Innehållsförteckning för February 2021 från Computer Music

Most people don’t have good mixing rooms, let alone perfect ones. It’s the combination of speakers and room that determine the sweetness of your sweet-spot. Most problems occur with low frequencies, but small spaces can also play havoc with your stereo imaging. Headphones, constant A/Bing and working at relatively low levels can help. But if your room is truly awful you should spend £500 on fixing it and £500 less on your monitors. Ideally you want the sound waves generated by your speakers to travel uninterrupted to your ears, but all the reflected sound in smaller rooms interferes with, and adversely affects the direct sound. Your weapons here are absorption and diffusion, and you need to treat the surfaces nearest your speakers – including the ceiling. Absorption prevents reflection. Effective…

In our previous instalment, we took you through the most common uses of the humble voltage controlled oscillator, better known as the ‘VCA’. We discussed its rather pedestrian role as a volume control at the end of any synthesiser’s signal path. We described how a VCA might be used as an intermediary between a modulation source and its target, allowing you to adjust and manipulate the amount of voltage being shuttled from one module to another. Admittedly, our examples were rather obvious. We patched in an envelope generator to shape our sound’s volume over time, before hauling out another envelope and VCA to add delayed vibrato. Now, we’re going to take these applications further, exploring how we can use VCAs to create an interesting rhythmic patch with all sorts of…

BASS EXCITER If your bass feels slightly muddy or undefined in the mix, try adding a subtle exciter to enhance the upper harmonics. This technique can often bring the bass more up-front and give an extra bite to cut it through the track. Watch out for any undesired distortion in the lowest frequencies as too many harmonics there can also make the bass sound muddy… ADDING CHORUS TO YOUR BASS Keeping your bass in mono is vital if you want to achieve a solid mix. However, sometimes you might want a little extra width in your bass to fill out the panorama. Simply duplicate your bass and high pass around 250-350hz. Next, choose your favourite imager, chorus or Haas effect plugin to increase the width of the bass. The result…

No review of a major league DAW is complete without a mention of the lite option. However, in the case of Cubase, that doesn’t really exist as, wisely in our opinion, Cubase 11 comes in three tiered versions – Pro, Artist and Elements. This provides three nicely spaced price points with corresponding feature sets, and upgrading from one to the next is essentially the price difference, so you’re not out of pocket. All three offer the same high-res 64-bit audio engine at up to 192kHz. Beyond this there are tiered feature sets, so Elements has track limits (64 MIDI, 48 audio, and 24 VST instrument) whereas Artist and Pro have unlimited tracks. Similarly, the internal routing and grouping, and addressable inputs and outputs also vary. As an example, Pro can…

Included with both the Pro and Regular bundles, Audio Clean-Up Assistant is a host plugin that allows you to chain up to five single-knob ERA plugins in series. Plugins are selected from the dropdown menu, and you can use more than one of the same plugin if desired. What you can’t do as yet is use the pro plugins. The assistant has a number of handy features. Firstly, it includes a bunch of multi-plugin presets. These provide quick solutions to typical tasks (eg clipping removal). Next up, grouping all these processes into one scrolling window makes accessing all their controls quicker. Finally, the assistant includes A/B and global on/ off, so you can bypass the whole chain with one button or compare different chain settings. OK, it’s not the fanciest…

01 Register your FileSilo account and log in. Even if you have a subscriber ID, you’ll still have to unlock each mag separately or migrate your old Vault account (see step 3) 02 Head back to the Computer Musicpage (filesilo.co.uk/computermusic) and choose an issue to unlock. You’ll need to answer one question to prove you’ve purchased the issue 03 You can migrate your old Vault account over to FileSilo to retain the issues you’ve added – head to filesilo.co.uk/vault and enter your Vault email address. Reset your password via the email you receive, and log in…

You know you’re having a moment as an artist when you think “hmm John Cale would be good on this track” and months later… boom! With a little “You don’t ask, you don’t get” gumption, the avante garde icon has willingly put down some vocals for you [for album track Corner Of My Sky] and it’s all go from there. That’s the short story of what happened to Welsh producer Kelly Lee Owens but let’s face it, the privilege could well be seen as all Cale’s. Owens’ crossover indie-dream pop-electronic appeal has earned her famous fans all over. The former nurse’s recently released album Inner Song builds on the critical acclaim of her self-titled 2017 album, itself the product of years working alongside artists such as Daniel Avery and Ghost…

