Innehållsförteckning för April 2021 från Electronic Musician

Compressors don't always surprise you. The usual controls of Ratio and Threshold abound, unless you're using an even simpler LA-2A-style gadget; and timing controls are in-play as well. Often, a compressor will differentiate itself from the pack by its specific analog-style response, or being modeled after a particular hardware unit. But DDMF's newest plugin is unashamdely digital, casting off the prescriptive shackles of gear. This makes it more able to put your signals under the ultimate control, being about precision rather than ease-of-use. The idea here is that Comprezzore will let you customize the compression response in two ways: first you can select more nodes to determine your transfer graph, creating your own changing knee shape or adding in upward as well as downward compression. The second is the ability…

The snare drum is huge! Not that it’s ever been unimportant in the grand drumming scheme of things, but the rise of several forms of dance music has seen more attention focused on the snare than at any time since the massive T’pau-style extremes of the late '80s. In the real world, the snare drum is the one placed between the drummer’s legs, with a band of sprung wires stretched across the bottom head to give it its unique crack and sizzle. Add to that some lively resonance from the top skin and you have an instrument that’s capable of producing a huge variety of sounds, from the warm, deep ‘doosh’ of the '70s to the high ‘ping’ of nu-metal, and everything in between. In terms of rhythm, the snare…

Physical realism ‘Be’ the drummer! If you’re aiming to program realistic sounding hi-hats and cymbals, it’s important to remember the mechanics of what a real player would do. A drummer only has two arms, so make sure no more than two cymbals are ever hit at the same time – and that’s without the snare or toms, of course. Duplicate hats Many ROMplers and ‘virtual drummers’ automatically apply mute groups to hi-hat samples, so a closed hat will end the decay of an open one. Although this mimics reality, it’s often good to disable it or have a duplicate hi-hat that you can use for overlapping pedalled and halfopen hits – set up your own ‘choke’ key if you need one. Multi-hats For floor-filling dance music productions, try placing one…

Our groove sounds pretty authentic and ‘live’ so far, but there’s still more to do if we’re to make our drums sound like they’re being played by a real drummer with a real drummer’s brain. To bring syncopation and a feeling of forward motion to the groove, we need to employ ghost notes. These are very quiet (often barely audible) incidental snare hits, funkily filling the spaces between hi-hat strokes. They can take the form of single hits or gentle presses, where the stick is pressed into the drumhead to create a very short, fast roll (three or four hits). Applying ghost notes is an automatic, almost unconscious process for the experienced drummer, who will play them pretty much constantly. For the programmer who takes the time to draw or…

If you’re new to string or brass arranging, the term ‘articulation’may be unfamiliar. It describes the use of a different technique to play the instrument, achieving a particular sound or effect in the process. With a violin, for example, there are many ways to play it – you can pick the strings with your fingers, play smoothly with the bow, bounce the back of the bow off the strings, and so on. Each of these techniques or articulations has a name, and can be indicated with symbols on a musical score to give the orchestra an idea of how to play the part. When composing realistic orchestral sounds in software, most samplers or ROMplers allow you to switch between different playing styles on the fly via MIDI, to quickly change…

Free valhalladsp.com The last few months has seen many high profile and impressive reverb plugins hit the shops, so there’s still 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. 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 big effects, yet despite its ambitions it has, like other Valhalla DSP plugins, a straightup interface that underplays the complexity of the effect. The single window design is split…

Since debuting on influential UK label Skint back in 2006, Belgian four-piece GOOSE have consistently impressed with their blend of synth-powered electronic sounds and rock band dynamics. Fifteen years and four studio albums on, their sound is still progressing. With their new EP, Something New, out 26 Feb, we caught up with the band to find out about how they’re creative setup works. When did you start making music, and how did you first get started? We started in 1996 as young teenagers playing rock’n roll from Black Sabbath to AC/DC to Elvis Presley covers. Then in 2000 we fell in love with our first synths the Siel Ochestra 2 and Novation Bass Station. Heavily inspired by Daft Punk and Les Rhytmes Digitales our sound changed, but we still continued…

