Innehållsförteckning för October 2021 från Computer Music

If we’re honest, part of the reason – OK a BIG part of the reason – that we got into music production in the first place was the idea of sitting in front of a big mixing console, imagining we were a top-line producer, recording the biggest band in the world. Of course, computer music making has meant that the need for such a big studio has decreased – and indeed many top-line studios have suffered as music technology marches onwards. But this doesn’t mean that a dedicated space for making music is not important, and that is what our main cover feature, well, covers, this month… Computer music making does allow you to do everything in the box, but there are several reasons why you could and should think…

Before we correct the bass, our speakers should be placed so that the tweeters are at ear level and the woofers are not exactly halfway between the floor and ceiling. The speakers should form an equilateral triangle with an apex just behind your head. Using the 38% rule is a trade-off between physical symmetry (good for stereo imaging) and bass response (good for tonally balanced mixing), so check how good the ‘phantom centre’ is in your new position by listening to a vocal. It should sit bang in the middle. If your high-frequency diffusion is up to scratch, you shouldn’t have too many problems. The more solid your speaker stands, the better. Hollow metal stands aren’t great, since they can remove your bottom octave – if yours are hollow, at…

As soon as you start sending a signal from one device to another, it becomes susceptible to all kinds of interference that can show up on your track as unwanted buzz, fizz and hiss. The most common sort is earth hum. In a perfect setup, all your audio equipment would be grounded at a single, very effective earth. That way there would be no current flowing in conductors and cable shields, and consequently no current introduced into circuits and signals. Your home probably has reasonable earthing, but the actual earth points can be numerous, shared between houses and sometimes a good distance away. Installation may not be up to ‘broadcast’ standards, and the distribution of power in your house may be on ‘rings’, which can cause further problems. The best…

Equalisation is something that’s essential for a music producer to know, but easy to get wrong when you’re getting started. One of the common EQing mistakes I see my students making in their mixes is boosting frequencies on every instrument. Boosting in the right places is important, but knowing where to cut frequencies is more crucial. When you’re mixing, the key is balance. You want all of the instruments in your track to shine. While there are frequencies at which each instrument sounds best, there are also some that’ll make instruments sound… pretty far from their best. And these need to be reduced or cut completely in order to make more space for other elements. For vocal tracks, the voice is your lead instrument. You don’t want to be fighting…

DDMF IIEQPRO £27 The commercial version of DDMF’s IIEQPro includes all the great features of the CM Plugins version (such as serial and parallel routing options and 19 filter modes, including several Butterworth filters) plus more bands and a built-in spectral analyser. It’s also very reasonably priced. ddmf.eu VOXENGO GLISSEQ $69.95 From the maker of SPAN comes this incredible equaliser that not only has the same powerful spectral analysis capabilities as SPAN, but also boasts program-dependent band response. This dynamic approach to EQ makes GlissEQ ideal for boosting highs and lows without making them sound harsh or muddy. voxengo.com FABFILTER PRO-Q £124 One of the best all-round EQs on the market, Pro-Q is overflowing with awesome features. With up to 24 filter bands, zero-latency and linear phase…

Bundled content can really sell a DAW and knowing that a selection of instruments, plugins and sounds are reliably integrated means you can focus on creating rather than installing. Tracktion have spent time finessing this aspect of Waveform Pro and the three tiers offer good entry points. If you want to add further Tracktion Waveform content on a piecemeal basis, that’s also possible via their Marketplace, and you can also get discounts by combining packs using their Bundle Builder. The Basic tier includes five instruments with associated content – 4OSC, Subtractive, Drum Sampler, Multi-Sampler and the respectable S&S synth, Collective. There’s also one Imagina drum kit loop pack. This is formatted so you can add it in multitrack form, which is a great option. Step up to the Standard bundle…

“I’m [always] thinking about how to get the most out of one instrument, rather than switching between multiple things for different purposes,” Tom Holkenborg explained to us when we chatted with him fresh from completing his own personal ‘Mount Everest’ with that behemoth score for Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Though Tom was keeping his cards close to his chest with regards to what was around the corner, this emphasis on wringing the best out of each instrument is underlined more than ever on the second instalment of his sample library series – and folks, it’s the big one. Though Tom’s first release covered a stupendous array of brass sounds, Holkenborg is really renowned for the thunderous might of his percussion (think of his modern classic soundtracks for films like Mad…