IK Multimedia Erik Norlander cm How did you personally get into music software development? EN “I came to music software very much from the user side. As a working musician, I started using MOTU Performer way back in 1987 (!) and also things like Unisyn for helping to edit and manage my hardware synths. How far we’ve come since then!” cm What do you love about working at IK? EN “Working with a group of highly creative, intelligent and driven individuals who are passionate about music and music tech, just like I am. These are not people who just show up to a job every day. The team that I get to work with brings real innovation and motivation to every project, and you can see it in the resulting…

For the second month running, our 15 Questions With… interviews take us to the other side of the world, this time with Aussie producer Benjamin David, aka Mild Minds. With a mix of beats, tempos and moods David’s Mild Minds project covers every pace, from ambient electronica to more uplifting (albeit lo-fi) house. Apparently “fans of Bonobo, Caribou, and Four Tet” might be in their element with his debut album (MOOD, out now and the follow-up to Mild Minds’ EP SWIM) which possibly explains the fact that Ninja Tune – one-time home of at least two of the aforementioned artists – are pushing the project out on their Counter Records label. Benjamin digs deep into the tech of his sound over the next few pages, which covers everything from Hip…

Achieving a basic starting balance for your mix can be a bit ‘chicken and egg’. Mixing is basically about judging one sound in the presence of another sound. Go back to first principles; what you don’t want to do is overload your outputs. Luckily, with most pop there’s a kick drum rooting the sonic picture, and we can use this to help build safe headroom into the mix. When the kick’s in place, setting the snare and bass becomes easier. Put a basic level meter over your master bus, solo the kick drum and set the kick drum fader so the signal at the master outputs is peaking at -12dB. When really struggling you can try the pink noise trick to help get the different elements of the mix to…

Selected kit list HARDWARE  27” iMac Soundcraft MTK mixer Doepfer Dark Energy Waldorf 2-Pole Arturia KeyLab 49 Audient iD22 Electro-Harmonix Oceans 11 Electro-Harmonix Canyon Delay Tone City Angel Wing Adam A77X monitors PLUGINS Logic Pro X iZotope Neutron iZotope Ozone Slate Digital Virtual Mix Rack Unfiltered Audio Indent Camel Audio CamelPhat…

Two very important tactics in the string arranger’s pocketbook are inversions and suspensions. Inversions are just triad chords played with a note other than the root note in the bass. As an example, imagine a C major triad played with the notes C-E-G. With the C in the bass, this is known as a root position triad – but you could have either of the other two notes in the bass instead. If you were to play the third – E – in the bass, leaving just the C and G at the top of the chord, it’s known as the first inversion. Put the fifth – G – in the bass, leaving C and E at the top, and it’s known as the second inversion. Inversions are a key…

Pop music obviously derives from ‘popular’, but like all art forms, whatever is currently popular changes. While individuality is always to be encouraged, if you want your tunes to fit well against the current landscape, they’ll inevitably need to conform to some extent to what your audience are expecting. This applies not only to the sound, production and genre of a song, but also to its structure. Successful pop songwriters always keep things simple enough to lock a tune into a listener’s subconscious, with enough tonal variety to keep them interested. So, while there are no hard rules to structuring a song, this month we’ll see one way to give a fairly traditional pop song format a more modern twist, using variations in the arrangement of a few parts to…

SpectraLayers is an extremely powerful cross-platform tool that lets you edit frequency via a spectrogram display with time domain on the horizontal axis and frequency on the vertical axis. This makes it useful for both fixing audio problems like unwanted noises, and also a great sound design tool for the creatively inclined. v7 is available from Steinberg as a standalone application in two levels, Pro (£257) and Elements (£68). They’ve wisely now added SpectraLayers support into Cubase Pro and Artist versions, so you can use it without launching it separately. But they’ve also included a specific version, SpectraLayers One. This is quite thinned down, even compared to the Elements edition, and you won’t find many of the editing and selection tools or processes. You also won’t find the latest automatic…

