Innehållsförteckning för October 2020 från Computer Music

With countless excellent sample libraries just a few clicks and a credit card away, it’s easy to find pre-programmed loops in practically any conceivable style these days. But although they can be a convenient shortcut to producing professional-sounding music, relying on them for all your beats isn’t always an approach we’d recommend. The advantage of being able to program your own beats from scratch is that you’ll gain a better understanding of how they work, both rhythmically and sonically. Knowing what gives a particular genre its groove and which drums are used to generate which sounds is a hugely useful skill when it comes to composing and mixing dance music. Creating rhythms using one-shot samples or drum machines gives you a far greater level of control over the sound than…

Bass is not only the foundation of a piece of music pitch-wise, but also incredibly important from a rhythmic perspective. A solid bassline locked to an infectious drum groove is the holy grail of dance music, so this month I’ll be looking at some of the ingredients that can help transform a basic bassline into a stone cold killer groove. There are, of course, many different styles of bass depending on the genre. Also, the type of instrument you’re using will have an effect on things – a great synth bassline will have similar elements to an equivalent line played on a bass guitar in terms of rhythm and syncopation, but as it’s played on a keyboard rather than a fretboard, the approach to the way it’s played and phrased…

As with previous iterations, Studio One 5 comes in two versions: the top-tier Professional edition and the far cheaper, lower-spec Artist edition; but for this review, we’re only looking at Studio One 5 Professional – see the PreSonus website for more on Artist. We should also point out that you can buy Studio One 5 outright or as part of the new PreSonus Sphere subscription service. This gets you all the company’s software (Studio One Professional and all its plugins, Notion, and a ton of sample-based instruments and loops), and various collaborative and networking tools, for a monthly (£12.05) or annual (£132.97) fee. One Performance For us, the new Studio One 5 feature we’re likely to get the most use out of is actually one of the more modest. Clip…

Bucket Brigade Devices (BBDs) form the cornerstone of solid state delay lines and unlike a digital or tape-based delay, they actually use a chip that’s full of capacitors to create a delayed version of the original signal. This can be used to implement a delay effect or combined with modulation to create a chorus. The typical BBD design includes input and output filtering, and this, combined with the noisy nature of the chips themselves, creates a distinctive sound. The Analog BBD mode on Syntorus 2 is D16’s attempt to emulate these solid state chips. With it switched in there’s a clear difference to the sound; and, for want of a better description, with BBD switched out, the sounds is quite hi-fi. With it switched in, it’s darker and more retro…

Meduza are a trio of producers from Italy – Luca de Gregorio, Mattia Vitale and Simone Giani – whose collaboration with Goodboys, Piece of Your Heart, earned them both Best Dance Song and Breakthrough Artist of the Year International Dance Music Awards. The song went on to hit number 2 in the UK singles chart and was nominated for a Best Dance Recording Grammy this year. Second single Lose Control (with Becky Hill and Goodboys) was also a hit around the world and the trio have remixed everyone from Friendly Fires (the track Heaven Let Me In) to Lifelike and Kris Menace (with Discopolis 2.0). Mattia Vitale is on hand to be your 15 question masterer… 1 How did Meduza get together? Mattia Vitale: “Luca and Simone started working together…

Amped Studio Bil Bryant CM What does the ‘online studio’ concept offer the professional producer? BB “The mobility of having your projects and sounds available on any computer, anywhere are the obvious benefits. Pro producers often use more than one DAW for specific purposes, and an online DAW can be a complimentary addition for any producer collaborating and in transit. Sketching out and sharing a project as a link that opens the arrangement in your browser is universally accessible.” CM Amped has come on in leaps and bounds. What were the big challenges? BB “We started in PNaCl (Portable Native Client Code) for Chrome and then ported over to WASM (Web Assembly) when it was robust enough for an application like Amped Studio. There are some dependencies with the architecture…

Sara Simms’s star is rising rapidly in the world of techno. As a DJ, she has played sets for Allen and Heath’s live broadcast at ADE and Miami Music Week, at Charivari Detroit, and at Techno Taco Tuesday for MNTRA in Las Vegas. She is also a producer and for her latest single, Finally, has teamed up with vocalist JEI who worked with Intruder for the MoS/Defected Records track Aname. Here Sara reveals some of her production tricks including some intricate kick work advice that could change the backbone of your productions… 1 How did you get into music production? Sara Simms: “I’ve always been into music; both my parents are music teachers who taught me piano, theory and invested in lessons for me. I grew up playing jazz guitar…