Korg’s DW-8000 returns in the form of the Modwave hybrid wavetable synthesizer Korg has revived yet another classic from its illustrious history and given it the hybrid treatment, with the new Modwave wavetable synthesizer that promises to take the DW legacy and create a “monster synth” with a little help from Motion Sequencing 2.0 and the brand new Kaoss pad modulation. It doesn’t take a genius to see that this looks like the third instalment of forward-thinking ‘modernized’ synths from Korg that tap into models of yesteryear with fresh features, all wrapped up in a now-familiar 37-key chassis. The Modwave seems to also take on the same ethos as the Wavestate and opsix with plenty of hands-on control and an engine combining deep synthesis with multiple filter options and a…

The kick drum, or bass drum, is the powerhouse behind the music. In a club, it’s the kick that’s nailing the four to the floor, and at a rock gig it’s the kick that’s making your chest compress. The kick started life as a hollow log being whacked by one of Dave Grohl’s ancestors about 60,000 years ago, and evolved via marching bands to its current status as the logo-bearing centerpiece of the modern drum kit. Now, of course, it also exists as a sequence of zeros and ones, filed away in your sample collection. The kick drum is all about low frequencies. It has mids and highs, but its full weight can be felt from 150Hz all the way down to 45Hz, where your speaker cones (and possibly you…

Many computer musicians shy away from programming their own acoustic (as opposed to electronic) drum tracks, understandably concerned that since they don’t know how to play a real drum kit, any attempt to create a performance on a virtual one will fall short in terms of technicality and sound. Others go in the opposite direction, naively and over-confidently penning beats that at best would require five or six limbs to actually play, and at worst come across as mad and unconvincing, even to the untrained ear. The fact is that programming realistic, groovy drum parts is well within any desktop producer’s abilities. All you need is a MIDI sequencer, a quality sound source and some insight into the rules, limitations and standard practices that real drummers work to and within.…

Fraser T. Smith has been a force ubiquitous to the UK music scene, contributing his talents to 18 number one albums and picking up Grammy and Ivor Novello Awards. Over his 25-year career, he’s worked with Adele, Sam Smith, Gorillaz and Florence and the Machine, and helped shape the sound of UK rap and grime, producing Stormzy’s debut album Gang Signs & Prayer. After spending decades fulfilling the potential of others, Smith has now turned the tables on himself with his debut Future Utopia album 12 Questions. Touching on subject matters such as inequality, technology, gang violence and the environment, the remarkable 51-minute concept album reflects on Smith’s relationship with modern society and what he calls his ‘imposter syndrome’. Eliciting contributions from a host of poets, artists, visionaries and session…

Modular synthesizers have been around for 50 years, and they’re more popular than ever. Yet for a couple of decades they were considered to be a dead technology fraught with limitations. Too cumbersome to haul on stage, and too esoteric, modular systems simply couldn’t thrive in a market full of sample-based all-in-one ‘workstations’. But one modular-minded German had other ideas. His name was Dieter Doepfer, and he’d been banging out cool synthesis products since 1979, when he released a phaser module for the then-popular Formant modular system. By the mid '90s, he’d released Doepfer’s MAQ16/3 sequencer (co-designed by Kraftwerk) along with a host of keyboards, pedals and other items. An interesting line-up to be sure, but it was 1995’s A-100 that made the Doepfer name. The A-100 was – well,…

$552 steinberg.net 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…

Supreme Samples VoxChops Synth $30 A huge selection of vocal phrases – with a separate NKI for each. There are whole phrases, “Let the bass drop”, “Put your hands up” and the like, plus ‘keys’, ‘pad’ and ‘lead’ patches fashioned from vocal samples – granular synth style – and a few individual ‘Shout’ samples to mess with as well. The main tab lets you access amp, pitch and filter envelopes, basic mixing, and some macros, but there’s more besides. In the Effects Engine, you can dial in chorus, delay, reverb and convolution processes. These can be keyswitched on and off too. Then there’s the Rhythm Engine, with its three 16-step amp sequencer and five LFOs offering a load of creative control over the source material. VoxChops Synth is primed for…