XLN Audio RC-20 Retro Color €100 10/10 cm239 Six modules to shoot your audio back in time like some kind of retro DSP cannon, RC-20 offers: Vinyl, Wow and Flutter, Distort, Digital, Space and Magnetic sections. Using different combinations of each, the plugin lets you put any kind of vintage tint on your choons, from video-game bitcrushing, through vinyl and tape emulation, to valve saturation. The only negative is the fixed signal path, but the sonic quality within is very high [well technically, it’s very low, but you get the drift]. RC-20 is a cure-all for producers plagued by vintage nostalgia. xlnaudio.com Aberrant DSP Sketch Cassette II $30 This emulation of an old four-track tape machine has recently been updated to add a bunch more features. Choose your tape type,…

D16 Group Spacerek €79 Web www.d16.pl Format PC/Mac, VST/AU/AAX A new Silverline plugin from D16, Spacerek takes on the concept of reverb, doing its stuff by fusing “modelled virtual spaces to a dynamic delay network”. Whatever the underlying mechanisms, Spacerek is capable of creating interesting and rich reverb spaces that don’t sound unnatural, but still lets you push things further for some unique results. Each of Spacerek’s 114 reverb models have different virtual microphone, sound source and room size configurations, allowing for versatile results. Those microphone and speaker icons on the display, by the way, aren’t moveable – they just represent how each reverb model works under the hood. In the centre, you can set volume for three reverb stages – Direct sound, Early reflections and Late reflections –…

A favourite of Van Halen, Prince and Bon Jovi, Oberheim’s OB-Xa synth is 80s music encapsulated. IK Multimedia’s OXa synth takes what’s best about the original hardware and distills it into an eminently playable instrument in your DAW, running inside IK’s Syntronik or SampleTank host software. Syntronik is an IK Multimedia plugin that runs multiple classic synth emulations, letting you choose presets or program your sounds, to layer multiple classic synths on top of each other, and to apply a selection of five from its huge stock of 38 effects to the signal. Once you’ve got OXa installed on your hard drive, you’ll have access to some classic 80s Oberheim sounds via the copious range of presets, and the control set for digging deeper into the programming behind them. OXa…

From deep within their Alps-based Bond-villain lair (well, probably an industrial estate in greater Grenoble, but we all need escapism right now) Arturia have brought forth their newest V Collection. And it’s more of the same vintage-emulations-with-a-modern-twist formula that has helped give people access to synths they could previously only have dreamed of. A full, comprehensive review from us is currently underway, but the summary of what’s new reads as follows: four brand new instruments (Jun-6V, Emulator II V, Vocoder V, OB-Xa V), upgraded titles (Jup-8V, Stage-73 V, Analog Lab V) and… a new higher price (up $100 from $499). But on that last point, early reviews seem to agree that with the expanded content, it’s not an unfair move. And there are also big discounts to be had for…

It’s not for nothing that the Philth track Phil Robinson dissects in our accompanying video is named The Teacher. And not just because one of his side ventures (although we can only imagine he is doing it for the love, as his levels of success soar) is as an, erm, teacher. No, this is an artist who very much has something to teach us mere wannabes – the art of being prolific in our output. And what is the key to that art? Well, we’ll let him explain over the course of this masterclass… Robinson’s upbringing in West London meant he was fortunate enough to be situated in the epicentre of a lot of the genres he loved, soaking in the soundsystems in clubs he would then, in later life,…

Drum processing: catching transients, cleaning breaks and gluing it all together 1 Philth likes to create his own sample libraries for things like breaks and bass, so that he can draw on these immediately, without having to spend the time selecting and processing elements on the spot. 2 Philth calls up some breaks that have been pre-processed. These files have been whipped into shape by getting their timings tight and their transients under control. If he’d dragged in unprocessed breaks, he’d have to take his mind out of the creative space, so having done this technical work in another session helps. 3 Philth cuts the lows of the drums in order to add a weightier kick underneath that will fit in context of the track. He then goes on to…

Crowded House - All I Ask Taken from 1991’s album Woodface, this unique track features a sublime string arrangement, courtesy of veteran Argentinian movie composer Jorge Calandrelli, deliberately designed to sound like it was recorded on a sound stage in 1950s Hollywood. It really demonstrates the timelessness of well-arranged strings, as it still sounds just as beautiful almost 30 years later. The track begins with a freeform intro section that sounds as if it wasn’t recorded to a click. Based on our analysis, it sounds like there are four parts written here – one each for the 1st and 2nd violins, plus viola and cello parts – played by a medium-sized chamber orchestra. Let’s take a look at each part of this gorgeous intro in detail. To approximate the sound…

