Innehållsförteckning för Autumn 2024 från Computer Music

It’s fair to say that, for a vast contingent of our readership, it’s been CM’s track record of giving away excellent software tools, instruments and effects that remains the biggest draw to our humble magazine. But, we know all too well the pain and frustration that can be caused by attempting to open a project following an update, only to find that one (or more) of your effects or instrument plugins no-longer work. As the CM Plugin Suite is so fundamental to who we are, it was made an absolute priority earlier this year to fully audit and overhaul our famed box of delights, making sure that both what we were giving away each issue fully worked with modern hardware, and that we could reinforce its brilliance with a selection…

Interface cm : Let’s talk about your latest release, FOLDS, first. It’s an exceptionally dynamic software instrument with heaps of deep control to shape its vocal-based sounds into new forms. How long was it in development, and what prompted you to make this as your second product? Tom: “FOLDS was in development for the better part of a year overall, and the reason for doing a vocal instrument second was because I had an idea during the process of creating the sounds for [the bowed and electronic instrumentation-leaning] STRANDS. One of the sounds for it was vocal-based. After we’d made it, sparks were flying and I was sort of thinking I could do so much more. “Vocals are highly valuable to people. Typically, the things that are most valuable to…

Reverb can be a top effect for creating cohesion and helping your mix to gel, but we can also use it for task-specific techniques. In previous mixing masterclasses we’ve looked at how sharing a small number of different size reverbs can be a reliable starting point to help make your mix cohesive. However, as your mix progresses you’ll often find that specific sounds need their own reverb treatment, and you’ll be looking to expand this core technique with some more tailored spaces. These reverbs might be featured or they might be more subtle, and as discussed previously, you have an abundance of reverb flavours at your disposal to achieve the desired sounds. Once you’ve found the effect you’re after, you can then choose whether to use it as an auxiliary,…

Dawesome (aka programmer Peter V,) has produced some incredible plugins over the last few years. We made last year’s Kult one of our synths of 2023, for example, and largely before 2023 had even got underway. But Dawesome’s latest synth, Myth, could well be even better. And since we heaped a 10/10 score on Kult, that leaves us with a potential marking issue of Spinal Tap proportions to deal with… The thinking behind Myth, according to Peter, is to make sound design a lot more fun and instant, so you can get on with the business of music production. “The idea is to get rid of the need to do tons of stuff to get movement in your sound,” he recently told Plugin Boutique. With Myth, then, the idea is…

Over the last 20 years, there has been a seismic shift in the compositional and production output of soundtrack and trailer music. Informed by Hollywood’s elite composers, as well as video game music, dramatic scoring has become increasingly reliant on percussion, and plenty of it! Big drums in a big room Monolith could be regarded as the percussion library to end all libraries, in part due to its beautifully excessive scale. This is the next phase of the partnership between composer and musician Richard Harvey and Orchestral Tools, which has offered us some real sampled gems in the past. As a musician and composer, it is Harvey’s collection of rare and antique percussion instruments that has provided the 53-instrument backbone for this library. As Harvey himself states, this is the…

Zenhiser Gold Rush – Tech House £50 You don’t have to sift through this lot long before you start pulling out nuggets of pure tech house goodness. The cavernous 4.4GB collection is full of glistening music loops, gleaming basslines, and synths so shiny you can see your face in them. Besides those cutting-edge production parts, there’s MIDI, one-shots and some sterling stems, packed with plenty of lairy loops and layers to dig through. Tempos whiz by at around the 122-128bpm range, so befitting whichever side of house/techno divide you find yourself in. A new gold standard in top-shelf sample-sourcing. zenhiser.com 9/10 Audiotent Textural £21 A beautiful array of rhythmically-rich textures, ready to drag ’n’ drop onto your mood-light drum tracks. The 107 loops in this expertly-crafted collection are teeming with…