The roster of Audio Imperia sample libraries has been slowly swelling, with an impressive library of cinematic and orchestral sounds which have rightly garnered both user and critical acclaim. While many users demand big, brash sounds sets, there is equal demand for individual instrument samples, which can explore the more subtle end of the spectrum, and that’s where Solo has plenty to offer. Going solo Solo embraces the familiar form of a Kontakt instrument, adopting the preferred NI library status, making light work of both installation and usability. It immediately appears in the library browser, while also being open to use within the free Kontakt player plugin. Solo also conforms to Audio Imperia’s beautiful, clean GUI construct, which offers some appealing layers. Firstly, each instrument is equipped with a Classic…

IK Multimedia AmpliTube 5 €100 9/10 cm293 It was one of the first amp sims ever developed and is now even spawning its own signature models – see opposite – but AmpliTube’s latest incarnation is better than ever. We concluded: “AmpliTube 5 expands further on the suite’s flexibility and realism. Hugely accurate amp tones abound.” ikmultimedia.com Fuse Audio Labs Virtual Pedal Board Bundle £17 10/10 cm288 A four-strong bundle of classic guitar stompboxes, with each plugin mimicking a real-world pedal with added parameters. “At this price we’d recommend VPB-Bundle to electronic producers too – it’s just the thing for colourful roughening, toughening and widening of synth leads, basses and drums.” fuseaudiolabs.de Audified ToneSpot Electric Pro $99 9/10 cm278 A channel strip plugin designed to polish and transform electric…

SmorgasFunk! We’ve gone ‘total funk’ this issue, with two new sample packs and no fewer than four packs from the vault. First up, Robbie from Cyclick explains how he assembled his banquet… “There is so much ‘funk’ that it was hard to choose a flavour to favour for this collection. I started by picking up the sticks, setting a click and pressing record on a drum kit setup that was already sat in the live room at Sandpit Studio. “The drums differ across the three tempos with either a change in dampening or tuning, and the snare was switched from a Ludwig to a Tama for the 105bpm beats. Each tempo features three mixes, produced simultaneously by blending different mics into separate effects chains. “Then it was time to record…

They say that summer is a slow time for news in the world of music production and that you can very possibly you can blame the Europeans for taking most of August off for their holidays (the lucky things). This year has been no exception as our news inbox has slowed to such a crawl that we actually welcomed the regular essay of a press release from Spitfire – more on that later. It’s not been an entirely news-less period though and, luckily, our favourite Parisian software developers UVI managed to release not one but two products before packing the budgy smugglers away for their annual holiday shindig. First up is their PX Sunbox, which is a recreation of the 1999 SunSyn, a hardware synth that was made by the…

In the September issue of Computer Music we lined up three hardware classic mono synths – the Moog Minimoog, ARP Odyssey and Roland SH-101 – with their software and (where possible) iOS emulations. We put audio from three examples of each of the three synths on FileSilo and asked you to identify which was which. The results were fascinating in that no one managed to guess the true source of every sound – some people did get a lot correct, but most people were way off with their guesses. Of course, having digitised all of the audio and put it online for you to download, you could easily argue that we evened up the playing field and you weren’t really listening to ‘proper’ analogue vs digital, but if you take…

It’s never been easier to whip up great-sounding tracks, particularly if you’re into electronic or heavily sample-based music. Every DAW on the market today ships with an extensive collection of ready-made loops, hits, pads and riffs, not to mention all those bundled synths and samplers. And then, when you’re happy with your mix, there are plenty of truly incredible plugin effects available that can give you a loud, shiny master, sometimes using just one knob. If you’re an electric guitar or bass player looking to put tracks together in your more rockin’ genre of choice, though, you’re probably more interested in capturing the feeling you get from your treasured collection of amps and pedals being played for real. And things are even more complicated for drummers, acoustic instrumentalists and singers.…

With the control room sorted, it’s time to consider the recording room. All the treatments discussed for the control room apply equally to the rooms we want to actually make noise in. Let’s be honest: you’re never going to achieve a large, neutral, ambient space in the average home, so unless you have a hall with a minstrel gallery, you need to aim for dry. The issue that usually first springs to mind when thinking about making a studio space at home is soundproofing. Unfortunately, unless you’re purpose-building a control room or live room and you want to spend a fortune and render the space pretty much unusable as a part of your house, there’s very little you can do about this. Double and triple glazing will do a good…

The rise of the perky synth is a phenomenon that goes back about eight years or so, with one of its first and most notable iterations being assembled by Clean Bandit. They exploited this sound, and many others like it, in their earlier recordings, which then in turn influenced a raft of similar pop hits. However, the influence for this sound extends back even further, to house and dance music of the 90s, where similar constructs were widely used, on the hardware synths of the day. But it is the ease-of-use provided by synth plugins that brought the perky synth back to the fore, with use extending far and wide. Many media composers found themselves using the technique, but in a very different setting. Perfect for suspense, tension and even…