While the original rhythm boxes of legend were based on analogue synthesis, and their successors on sampling, the modern sound designer has far more sophisticated tools at their disposal. Obviously, sample-based drum plugins are numerous – FXPansion’s BFD, Toontrack’s Superior Drummer and other similar tools seek to provide the most realistic experience. However, sample-based drums come at a cost. Even sounds that short can take up vast amounts of space on your hard drive, since the only way to ensure authenticity is to sample a range of hits at varying velocities for each drum. Of course, this is part of the sales pitch: more and bigger samples is the mantra of the commercial sample industry. Yet no matter how many times you sample a drum, the individual samples will be…

Vocalist, DJ, producer and major star collaborator Harrison has made a name for his live shows that combine his vocal talents with huge dance tunes. As well as touring this around the world, he has worked on tracks with some of the biggest names in music including David Guetta (the track Ain’t a Party), Hardwell (Sally), Laidback Luke (the album Focus and track Never Rave Again) and Steve Aoki (Holding Up The World) among many others. More recently he has launched his own Outlaw imprint with a focus on solo productions and now has a studio that really does combine the best in hardware and software. Take it away Harrison… 1 Tell us a little about your musical background and upbringing… Harrison: “I’m 27 years old and I’m now signed…

We’ve saved what for some will be Studio One 5’s best new feature, and for others a complete irrelevance, for its own box. The Show Page – and its reductive full-screen Performance mode – comprises a completely new and refocused environment within Studio One in which your studio projects can be reconfigured into, and performed as, complete, sequentially organised live sets, incorporating backing tracks, virtual instruments, live audio input and effects processing, mixing and comprehensive MIDI control. We’ll confess to not having put the Show Page on an actual stage yet, but its flexibility and power are readily apparent, and it could prove game-changing for bands looking to take their tracks to the stage without the hassle of running multiple laptops, mixers and all the rest of it – assuming…

Klevgrand Ting $20/$8 8/10 cm283 What can only be described as a found-sound drum machine, Ting has a dozen household objects mapped to each key of your ‘board so you can trigger around 500 car keys, sofa slaps and plenty of pots. If that doesn’t appeal – and we haven’t made it sound that great, tbh – Ting actually works! “Although limited in its sonic scope, it sounds fantastic and proves particularly effective for dubby percussion lines and layering under beats.” Of course it does! klevgrand.se Zero-G Fraktale Fragmente £38 9/10 cm282 This Kontakt instrument contains 500 mechanical, electronic, aquatic, found and other strange samples. With some rudimentary editing and effects on offer you can easily do enough mangling to get creative, so delivering “one of the most…

Toontrack EZbass £129 Web timespace.com Format PC/Mac, VST/AU/AAX/Standalone Toontrack‘s EZdrummer 2 (10/10, 205) and EZkeys (various scores for various versions) virtual instruments give music producers everything they need to create authentic sounding drum and keyboard tracks; and now the band is one step closer to completion with the introduction of EZbass. At the heart of EZbass are two multisampled electric bass guitars – a ‘Vintage’ Fender Jazz and a ‘Modern’ Alembic, totalling around 2GB of samples – each of which is used as the basis for a variety of presets that, in typical ‘EZ’ style, incorporate fixed effects racks. These take in amplification, EQ, reverb, chorus, distortion and more, and although you can’t simply build your own rack from the ground up, the presets provide more than enough starting…

Reader Music – another fan writes! Dear cm Glad to hear you are bringing back Reader Music*. It’s a great idea to bring back a feature to hear and read about what fellow Computer Music readers are producing, if only to measure my own meagre efforts against my peers. Will you be resurrecting the part where you get an expert producer to critique the tracks? This could be scary… Glen Indeed it could, and we don’t want to put off any readers from sending their music in, so we’ll be offering as constructive criticism as possible and leaving the possibly more extreme producer views for another time. If you want to send in your music to our all-new Reader Music* section – starting in next month’s issue by the way…