Learn to master virtual guitar! Next issue, we’re exploring ways that you can achieve world-class guitar sounds and performances without spending years actually learning the instrument. From ultra-real effects suites to performance machines, it’s all you need to take the axe virtual! PLUS! John Tejada The DJ and creative musician on a genre-defining career Free samples A collection of melodies to uplift the soul, alongside hybrid strings On test Expressive E Noisy 2, GForce Oberheim DMX and more……

news NEW RELEASES • COMMENT • INDUSTRY HAPPENINGS A brand new AI vocal tool that seeks to redefine how you sound, Vocoflex promises a remarkably simple interface. Simply drop a recording of you singing, as well as a recording of someone you want to sound like into Vocoflex for the plugin to analyse as a target voice, and it’ll morph the vocal timbre in your first recording into that of the second. Dreamtonics says Vocoflex only needs 10 seconds of a clean and unprocessed vocal to create an AI vocal model. That’s pretty impressive in our book. The target voice recording appears as a line of joined dots in the plugin’s interface, with each dot representing a segment of the audio; you’re able to morph between the timbre of each…

PLUGIN SUITE Our CM Plugin Suite is a collection of complete instruments, effects and tools designed to aid you in your music production endeavours. It’s an incredible resource, now boasting 71 pro-quality Mac and PC plugins that, in many cases, you won’t find anywhere else, in both VST and AU formats. We’ve also got a solid selection of full products, which require licence code registration. These are marked on our matrix beginning opposite. Some items were created exclusively for us by developers like GForce Software, Lunacy Audio, IK Multimedia, u-he and many more. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS Where do I get the plugins? Once you access this issue’s downloads page, scroll down to the CM Plugin Suite logo and link, and take note of the current access code (that rotates on…

While many producers can create a great sounding loop, it takes a little more knowledge to build a track that keeps the listener engaged throughout. In this month’s masterclass, we’ll learn how to arrange an EDM track from a loop and examine the elements each section should consist of. To understand electronic music structures, we can refer to the pop music song structure, where each song is made up of different parts that all serve a purpose. In pop music, a song consists of a verse, pre-chorus, chorus, second verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge and finishes with a chorus. Modern electronic music utilises a slightly different structure, yet the sections bear some resemblance. A typical EDM track starts with an intro, moves on to a construction part where more elements are…

The multi-effect has become something of the star of music production in recent years, thanks largely to the leaps and bounds made by computer processing. What were once humble effects, that just focused on single areas, are now multi-headed beasts capable of all sorts. Indeed these fully-featured multi-effects are arguably now equally as important as the shiny new softsynths in terms of their status in your sonic arsenal. However, the more features multi-effects cram in, the more complex they have become. SSL’s Module8 manages to walks the fine line between power and ease of use, though, packing in features, but not at the expense of practical use. The plugin offers some of the best hands-on sound design options, then, and all in a very easy to use package. How many…

iZotope RX has been a leader in the spectral editing space for some time, with wide adoption in the film and TV post-production space, and many adherents within the ranks of music producers, mastering engineers and sound designers. It presents audio as a spectrogram, portions of which can be selected for editing and processing using a set of cursor tools similar to those found in photo editing apps: rectangle, brush and lasso tools allow specific time and frequency ranges to be selected. There’s also a magic wand tool that auto-selects frequencies that match a point. Analysis and processing is performed using RX’s various modules, which are organised into Repair, Utility and Measurement groupings. Processing is destructive, but realtime previews, a flexible comparison system and comprehensive undo history makes it easy…

Download all assets for this issue at bit.ly/cm339downloads Impacts Time to make a big impression with our deliciously thunderous collection of deep impacts. Over to Robbie… “Thumping, bumping, punching, crunching, slamming and smacking sounds are the theme for this sample pack. Whether it’s for post or music production, a well placed boom! can really grab the attention. “There are eight folders of impact one-shots derived from eight processing chains, through which sampled drums and field recordings were given a new identity. The raw sounds were loaded into Kontakt where they were pitched and stretched beyond their original state, and this tweaking continued as processing chains were also fine tuned to maximise variety. The processing chains were armed with plugins listed below. As ever, these may be standalone samples, but manipulating…

