hats and cymbals, it’s important to remember the mechanics of what a real player would do. A drummer only has two arms, so make sure no more than two cymbals are ever hit at the same time – and that’s without the snare or toms, of course. DUPLICATE HATS Many ROMplers and ‘virtual drummers’ automatically apply mute groups to hi-hat samples, meaning that a closed hat will end the decay of an open one. Although this mimics reality, it’s often good to disable it or have a duplicate hi-hat that you can use for overlapping pedalled and half-open hits – set up your own ‘choke’ key if you need one. MULTI-HATS For floor-filling dance music productions, try placing…

Many computer musicians shy away from programming their own acoustic (as opposed to electronic) drum tracks, understandably concerned that since they don’t know how to play a real drum kit, any attempt to create a performance on a virtual one will fall short in terms of technicality and sound. Others go in the opposite direction, naively and over-confidently penning beats that at best would require five or six limbs to actually play, and at worst come across as mad and unconvincing, even to the untrained ear. The fact is that programming realistic, groovy drum parts is well within any desktop producer’s abilities. All you need is a MIDI sequencer, a quality sound source and some insight into the rules, limitations and standard practices that real drummers work to and within.…

REVERB INSERTS Although we used a single bussed reverb in our walkthrough, there’s no reason not to use inserted reverbs on your separate channels. A short, dark ’verb on the kick, a longer, brighter one on the snare, etc. If you choose to do this, though, be careful not to make it sound like each of your drums is in a different space to the others – unless you’re going for deliberate weirdness, that is. PARALLEL COMPRESSION Parallel or ‘New York-style’ compression is simply the act of mixing compressed and uncompressed versions of the same signal in order to reduce the dynamic range but retain all those punchy attack transients. Either bus your drum group through an auxiliary track with a compressor plugin inserted and mix it with the original,…

GATEWAY TO THE EIGHTIES Other well-used 80s tropes, eventually dismissed as clichés at the time, come in handy when trying to evoke the sound of the decade now. For example, gated reverb – allegedly discovered when Hugh Padgham patched a gate over the heavily-compressed listen mic used to communicate with Phil Collins in the drum booth – became a decade-defining effect, used a lot on drums. Make your own gated reverb effect by heavily compressing a non-linear reverb tail, then placing a noise gate plugin across it to chop off the release. SYNTHS YOU BEEN GONE The 1980s was also the decade in which innovative new synthesis techniques like FM (Frequency Modulation), PD (Phase Distortion) and Wavetable synthesis appeared on the scene. So a great way to recreate the sounds…

Matt Uelmen is a US musician, composer and sound designer, who specialises in audio for PC games. Max Schaefer is the co-founder of Runic Games and CEO of Echtra Games. They’ve been working on music together for 25 years, including for games that defined the action role-playing game genre, like Torchlight I and II, Diablo I and II, and, most recently, Torchlight III Computer Music: Tell us about your music background? Matt: “I grew up in a musical household, all five people in my immediate family, which includes another professional musician, can play some keyboard. I was very lucky to have had the idea of trying to focus on video games back when everything about the video game development and music worlds were incredibly uncompetitive compared to today.” cm: How…

If there’s one criticism that has been levelled at Arturia’s emulations over the years it’s that they can sound rather drenched in effects. Happily OB-Xa V doesn’t exhibit this too much (the Jump preset doesn’t even feature the original effects as standard) but you can easily control the applied effects by clicking the Advanced Panel. Here you get two options: Effects and Modulation. Within the former, there are some mostly great sounding effects, with nine options selectable from drop-down menus for each of the three blocks on offer. Parameters are shown for each effect ranging from a couple for the Bitcrusher up to seven for the reverb. The Modulation options are fantastic, with up to four envelopes (selectable from the middle screen) that you can assign to most parameters by…

In the decade since Hit’n’Mix’s audio software first appeared, it has come on leaps and bounds and not only grown in terms of features but also sounds a whole lot better. Somewhere along the way it acquired the Infinity name and now, at version 4.7, could finally be ready for a much wider audience. Basic concepts “Note Editor lets you paint, erase, smooth and adjust different types of harmonics across selected notes” Billed as the world’s first atomic audio editor, Infinity is a standalone application (OS X 10.10 or later, Windows 7 or later) that analyses audio (WAV, mp3, Flac, Ogg) and presents it as melodic and noise components. These can be edited in various ways to achieve functional, reparation and creative tasks. Melodic and noise components appear in a…

