Innehållsförteckning för September 2024 från Computer Music

Lifeline Lite Bundle (VST, VST3, AU, AAX and standalone) is a two-plugin pack from Excite Audio that normally retails for £79! But don’t be put off by the ‘lite’ tag, these are quality plugins with multiple processors and are yours absolutely free with this issue. Excite Audio has built an impressive stable of processors, instruments and analysis plugins. These include some very creative examples such as Motion Harmonic and Bloom Vocal Aether, alongside powerful and flexible processors such as Lifeline Expanse and Lifeline Console. The Lifeline plugins come in both full and lite versions, and are available individually or in bundles. The lite plugins we have here do not include the advanced parameters (you’ll see the button is greyed out), but they use the same processing engines as the full…

If you were the lead singer and founder member of the platinum-selling band Bleachers, you’d probably be content with your lot, but not so Jack Antonoff. The multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter and studio guru doesn’t exactly rest on any laurels, and as well as finding success in Bleachers, has been running something of a side hustle as a record producer. Quite a successful one at that… Antonoff started working with Taylor Swift in 2013, contributing to the production and songwriting for the singer’s fifth album, 1989. He became a key part of her inner circle during her meteoric rise to world megastar status, and more recently worked on Swift’s re-recordings of her earlier albums. He has also collaborated with Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Pink, and St Vincent. Understandably, Antonoff is pretty…

The MPG Awards have always excelled at celebrating both those legendary studio icons and the rising crop of new production talent in equal measure. This year’s awards, held at London’s The Troxy, continued this tradition with the likes of Alan Moulder and Ken Scott scooping the Icon and Special Recognition plaudits respectively. Meanwhile leading the Rising Star charge – and landing that coveted MPG award for the category – was producer, writer and mixer Amy Sergeant. Based out of her production studio in London (Naughty Cat Records), and specialising in indie-folk and alt-pop, Sergeant has had an impressive decade. She quickly transitioned from assistant engineering for the likes of Florence & The Machine, Wolf Alice and The Vamps to engineering sessions for renowned producers such as Rodney Jerkins, Mark Crew…

If there’s one company that’s been on a crusade to advance the capability of hardware control of software synthesisers, it’s Expressive E. But controllers can sound a little quiet without a decent sound source, and thankfully help is at hand. Hearts and minds The Phase Plant Expressive Suite is a collaboration between Kilohearts and Expressive E, with the synth element of the suite provided by Kilohearts and its prize-winning Phase Plant plugin. The synth engine itself is exceptionally capable, adopting a semi modular format which guides your path, should you choose to create patches from scratch. At the oscillator level, there are options to work with conventional subtractive-style waveforms, or delve into sampled waveforms, granular or wavetable synthesis. Each of these oscillator elements occupies a module of its own, with…

There’s nothing quite like the sound of a full symphony orchestra. The sound of 100 musicians playing as an ensemble has long been the preserve of classical composers, with the modern symphony orchestra continuing to play an enormous part in productions of all forms, from string sections in your favourite pop ballad, to the full-on onslaught of a battle sequence in a feature film or video game. With developments in sampling tech, you can strike up the virtual band and create a pretty convincing facsimile, at a fraction of the cost of the real thing. A breath of refreshed Air Spitfire Audio is undoubtedly one of the leading lights in this pursuit. Established by two media composers, they went from selling their homemade orchestral library to friends, to the inauguration…

Audiotent Transients £21 107 cunningly crafted drum loops, purpose-built to add punch, rhythm and character to your tracks. The pristine grooves are a joy to work with, with all the kicks, snares, claps, and hats, sculpted by sonic scientists for maximum impact. Frequencies have been studied and scooped, leaving everything with bottom-end body to thump, and everything that needs to punctuate dense dance music with enough attack to shine through. audiotent.com 9/10 Audioworks Nebular Bloom £14.95 Set sail on an electronic odyssey via this adventurous and avant-garde collection of otherworldly sounds and samples. Along the way, catch snippets of hard-to-place fragments of audio, and other left-of-centre loops and layers. There are also muted melodies and haunting hits, sourced from traditional instruments, as well as some expansive analogue, digital, and modular…