INSTRUMENTS SYNTHS We’ve got some of the best software synths ever in our collection, from world-class legends to state-of-the-art sonic playgrounds. They’ll be effective in any music production scenario GForce Axxess • A superb virtual version of the Axxe from 1975• Over 350 presets, a new sub-oscillator, an arpeggiator as well as a 16-step sequencer• Full version! gforcesoftware.com Lunacy Audio CUBE Mini • 3D sample-morphing engine, sampler and vector synth• Load multiple sounds and blend them together• Deep FX suite and advanced modulation lunacy.audio u-he Zebra CM • Blendable oscillator waveforms• Super-programmable step LFOs• Slick delay, reverb and chorus• Original synth designed just for CM u-he.com u-he Bazille CM • Patchable modular synthesiser• Sequencer and Mapping Generator• Audio-rate modulation, Fractalizer u-he.com Dmitry Sches Thorn CM • Dual spectral oscillators/analogue/harmonic filters/spectral/real-time…

Many synths wear their branded colours with pride; Moog features a white legend on a black background, Oberheim employed highly identifiable cream panels, but one of the most enigmatic of all has to be the ARP generation of synths, resplendent with their orange blocks and white lettering. Drawing inspiration from the original ARP Axxe, GForce Software has resurrected this classic in software form, with several operational additions along the way. As we’ve secured Axxess for our plugin suite, we decided to make it the subject for our latest series of synth sound design tutorials. We get things underway by drawing musical inspiration from a musician who became known for his soaring ARP synth solos. Billy Currie was a notable ARP Odyssey performer, with a recognisable sound and playing style that…

Good news for those of you who like the sound of vintage synthesisers: you no longer have to run the gauntlet of the Wild West that makes up the secondhand synth market. With so many companies reproducing the classics, you could plump for a brand new hardware reissue, but what if you could purchase a piece of software that contained not just one classic machine, but 46 of them? The thing with strings GForce Software continues to pull off a feat of engineering through its latest update to the incredibly appealing VSM series. String Machines are a class of electronic instrument with roots planted in traditional subtractive synthesis. But this does beg the question, why do they require a category of their own? Back in the ’70s, when subtractive synthesis…

Contemporary EQ plugins tend to fall into two categories, either emulating classic hardware with all its idiosyncrasies, or harnessing the power of software to deliver flexibility simply not possible in the analogue domain. LFO-EQ-1 is the latest version of DHPlugins’ modulation EQ, and falls firmly into the latter category, taking a regular EQ format and throwing in LFO and envelope control as well as four effects modules. The core design is a 5-band EQ with three parametric bands joined by a high-shelf/low-pass filter and a low-shelf/high-pass filter. The middle band also gets an all-pass phaser mode. All five bands offer a full frequency range (20Hz to 20kHz) with +/-24dB gain, individual bypass and wet/dry mix. Parameters can be changed using the controls or via the graphic display nodes, and the…

It’s been difficult to ignore the incredible rise of Cherry Audio recently, through its exacting reinterpretations of seminal classics from the vintage synth and drum machine back catalogue, coupled with some new and exciting designs, too. With price tags starting as low as zero, it’s on a charge to bring affordable, amazing-sounding plugins to the masses. In the Chroma-zone What makes Chroma particularly interesting, is that the Rhodes Chroma is apparently one of the most requested synths for recreation, which is just as well, because an original vintage model could easily set you back five figures. So, what is the Chroma, and why is it of such interest? The Chroma began development under the watchful eye of Alan Robert Pearlman. You might know his company better as ARP, the producers…

Yes, it's a brand new series of monthly masterclasses, this time revealing all you need to know about our very own, freshly updated, suite of plugins. The CM Suite comes free with the magazine every month, and this new series of workshops will highlight the best plugins in the suite and show you how a little knowledge of them can be applied to improve your mixes. We'll kick things off with Black Salt Audio and its mighty fine suite of four plugins. BSA has only been developing software for three years, but already has a great rep for creating incredibly well designed, straight-to-the point plugins solving mix issues, adding a creative edge, or simply making your music sound better. The Black Salt Audio CM bundle is a fantastic introduction to…