Pulsar Digital are relatively new plugin developers but with a lot of experience – their team having previously programmed plugins for Arturia and Slate Digital. They have three plugins: Mu, Echorec and Smasher, and it’s the latter 1176-type compressor that we have here for free! Generally speaking, compressors can be used to tame audio subtly – as you might do in mastering – or used as an effect to add punch and grit. As you might expect from the name, Pulsar Smasher definitely falls into the latter camp. It is essentially emulating the ‘all-buttonsin’ effect first experienced on the classic hardware UREI 1176 compressor. Also known as ‘the four-button trick’ or ‘British Mode’ this effect was discovered when pressing all of the hardware’s Ratio buttons in at the same time.…

Cherry Audio Voltage Modular 2 Get your Eurorack-style fix on your Mac/PC with Voltage Modular 2 Version 2 of Cherry Audio’s Voltage Modular has landed, introducing a raft of profound changes and new features to one of the most expansive and powerful software modular synthesis systems on the market. First – and, for some, foremost – will be the addition of a number of new modules to the Voltage Modular Core package, including the Poly Vintage and Poly Super Oscillators, Poly Ladder Filter and Poly Super Envelope Generator, Spectrum Analyzer, MIDI File Player, Octal Switch and Micro Mult. Many of the incumbent modules have been redesigned and improved as well, with linear FM being worked into the Oscillator, resonance modulation added to the Filter, and the Delay module offering tempo…

Apple Logic Pro X and Ableton Live 10 are two of the most popular music production applications in the world, and as of May this year, they’ve got far more in common than just their version numbers. Before the release of Logic Pro X 10.5, Live’s Session View gave it a creative angle all its own, but with the promotion of the Live Loops Grid from GarageBand iOS to Logic, that differential has been flattened. Not only that, but Logic Pro X 10.5’s new Sampler and Quick Sampler plugins are positively brazen in their similarity with Ableton’s Sampler and Simpler devices, while the remade Drum Machine Designer is more than a little reminiscent of Ableton’s Drum Rack. Once upon a time we knew where we stood with these two qualitatively…

The kick drum, or bass drum, is the powerhouse behind the music. In a club, it’s the kick that’s nailing the four to the floor, and at a rock gig it’s the kick that’s making your chest compress. The kick started life as a hollow log being whacked by one of Dave Grohl’s ancestors about 60,000 years ago, and evolved via marching bands to its current status as the logo-bearing centrepiece of the modern drum kit. Now, of course, it also exists as a sequence of zeros and ones, filed away in your sample collection. The kick drum is all about low frequencies. It has mids and highs, but its full weight can be felt from 150Hz all the way down to 45Hz, where your speaker cones (and possibly you…

Record drums? Why would you bother when it’s so easy to simply launch Superior Drummer or BFD, bash out a quick beat on the keyboard, hit the quantise button and get stuck into recording everything else? It’s certainly true that some of these virtual drums/drummers sound awesome, and offer a mind-boggling choice of sounds and patterns. Not only that, but they don’t argue, and they don’t issue demands for payment, writing credits or bowls of Smarties with all the blue ones taken out – so it’s effectively a no-brainer, right? Well, here are some other things that those pieces of drum software – and all the rest of them – don’t do. They don’t know how your song goes; they don’t have ideas; they don’t have a background of musical…

The track Bassline put Bristolian producer GotSome on the map in 2013/4, after being championed by Annie Mac and others. Following that, the Just A Feeling EP led to collaborations with Wiley and AC Slater and remixes for Sub Focus and Craig David among many others. More recently, Adam has been dabbling in other genres including house, but it seems the bass has always been with him… 1 How did you get into production? Adam Gorsky: “The key thing for me was being young and being from Bristol when drum & bass was big – being around that and hip-hop. Bristol had the cream of the crop in the underground scene, and I just wanted to be involved. I just wanted to save up for some turntables and learn how…