New IK Multimedia gear The Italian megalith ramps things up with a feast of new releases IK Multimedia have had a busy few weeks, announcing a raft of new releases for computer-based musicians. First up, T-RackS Space Delay – an emulation of the timeless Roland Space Echo tape delay. Built on the same hybrid convolution and physical modelling technology as IK’s Tape Machine Collection (8/10, 276), this features the expected three playback heads, variable-speed motor and onboard spring reverb of the real thing. A number of completely new extensions have been thrown in too, including independent panning of each playback head and the spring, high- and low-pass filters, and the ability to duck the echo with the input signal. You can also dial in mechanical noise and tape degradation. Space…

If you want ‘real’ drums, then go pick up a copy of last month’s Computer Music, where we detail how to get the perfect acoustic drum kit sound in your computer and to recreate ‘proper’ beats in your DAW, with a healthy dose of recording, programming and mixing advice along the way. This time around, we’re talking electronic beats, those more machine-like rhythms that lie at the cornerstone of so many of today’s music genres. Of course, any beat that lies on your hard drive can be described as ‘electronic’; once it gets there it’s made up of digital ones and zeros. But stop being pedantic; you know the score! We’re talking about those beats that provide the foundation to just about every genre and sub genre that you can…

In this walkthrough, we’ve used the technique of placing the kick and snare dead centre in the mix by reducing their stereo width, and having the ride sit out on the edges of the stereo panorama by running it through a flanger. We call this kind of trickery mid/side processing, and understanding it is pretty much essential for getting contemporary-sounding drum mixes. How does mid/side work? Usually, we think about a stereo signal in terms of left and right channels. We can ‘encode’ both channels into a mid signal (the information that’s present in both the left and right channels, and thus what you hear at the centre of the mix) and a sides signal (the difference between the left and right channels, and what you hear at the very…

Last issue we looked at the many functions of a typical filter, using the module included with Cherry Audio’s Voltage Modular Nucleus. We showed you each of the onboard filter types (low-pass, high-pass etc) and two slopes. We learnt how the filter’s ability to carve away selected frequencies make subtractive synthesis, well, subtractive and how it affects some of the waveforms produced by a typical analogue oscillator. This month, we’ll use that sculpting power to create some familiar timbral effects. A filter is at its best used dynamically – simply setting the cutoff frequency and leaving it alone does not make for an exciting sound! Such a static approach surely has uses – especially when using a filter as a corrective tool – but the best synth sounds are organic,…

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…

Polish developer D16 produce some of the finest analogue emulations available, ranging from the Roland-inspired Drumazon and Nepheton drum machines right through to hardware emulating effects such as their Antresol flanger, Repeater delay and Redoptor tube distortion. A decade ago they released their original chorus plugin, Syntorus. This captured the classic analogue chorus sound you’d find on synths, pedals and beyond and needless to say we loved it and still do. But ten years is a long time, and so it’s great to see this excellent processor finally getting an overhaul. So what’s new? “Ten years is a long time, and so it’s great to see this excellent processor finally getting an overhaul” Syntorus 2 (VST, AU, AAX) builds on version 1 in a number of ways. The big news…

The original Novation Launchkey arrived back in 2013, a solid and great value-for-money controller for both desktop and iPad and one which we concluded was, ‘possibly the best controller keyboard in its price bracket’. The Mk 2 version came out in 2016 and – with 16 launch pads corresponding in colour to those of the clips in Ableton’s Session view – became a bit of a steal for Live users. Now at Mk 3 stage, and with ‘create and perform with Ableton Live’ writ large on the box, Launchkey appears now to be a Live-only controller. Look a-Live It’s not, of course – even the most dedicated MIDI controllers will work, to varying degrees with any DAW, and Novation confirm this by saying “Launchkey also has full integration with Logic…

Native Instruments Infinite Escape £44 Minimal house is the subject of NI’s latest Expansion, giving everyone 1.5GB of construction kits and one-shots for embellishment or origination of their own ultra-chic dancefloor numbers. It is particularly amenable to Maschine and Battery users, who get the deconstructed sources of said ‘songs’ in the form of 40 Groups (complete with MIDI patterns) and 45 Kits, respectively, plus 70 Massive and Monark presets. The beats are crisp and glitchy, basses tight and subby, melodics delicate and subterranean, and production is pristine. One of the best Expansions yet, we dare say. native-instruments.com 10/100 Loopmasters Future IDM £35 Citing Bonobo, Four Tet and Bicep as influences, this 950MB library aims to cater to your more thoughtful electronic productions. Vintage x0x-boxes feature heavily in the…