USING FREQUENCY ANALYSERS AS YOU EQUALISE When creating a balance in your mix, there is absolutely no substitute for your ears and what sounds good. But it can sometimes be very useful to see what’s going on as well and that’s where a frequency analyser comes in handy. I use a free plugin called Blue Cat’s Freq Analyst. It’s well worth grabbing and placing on your mix bus channel to see which frequency bands are the busiest. The visualisation reacts to your sounds in real time, so you can see exactly where you’ll need to tweak your instruments, whether it’s equalising your bass region to make up for a lack of low end or cutting a dominant instrument that’s masking other sounds in the same frequency range.…

Arturia has steadily built a formidable library of hardware-inspired effects featuring modulations, delays, dynamics and beyond. These successfully emulate the originals and then supersize them with numerous software extras. Recent additions include the Juno-6 style Jun-6 Chorus and last year’s ‘3 modulations’ bundle which added Dimension-D chorus, Bi-Tron phaser and BL-20 flanger. New collection They’ve now turned their attention to updating their FX Collection which bundles together all these effects in a cost-effective package. The original 15 effects are now joined by the four effects mentioned above and three new Mix Bus focused processors – Bus Force, Comp Diode-609 and EQ Sitral-295. So FX Collection 2 (VST, VST3, AU, AAX) now has an impressive 22 effects with four modulations, three compressors, three reverbs, three delays, three filters, three preamps, and…

Holkenborg is renowned for his ‘fullcontact’ credo – taking complete hands-on oversight of everything he records, and this trait is exemplified by Tom Holkenborg’s Percussion’s often quirky, experimental choices – such as the decision to record a cheap set of Marching Band drums. The fierce individuality of Tom’s attitude to music-making is also fairly apparent by the mixing choices that he has opted for, with the default recordings showcasing massive amounts of natural reverb, with often near-endless room-tails that boost their dramatic impact. It’s more understandable when you realise that this library is, essentially, the very same home-made package that Holkenborg has used himself, for nearly eight years. “I started developing this library as early as 2013, when I started sampling my own drums,” Tom told us. “I should say…

In the Toontrack eco-sphere, they pretty much have you covered for the majority of your commercial music requirements. With the impressive roster of EZDrummer, EZ Bass and EZKeys, the ease with which you can assemble impressive track elements, with equally impressive speed, is genius personified. However, Toontrack have recently been furnishing their EZ Packs with imaginative elements of sound design. The silver Screen The EZKeys suite started life as an accessible way to get great pianistic sounds into your song, (especially helpful to non-keyboardists) and the lineup has been increasing steadily since. The opening salvo of pan-swept goodness immediately inspires confidence, thanks to the glittering array of sampled content, from analogue and modular synths, through to bowed guitars and a Bösendorfer grand piano. This is the brainchild of Mattias Eklundh,…

Minimal Audio are new US-based software developers who have already released some great looking and sounding plugins like Rift, which they describe as ‘a new type of distortion’. Rift Filter Lite CM is a version of their $49 next generation morphing filter which we have for free this issue. Minimal also make sound packs and we’re delighted to be able to offer all readers five of these as well. Full instructions to get the packs and the plugin are opposite, plus a run-through of the features in Rift Filter Lite CM. Rift Filter Lite CM might look pretty basic but it’s actually a very powerful and dramatic filter plugin. It has no less than 24 types of filter in four categories (Basic, Morph, Peaking and Harmonic) with a Morph control…

With Ishmael Ensemble’s debut album, A State Of Flow, garnering praise from The Guardian, Mojo and The Wire and landing the band sessions at Maida Vale for Gilles Peterson and Tom Ravenscroft, the pressure was on for its followup. Luckily, new album Visions Of Light is just as wide-reaching and ambitious and looks set to only increase the band’s success. The ensemble is led by producer and saxophonist Pete Cunningham, with Holysseus Fly on vocals, Stephen Mullins on guitar, Rory O’Gorman on drums and Jake Spurgeon’s on synths. Their sound takes all sorts of elements from the rich musical history of their home city of Bristol and mixes it up with experimental jazz leanings and a very decent helping of tech... 1 Tell us how you got into music Pete…

In addition to creating reflections and diffusions, a room’s size, shape and construction all have the potential to cause some annoying problems. Top of the list are room modes. In the simplest terms, these occur when a frequency’s wavelength exactly matches the dimensions of a room, creating what’s called a standing wave. This ‘natural frequency’ becomes amplified. As an example, two parallel walls 12 feet apart will create a standing wave at roughly 94Hz. In addition to room modes, you can also experience problems with boundary reflections, where a direct sound wave combines with a reflected one. This effect can happen perfectly in phase, perfectly out of phase or anywhere in between, and to human ears, it will make certain frequencies sound appreciably louder or quieter. The good news is…