When we speak of ‘analogue synthesis’ we usually mean analogue subtractive synthesis. There are, though, many other non-analogue forms of subtractive synthesis – the typical sampler fits that description. You see, the ‘subtractive’ bit has nothing to do with how a synth makes its sound, but how that sound is manipulated once generated. In the case of subtractive synthesisers, an oscillator generates a waveform by analogue or digital means. That waveform likely consists of the fundamental frequency, plus harmonic and inharmonic frequencies. Said waveform is then spat through a filter, which is used to hack away at those frequencies. The filter’s actions might be defined by modulation sources such as low frequency oscillators, envelope generators, or performance controls like velocity sensitivity or keyboard scaling. More on that below. It’s this…

Our promise We bring you honest, unbiased appraisals of the latest computer music products. Our experts apply the same stringent testing methods to all gear, no matter how much hype or expectation surrounds it. What the ratings mean 1-4 A seriously flawed product that should be avoided 5 This product’s problems outweigh its merits 6 A decent product that’s only held back by a few flaws 7 Solid. Well worth considering 8 Very good. A well-conceived and executed product 9 Excellent. First-rate and among the best you can buy 10 Exceptional. It just doesn’t get any better than this! Awarded to products that challenge existing ideas and do something entirely new A product has to really impress us with its functionality and features to win this one If the product…

Quad was originally designed as a rack extension instrument for Propellerhead Reason and has now been relaunched for VST, AU and AAX users. Like many Rob Papen synths, most of the functionality is found in one jam packed window, and it’s fair to say this contributes to a functional rather than designer layout. However, if you’ve used Rob Papen synths before you’ll appreciate that the directness and efficiency are accompanied by incredible depth of features, a plethora of presets and an awesome sound that you’ll keep coming back to. Quad Core “The big ticket feature and the one that dominates the interface, is the XY pad system” Quad features two core oscillators each with their own sub oscillator and 4 XY pads – two per oscillator. This four-fold ‘quad’ arrangement…

Infinity uses the coding language Python for its scripting, and, as mentioned, scripts form the basis of many of the editing processes, including the Note Editor, Chord Creator, the four Mapper options (Beat, Panning, Pitch and Volume) and Audioshop tools such as clone, draw, join, blend and so on. However, Infinity also incorporates a fully-fledged script editor. To get started, you head to the RipScript menu and launch either the Create RipScript option or the RipScript Editor. The former provides various templates and starting points and once selected will open the editor for you. However, perhaps an easier option is simply to launch the RipScript Editor, click on an existing script from the list on the left (you’ll notice the factory ones have padlock icons) and duplicate it ready for…

Sontronics Podcast Pro £99 Web sontronics.com Gear Dynamic podcast microphone OM For obvious reasons, there have been more of us with time to broadcast something, and there’s certainly lots to talk about, so the field of podcasting is booming. Sontronics are best known for their higher end studio microphones – like the Aria, Delta and Mercury – that they have been making since 2005. The new Podcast Pro doesn’t quite have their top-end recording aspirations, but nor does it boast their prices and it does pack some Sontronics quality in there, resulting in a well-spec’d mic for the cash. First up there’s the build quality. It’s a pretty light-weight mic at 356g, but has a very solid feel and great overall design (it’s also available in a striking red).…

> Logic 10.5 Logic 10.5 has some issues with third-party plugins and a lot of developers are releasing special updates to tailor for it. Pulsar’s latest downloads should work fine, but if you are using an earlier version or have any issues, they say: “For the Logic 10.5 issue, we found that if you have any problems, install the latest version and delete any file located in ~/Library/Caches/AudioUnitCache. This way Logic will scan the plugins again which should solve the issue.” > It can be massive Unusually for a plugin of this ilk, Smasher can be completely customised in terms of size. Click and drag on the bottom right corner of the plugin’s UI to take it right up to a massive 200%, or click the 100% or 150% boxes…

Acoustic Drums We’ve got a huge set of features designed to help you get a great acoustic drum sound, but you can always use these samples instead! Robbie from Cyclick samples says… “This set of samples utilises an acoustic drum kit (kick, snare, rack tom, floor tom, hi-hats, ride cymbal and crash cymbal), a bunch of mics/preamps and seven tempos. For each tempo, the kit was tweaked a little (tom and snare tuning) and then 30 minutes’ drumming was put down, sifted through for one- or two-bar nuggets and mixed. A second kit was set up with just the room mics brutalised with UAD 1176s along with the overheads and Super Stereo Ear (see below) and kick drum speaker mic tucked in behind. This is a heavy, squashed sound which…