When we think about splitprocessing plugins, we tend to think of multiband ideas, where the extent and type of processing changes based on the frequency in question. There's also straight parallel processing, where two signals can be processed differently and then blended or balanced together from there. Masterlab's DynaQ, though, is something that hasn't been seen much before: the separate parts of your audio that are processed differently: here they're split up using a compressor. Any audio information that triggers gain reduction in DynaQ's onboard compressor (basically, anything that breaches the threshold) will be processed by the 'Above' set of controls, and anything in your audio signal that doesn't breach the threshold will then be processed by the 'Below' controls. This makes for an interesting take on split processing, and…

Together with mid and high click, the balance and length of the sub, punch and honk elements are what shape the bass drum sound. These combine to give you a either a long, subby, 808-style kick, a house-esque, clicky all-rounder, or a top-heavy Metallica rocker. Start with the nearest thing you can find to what you ultimately want – whether that’s a sampled sound or a synthesized one – then go ahead and sculpt away. Sub happens at around 60Hz. Make sure you cut or boost in this area using a narrow Q, otherwise you might unhelpfully add or remove frequencies on either side of your chosen range – even small adjustments at 30Hz or 100Hz will have a big effect on the sound. The sub element is what makes…

The hi-hats are a pair of cymbals mounted on a stand, one upside down and the other the right way up, both held in place on a central spike and connected to a footpedal at the base of the stand. By operating the pedal, the drummer brings the hi-hats together. If you watch a jazz drummer play, you’ll see that the hi-hats spend most of the time closed, but open and shut quickly on the second and fourth beats of the bar. In just about all other modern styles the hi-hats are kept closed or half-closed and played with sticks, anchoring the drum track by beating out eighth-notes. The role of the hats is to give life to the kick and snare pattern. Acoustic hats vary from small, thin and…

As you’ll have no doubt noticed, our drum part so far, while making sense in terms of playability and pattern, still sounds totally mechanical and unrealistic. This is because we drew all the notes in by hand, snapped perfectly to the grid and at a constant, fixed velocity level. The best way to remedy this problem is to play the part in live using a MIDI keyboard or drum pads. It does require a modicum of skill and the ability to ‘feel’ the groove rather than just rigidly bash it out, but you don’t have to play the whole thing at once. Set up a record cycle and play each element in separately as the track loops round – hats, then kick, then snare, for example. The result will be…

from $1,400 sequential.com In 2015, when Yamaha handed back the Sequential moniker to Dave Smith, there was much rejoicing from the community (and I expect similar feelings were expressed within the walls of the company) and a new era dawned, bringing with it a selection of hardware that crossed some boundaries, from the much praised Prophet Rev2, the vintage vibed OB-6 and Prophet 6, to the more recent re-issue of the wonderful Prophet 5. This left a space for something modern and mono that didn’t sit in the same area as the Prophet X but would provide players with a synth that had the familiarity we musicians yearn for, yet an experience that was new and exciting. The curtains were pulled back to reveal the Pro 3. So, what it…

$39/month, $299.88/year, $999 forever accusonus.com 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…

$40 For the dubstep don dada’s debut sample pack he’s only gone and whipped up a fat batch of big and brash sounds to loosen your fillings, and rattle your neighbor’s windows with. The 641MB of goodies inside this cheeky little offering are all top-notch blasts of pure noise and nasty ass drums. The former beatbox star has made a science out of crafting sucka punch hits and pulse-quickening riddims – if you check on any of his collabos and remix work for heads like The Prodigy and Bassnectar, you’ll know what standard he operates at on this selection. Here you get big room weight across a variety of cutting-edge club styles. All tear out. All in your mush. A strong release, top to bottom, from the much-loved nutbag of…

Don’t be put off by the name of this Ableton plugin. Though Beat Repeat was designed for drums, because it creates controlled or randomized repetitions of any incoming signal it can be a valuable tool for spicing up static guitar loops and pads as well. A quick fiddle with the controls reveals that Interval defines how often the plugin captures new material and starts repeating it — anywhere from each 1/32 note to every 4 bars. Grid defines the size of each repeated slice; set it to 1/16 and a sixteenth note sized slice will be captured and repeated. The Offset control shifts those repetitions forward in time. For example, with Interval set to 1 Bar and Offset to 8/16, the audio will be captured once per bar halfway through…