Sound design made simple! Next time, we’ll discard those presets as we show you our go-to tricks and techniques for creating sounds, effects, samples and overall mix colours that sound unlike anything else – from the impactful and abrasive to the ambient and emotive PLUS! Moonilena The experimental Stockholm artist on her latest exploits Free samples Land the perfect drop and explore our vast Tech House Toolkit On test Reason 13, EastWest Hollywood Strings 2, SSL UC 1 and more……

news NEW RELEASES • COMMENT • INDUSTRY HAPPENINGS Resisting the temptation to succumb to numerical superstition, Reason Studios has released Reason 13, the latest version of its legendary DAW and plugin. From a redesigned sequencer and interface to five new Rack Devices, the software is full of improvements and, having previously been available as a public beta, is now fully finished. The release comes a little under three years after Reason 12, and one of the most obvious ways that the software’s workflow has been sped up is with the introduction of a new browser, which puts all patches, samples and loops in one place. You can search by name and type and select categories and tags, which should mean that you get to the content you’re looking for faster.…

You might not realise it, but when you fire up this ultra-modern, AI-leaning Logic upgrade, the fundamental technology you’re using owes a debt of gratitude to sequencing technology from the late 19th century! Within any modern DAW, you’ll probably have seen or used a feature described as the Piano Roll editor. This is designed to act exactly like a form of music technology which was employed during the late 1800s, as a form of Piano-based entertainment. Long pieces of card and paper would have had holes cut into them, allowing a ‘Player Piano’ to reproduce classical tunes or the popular music of the day, live, except in sequenced form. The Piano Roll editor was formerly known as the Matrix editor, and far from being any form of sci-fi voyage of…

The lead synth is one of the most memorable elements that producers use to create the melody or main idea for a track. The power of the lead melody line is created by starting with a good preset or custom-designed synth patch, and using a particular combo of plugins and/or automations to achieve the desired result. When creating a track, it’s important to identify the type of sound and genre you’re aiming to write and construct the lead synth sounds for your tracks accordingly. In techno, a wide range of lead synth sounds are popular in modern tracks. These sounds range from old school rave-type sounds to heavily-automated futuristic pluck leads. In the techno world, two artists who top the Beatport charts with their tracks are Eli Brown and Charlotte…

Every now and then, a brand name enters the vernacular. How many times have you reached for a Hoover, instead of a vacuum cleaner? Well, the same could be said for pitch correction software, except now it’s become more of an adjective than a branding… Do you Believe? The arrival of Auto-Tune on the plugin market back in 1997 was nothing short of a game-changer. Placing aside the well trodden and slightly unkind criticisms about singers and tuning, it was the usage of Auto-Tune on the Cher song Believe that announced its wider presence to the world. Through this slightly excessive placement, it gave credence to the concept known as hard-tuning, which would become associated with certain styles of music production, such as R’n’B. Meanwhile, the company that started it…

It wasn’t that long ago that creating real-time effects, such as stutters, tape stops and even the humble pumping compressor, could be quite a chore to engineer in a track. Thanks to the progression of computing power, ever more ingenious plugins have made these processes simpler and more effective, but not always at the end user level. Multiple EFX This is where Arturia hope to capture your imagination, through a plugin which is as easy to use as it is rewarding to hear. EFX Motions is a multi-effects plugin, designed to operate in sync with your DAW. We’re not talking about reverbs and delays here, although these effects do form a very small part of the plugin’s makeup. At the most simplistic end, it’s all about elements such as volume…

Download all assets for this issue at bit.ly/cm337downloads Fantasy & Magic Fresh from the cauldron comes this bewitching set of fantastical effects. Our very own Gandalf (Robbie) explains “To adorn fantastical tales of the imaginary past, this sample pack provides accompaniment to wizards, witches, pixies, elves, caverns, covens, castles and enchanted forests. The folders are: AtmosphericsConcert ZitherElvish FlutesHeavy StringsHex HarpPixie StringsWoodland Woodwind “The Atmospherics consist of ominous long one-shots of dark ambience (two processes/sources) and some more creepy sounds that evoke magical dark arts. The battered zither gets pulled out once in a while and always manages to nail the job. The Elvish Flutes combine Mellotron flutes with sampled pan flutes.” More detailed info can be found in Robbie’s PDF in the sample folder SELECTED GEAR Concert ZitherCalrec CM1050C microphoneFocusrite ISA828 preampCyclick ArchiveSteinberg Nuendo 12Arturia…