There are a lot of options available for great-sounding bass samples. Yet, they are sometimes limited in respect to creating your own pattern and notation. That’s why synthesising your own bass patches works great. Today we’ll go through some of the tricks Audiotent use when creating unique preset libraries. Both software and hardware are capable of generating a wide range of bass timbres but for our step-by-step guide we used Xfer Serum due to its easy to follow layout and affordability. What makes a perfect bass? There is no direct answer to this. Each electronic music genre requires a different set of timbres to fit its style. So there is no ‘perfect bass’. A dubstep wobble bass with lots of OTT processing might not be a best fit for a…

Steinberg has spearheaded music software development for over 30 years, and through Cubase, which started as a MIDI sequencer, introduced a whole generation to the block-based arrange screen now used in the majority of today’s DAWs. Along the way they invented virtual studio technology, developed a class-leading audio editor (Wavelab) and survived the dark days of software piracy. However, in the last few years the music software landscape has changed beyond recognition and their flagship DAW, once one of only two or three serious contenders, now finds itself competing in a sea of seriously powerful and yet surprisingly similar apps, many of which of course owe their modus operandi to Cubase. So, how does this market-leading DAW keep things fresh? Existing users already know the answer, and that is the…

When we last looked at this bundle it had five plugins and included the ERA-D reverb and noise remover. Since then, ERA-D has alas become a legacy plugin. However, Accusonus have been busy expanding and reworking their offering and the result is ERA 5. Still available in two packages (Regular and Pro) and via subscription or perpetual licence, it’s the Pro bundle we have on review. This features 13 plugins (you get nine in the regular bundle). Twelve of these are real time plugins (VST, AU, AAX) and one plugin (Room Tone Match) is specifically for Pro Tools Audiosuite format. Included in the 12 is a new host plugin, Audio Clean Up Assistant (as discussed on the next page). Some plugins are updates of previous versions (Voice Leveler, Plosive Remover…

The last few months has seen a number of high profile and impressive new reverb plugins hit the shops, showing that there’s still plenty of mileage in refining this everyday effect. However, without wishing to detract from any of those plugins, for us the reverb/delay story of 2020 is actually a freebie. Valhalla DSP’s Supermassive (VST, AU, AAX) first appeared in May 2020 and has had a couple of updates since. Now at version 1.2 we thought we’d put it through its paces and see if you can in this life genuinely get something for free. Supermassive – as the name suggests – is designed for creating big effects, yet despite its big ambitions it has, much like other Valhalla DSP plugins, a straight-up interface that underplays the complexity of…

Sample Tools by CR2 Mousse T. Vol. 1 £19.99 Dope samples, samples samples samples. Yes, Mr. T is here with his first sample set in 25 years. And, as you’d expect from the studio don behind household names like Tommy Jones and Kylie Mc-Nog-Nog, it’s of a very high standard indeed. Across 200 loops and three ‘Songstarter’ kits, he showcases his covetable set of vintage synths and iconic slabs of hardware. Each one is left on until they hum with joy, and the ‘Sexbomb‘ star has coaxed some delectable grooves out of ’em. It’s fine-form disco and feel-good funkery to the last drop, with Rhodes and Wurli loops leading the pack. Guaranteed to make you horny – or flustered, at the very least. sampletoolsbycr2.com 9/10 Sample Tools by CR2…

Outer Space Bass Robbie Stamp from Cyclick tells us more about the inspiration behind his sample-pack creation: “I’m no expert, but I don’t think basslines naturally occur in space, as they clearly do on Earth, but if they did... This samples set is made up of synth basslines, drones and one-shots designed to fit an ‘Outer Space’ soundscape. Often dark, reverbed out, maybe with a little sci-fi zing and movie SFX flavour. The basslines are created from 14 instruments (softsynths and plugin processing), each contributing two lines across seven tempos: 85, 95, 110, 120, 128 and 140bpm. “The Bass Into Space folder contains one-shot hits (A to G) from various combinations of synths and heavy plugin chains. Expect long reverbs and odd tonalities. Often multiple reverbs were mixed into each…