Defined as ‘the linear progression of individual melodic lines, voices or parts and their interaction with one another to create harmonies’, voice leading is a music theory technique rooted in choral and orchestral arrangements. In a nutshell, it involves breaking chordal parts down into individual voices, then making each voice flow from chord to chord in a logical way. In, say, a string quartet, each player has their own part that, blended, make a continuously evolving harmony. Voice leading needn’t be limited to backing vocals and string arrangements though – it can also make a big difference when making piano-based chord progressions and pad parts sound smoother. Being largely keyboard or guitar-based, a lot of modern pop songs don’t have to worry about how the individual notes in the chords…

You don’t need the latest and greatest plugins to get a polished-sounding mix. We show you how to get the most from standard EQ and dynamics processors It’s a common misconception among new producers that anyone making decent-sounding music must be using hundreds if not thousands of pounds’ worth of high-end plugins. The reality is that many artists simply use their DAW’s stock mixing effects. The producer who knows how to get the results they want from basic equalisers, compressors and gates is much more likely to make quality mixes than the producer with a ton of expensive plugins but only a shallow understanding of how to use them. In fact, having too many plugins in your arsenal can be counterproductive: those who only have access to limited tools tend…

Waveform from Tracktion Software is a music production DAW that combines an innovative workflow with incredible value, and in recent years has grown immeasurably both in features and design. If you want to give it a try, there’s a very impressive free version (see next issue!) and you can also register for time-limited trials of the Pro application. The full package, Waveform Pro, has just received a significant intermediate update to version 11.5. It comes in three version – Basic, Standard and Extreme – and these offer tiered plugin and audioware content. As before, it works on OS X, Windows, Linux and Raspberry Pi and now has native support for Apple Silicon, making it one of the most cross-platform-capable DAWs available. Go Pro “v11.5 includes one very significant change and…

With so many plugins available, it’s becoming harder and harder for developers to differentiate their designs. Nevertheless, with FX Collection 2, Arturia are doing their very best to persuade you. First up, by opting for the FX Collection 2, you are saving considerably on the individual plugin pricing (€99 each). So assuming you pay the full and quite hefty €399 price tag, it works out at around €18 per plugin, which is very reasonable. Next up, and this is a big one for us, added extras. Arturia’s plugins combine authentic hardware emulation with plenty of extra features. Whether that’s the modulation matrix in the M12 filter, the Time Warp feature in the FET-76 compressor or the Range control on the Sitral-295 EQ, to name just three examples, there’s always something…

KaoX (VST, AU, AAX) is a hybrid synth that’s based on Yamaha’s rare early 80s FM synth, the GS1. Very few GS1s were made, and most lacked the external programmer so were pretty limited from an editing perspective. KaoX takes this 8-operator FM concept, makes it easy to edit and then beefs it up with two analogue oscillators, two chaotic oscillators, two analogue filters, two LFOs, two chaotic modulators, two envelopes, two output VCAs with individual output panning, four effects, arpeggiator and step sequencer. Phew! Significantly, it then duplicates the whole thing into a dual layer (Lower and Upper) architecture. Powerful stuff. KaoX’s default state is a simple view, inspired by the wooden design of the GS1. Here you can set overall performance aspects such as Tune, Glide and Pitchbend…

Bomba Estéreo are described as “a Colombian electro-folkloric dance band”; such is their varied, often eclectic and massively popular music. We mention that because they might well be the biggest band you haven’t heard of, with millions of followers and record sales, and hundreds of millions of YouTube views. The band started some 20 years ago, with founding member Simon Mejía releasing the first album Vol. 1, almost as a solo effort. Recruiting band members over further releases, Bomba Estéreo started making huge waves, voted MTV’s Best New Band in the World, and notching up plays on film (Limitless and TV series Dexter) and in video games including Fifa and Just Dance. They have also enjoyed major success in the US, with headline festival appearances and major brand ad soundtracks.…

Free special 300 edition of Tracktion! A complete, special edition version of Tracktion awaits you in our special 300th edition of Computer Music. It comes with extras over and above the standard edition plus a full tutorial to make a tune from scratch. It is the essential edition! PLUS! Star talk Oakenfold, QRTR and Public Service Broadcasting speak Then & now How we made music when started in ’97 compared to now! Best (& worst) The best things of the last 300 issues (and the worst!)…