Interface cm: Firstly, let’s talk about ShaperBox 3.5. The latest iteration of your suite of powerful rhythmic and mixing tools is such a robust package, and is absolutely chock full of incredible effects. Can you talk us through the new features that were added in this latest update, and just why ShaperBox differs from the other mix/effect suites found on the market? Jakob: “Our aim with ShaperBox is to make it easy for any producer to get complex-sounding results, all in one plugin. That’s why you’ll find there’s no modulation setup, no routing matrix and no automation systems that you have to deal with. Instead, you add one of up to 10 effects – from volume ducking, filtering and distortion to phasing, reverb, panning, temporal manipulation and more – and…

Logic’s long-awaited leap to 11 feels like a big statement, but many of the updates on offer feel very familiar. Open an existing project and other than the wording on the splash page, you could be mistaken for wondering if you have installed this new version at all! That’s because many of the fresh, workflow-enhancing elements are to be found lurking just under the surface. Ready Player One One of the most eye-catching new additions comes in the form of the Session Players. This has been a long time coming, since we first saw the jaw-dropping Drummer way back in 2013 (has it really been that long! Ed). Finally, technology has caught up, and this virtual rhythm section is swelled by the addition of new members; Bass Player and Keyboard…

Mixing is a combination of technical and creative decisions, and some of these decisions such as creative filtering can have a big impact on both the clarity and impact of your mix. Filters are one of the most powerful mixing tools we have, and none more so than when we’re using them to create tailored or section-specific effects. What’s more, with effects ranging from small snippets of a telephone voice to full on filter sections and beyond, you’ll find creative filtering can be both bold and subtle, and is regularly used across many different music genres. In the analogue domain, different filter circuits are an important part of synth design, and you’ll find plenty of corresponding software filter emulations, if that’s the sound you’re after. That said, when it comes…

It’s hard to believe that Logic Pro X, the tenth major revision of the now Mac-only DAW, was released over a decade ago in July 2013, featuring the then all-new Flex Pitch and beat-creating Drummer. Before that release, the updates to the software were few and far between – to the point where some were even questioning whether Apple would continue with the DAW – but since ‘Pro X’, every point update has felt like major news. Version 10.4 introduced the ChromaVerb reverb and Smart Tempo functionality, but v10.5 was perhaps the biggest update of the lot, with Live Loops giving Ableton a run for its money, and the Sampler and Quick Sampler plugins finally putting EXS24 into the plugin retirement home. In November 2020, version 10.6 was more about…

Distortion comes in many shapes, sizes and colours, and while it immediately conjures images of rock guitarists, subtle degrees of distortion can enhance everything we hear, from the sound of a cool synth to an entire mix. We’re getting warm Many of the more desirable distortion-based effects reside in the hardware domain, costing a small fortune, even at secondhand prices. Thankfully Universal Audio has been on a plugin crusade for many years, providing the analogue colour we yearn to hear, in a DAW-based world. Enter Verve Analog Machines, a compendium of ten differing but complementary models, each in the style of a particular piece of hardware. The ten options are selected via a beautiful graphic, which forms the central component of the user interface. It’s easy enough to work out…

WaveLab has appeared to be a bit of a laggard of late, stuck at version 11 whilst its Steinberg stablemates, Cubase and Nuendo, stormed ahead to version 13. It’s therefore little surprise that WaveLab’s long awaited version 12 update packs in a dizzying stack of improvements and new features. Projects & montages There has been a major overhaul to the way audio and other assets are handled by WaveLab Projects and Montages. Where previously one could take a fairly ad-hoc approach to how these assets were arranged within the filesystem, WaveLab 12 has its own ideas about where those assets should be located. This is, allegedly, only optional and you can continue to work as you wish, but when we did so, WaveLab created an unfathomable mess of files and…