Innehållsförteckning för Autumn 2023 från Computer Music

Interface : Firstly, we loved Cmpsr. How long had this controller been in the works, and what prompted you to develop it? Si Tew: “The initial idea was really in 2018. It was all about recognising the need. I was working with individuals who had reduced access. A lot of instruments that were out there just weren’t really working for them. That was the initial spark. Owain and I have known each other for a long, long time. He was working in a slightly different side of things, but noticing similar issues. We thought we should bring a design to market that met those needs and allows people to get creating. Things really started picking up around 2020, that’s when we incorporated as a business and started to move things…

Jessy Lanza is one of those people who has spent much of her life in or around her hometown and has a particular relationship with it. Hamilton, Ontario is just over the Canadian border from Niagara Falls, on the shore of Lake Ontario, and also hemmed in by Lakes Huron and Erie. Much bigger cities like Toronto and Detroit are nearby – we’re talking North American distances, not European – but so is the Canadian wilderness. “You don’t have to go far out of Hamilton to be in the middle of nowhere,” laughs the 37-year-old producer. “When you commune with nature in Canada, it can sometimes feel kinda overwhelming. There was a sense of space and melancholy that definitely filtered down into the music I make… songs with a sense…

Beatie Wolfe has long-defied simple categorisation. Originally hailing from South London, but now based in Los Angeles, Beatie’s formative passion for crafting acoustically-oriented songs would lead her on a journey far beyond that which many songwriters undertake. As a globally renowned artist and public thinker, Beatie has conceived numerous groundbreaking musically focused (or musically linked) visual and aural art projects. These include creating the world’s first 360° AR live-stream from the Bell Labs’ anechoic chamber, beaming her music into space in association with NASA and, perhaps most critically, crafting From Green to Red – an environmental art piece about humanity’s impact on planet Earth, developed from 800,000 years of CO2 data. She’s regarded as a passionate musical explorer, delivering lectures and TED talks on its power to heal,…

Developer Pulsar Digital seems to be on a bit of a mission to revisit classic hardware and give it a modern software twist. They’ve already had a good crack at a couple of Urei compressors (1178 and 1176) and on the EQ front their first target was Manley’s Massive Passive. Now they’ve turned their attention to the George Massenburg GML 8200 EQ. This highly regarded and sonically transparent hardware unit offers a beguiling blend of parametric precision and smooth sheen that explains why good condition units still fetch in the thousands. Of course with plugins, achieving transparency is less of an issue. Nevertheless, emulating those classic GML curve shapes is clearly important, as is the parallel band topology, and these are both starting points for the plugin. Pulsar 8200 features…

Universal Audio’s meticulous software emulations of classic gear have recently started going native, so more and more of them no longer require UA gear to run; great news for all of us as we can simply run them in whatever DAW we use, just like any other plugin. The US company’s core range of plugins used to largely focus on classic outboard gear but has now also branched out into instruments like Electra 88 and Moog Minimoog. But with this latest Capitol Mastering Compressor, we’re very much back to bespoke outboard gear, this time modelling Capitol Studio’s hand-built tube compressor, the CM5511. Only four were built for Capitol’s mastering suites but they’ve been used to master tracks on legendary labels like Capitol, Motown, Geffen and Def Jam. Thousands of tracks…

Thirst-quencher AIR Music Technology release a classic-leaning multi-FX plugin that melds vintage warmth with modern dexterity AIR Music Technology has announced the release of Sprite, a multi-effects plugin that’s said to be inspired by the “studio hardware staples” of the ’80s and ’90s. Before software did (almost) everything, producers relied on chunky, rackmount multi-effects processors like the Eventide H3000 to apply effects like reverb, chorus and delay. Sprite is reportedly a ‘modern take’ on machines like these, though AIR tells us that it goes a step further and ‘does things not possible in a hardware unit’. (We’re not told what, however.) Sprite packs an array of effects under its virtual hood. You’ll find all of the usual suspects inside, including a reverb with eight room characters, a BPM-syncable stereo delay…

Seizing our attention upon the first spin of his single Lemonade earlier this year, Keir evokes the flamboyance and bombast of such stadium-appeasing icons as David Bowie, Freddie Mercury and Prince with an emotional, empathetic through-line, dealing with complex themes, including struggling with mental health-related issues. All of which sits within some very elegantly-sculpted mixes. Alongside his songwriting partner and production-guru George Glew, Keir’s songs have been generating serious buzz across the music press for the last year, with his debut self-titled album released over the summer. We spoke to Keir and George right on the cusp of its release, to learn about their collaborative writing process, how they arranged the tracks to accentuate Keir’s immense voice, and the broader themes resonating from Keir’s work. 1 Hi Keir, hi George.…

When early synthesisers started to become an affordable prospect, it didn’t take long to work out that there was limited choice in the market – and they were all monophonic! Polyphonic synthesisers were still some way off, or exceptionally expensive to purchase, so it was left to the synthetic pioneers to create chords using more than one oscillator, using their mono-machines. This was a charge firmly led by the classic Minimoog. Bedecked with three oscillators, it was possible to create a triad and play it up and down the keyboard. Just listen to Autobahn, by German pioneers Kraftwerk, for one of the first examples of this. But this is still a technique very much in use today; bands such as Hot Chip are well acquainted with the technique, with significant…

Mastering is a process open to aural scrutiny and debate, with one person’s perfect mix being another person’s over-baked catastrophe! But what if the process could be fully automated? Would we be happy to surrender our ears to the ’bots? Mastering, but not as we know it AI Master is a new mastering plugin which hopes to take all of the mystery out of the mastering process. This concept relies upon the surrendering of control to the AI within the plugin, as it calculates everything that you need within the mastering chain. Featured elements for treatment include adjustment to the dynamic range of the track through compression and limiting, spectral balancing, stereo image/soundstage alteration, and probably more besides. Once these elements have been adapted automatically, the outputted signal provides levels…

Cyclick Tracks The first of our ‘Track Builder’ packs from back in January, Robbie from Cyclick assembled this glorious ensemble of multi-instrumental samples. Here’s what he had to say at the time: “This sample pack is made up of six tempo-based track building construction kits across a handful of genres: funk, synthwave/dreampop, French house and shoegaze. These are, of course, starting points and even the slightest of manglings and mix-ups can take them to a whole new space, or at least a different genre.” The loops are all two or four bars long, and each instrument provides three loops per kit. For more info on the pack (and all the other packs featured) see the PDFs in the respective folders of each pack. Groovy Beats and Bass The second ‘Track…

Drummers across the world are running for the hills! That’s because the world of computer music-making has never been in better shape when it comes to beat-craft, with software packages and drum machine plugins more feature rich than ever before. Now you can have practically any electronic drum machine in history on your hard drive, plus the best acoustic drum kits, played by the best players, all recorded by the most incredible mics in the finest studios in the world. There really is no reason to leave the comfort of your computer to create either the most hard-hitting electronic beats, or the most authentic-sounding acoustic drum tracks. And it’s those two broad categories – electronic and acoustic – that we’re focusing on here. In previous features we’ve tended to discuss…

Compression is one of our core mixing tools, but there are many specific techniques that use compression in different ways, so we’re allocating individual mixing masterclasses to each. This month we look at a very popular technique – parallel compression. Parallel, or New York compression as it’s sometimes called, is a mixing technique that blends a dry and compressed signal, and is particularly popular for beats, bass, vocals and even the master bus. The technique was first developed back in the analogue days and in its simplest form involves paralleling a signal across two channels, one of which you compress quite heavily and one of which you don’t. You can then find a balance of the two signals, allowing you to benefit from the flavour the compressor adds but also…

There are few sounds that encapsulate electronic music like the sound of the vocoder. That sound of the robots singing: that’s a vocoder! The only problem is, they can be a tad tricky to use, but Zynaptiq aims to change all of that, with its long-awaited update to the hailed Orange Vocoder. Under the Robot’s visor! Orange IV is a fully functional and flexible vocoder, fully integrated into the DAW-based realm. Unlike previous versions, IV loads as a fully-functional MIDI controllable software effect. This is important, due to vocoding architecture; vocoders require two signals, namely a carrier signal, which usually takes the form of a synthesiser, and a modulation signal, which is most commonly a voice, although vocoding drums is also a popular pursuit. The combination of these two elements…

> Free software CUBE is a powerful and creative synth that features an impressive 3D morphing engine. This month we’re very excited to collaborate with developer Lunacy Audio, bringing you its bitesize version, CUBE Mini (normally $49), absolutely free. Building synth sounds from scratch can be an incredibly rewarding process, but even the most hardcore patch creator loves the immediacy of a carefully crafted XY pad or macro control. CUBE Mini steps this up a level by combining up to eight sound sources in a 3D cube-shaped matrix with either manual or dynamic movement between them. It’s an awesome idea that’s even more fun in practice, and you can swap individual sounds and even head into more detailed sample-specific sound editing to modify envelopes, pitch, looping and beyond. Sounds are…

Techno special - dissecting the genre It’s our ultimate techno guide! Learn the fundamentals and principles of the Detroit-originating genre to build modern techno tunes. Get your rave on with impactful four-to-the-floor beats, sub-bass-beefing, careful mixing, melody-making and much more… PLUS! Apashe On melding EDM with a philharmonic orchestra. Epic! Free samples Brand new Horror and Tension samples to conjure spooky vibes On test Cherry Audio Octave Cat, SSL Blitzer and many more…