Innehållsförteckning för Autumn 2022 från Future Music

> IK Multimedia already had a set of winners on their hands with the well-received iLoud Micro Monitors, which delivered affordable quality monitoring to home studios, and the expanded iLoud MTMs. Now IK are aiming to take the iLoud range upwards into the pro realm with three new models. This new line-up, billed as the Precision range, features two two-way monitors, one with a 5-inch driver and one 6.5-inch, and a range-topping MTM model, which is a three-way design featuring two 5-inch drivers. The iLoud Precision offers an impressive frequency response from 36Hz to 30kHz with a +/-1dB tolerance from 45Hz upwards. The Class D amps on board give true linear phase response above 150Hz and the 96kHz internal DSP processing keeps top and bottom in check depending on the room…

> After several weeks of leaks and speculation, Yahama have updated their MODX synth range, adding a trio of new models. Launched in 2018, the original MODX took inspiration from Yamaha’s top-end Montage workstations but arrived at a more affordable price, ditching some of the more ‘pro’ level features, cutting down on the memory size and opting for a plastic rather than all-metal build. Now, four years later, the company have launched the updated MODX+ range. As with their predecessors, these new workstations make a big play of the multi-function Super Knob, which goes a great way to making up for the reduced number of physical controls compared to the Montage. Once again, the sound onboard mixes AWM2 sample-based tones – which are capable of convincing orchestra, brass, pianos and…

01 > We’re using Ableton Live here. Import the song with the source break into a Session View clip slot. Use Live’s warp tools (Beats Warp Mode) to isolate and loop the break, then right-click/crop sample. This is non-destructive. You may want to quantise the beat but that’ll depend on what the beat is, and what you’re playing it against. 02 > There are now two paths we can take; this is the first. Load Simpler into a new track, and drag the cropped beat into the labelled drop area – the waveform appears. At the far left of the Simpler screen are three modes – click ‘Slice’ and Live inserts vertical lines based on the transients in the beat. If this automated slicing doesn’t do what you want, you…

INCLUDES VIDEO 01 > The arpeggio acts as a finishing touch after Borders’ second chorus. “For melodic arps I usually use my Moog Grandmother,” he explains. “I start by trying to play in some sort of basic melody.” 02 > Joe creates a basic arp-like riff by playing the Grandmother then records the MIDI into Ableton Live. “I’ve gone in and muted a few different notes that I didn’t think worked. It’s all a bit trial and error,” he tells us. 03 > Next Joe sends the MIDI back out to Behringer’s TD-3, a clone of Roland’s classic TB-303. “As much as the Grandmother sounds great, the distortion and the proper squelchiness of this TD-3 really works.” 04 > The audio is then recorded back into the DAW, where Joe…

KEY FEATURES 256 MB memory, 32-bit/96kHz operation, complete stereo signal path, 200 presets (up to 500 locations), 6-voice polyphony, 14 synth engines, 15 sampled drum kits (plus 10 D-Box kits), 8 effects, 8 sequencers; Tape with 160 minutes record time and four tracks each; Sampler (20s); CONNECTIONS : 3.5mm audio in/line in, 3.5mm audio out for headphones/line out, USB C port for charging, streaming audio, file transfers and MIDI THE PROS & CONS + Beautiful mobile sound – better than the original Extra storage, tape and sampling Inspiring sounds for leftfield composers - The price. Of course. Think of the number of hardware synths you could buy Still no undo and quantise but the sequencing has been bolstered The price. Again Has there ever been a piece of gear as…

Sampleson – MetaPiano $89 >Despite their name, Sampleson have put a lot of time and effort into creating instruments that don’t actually employ a large collection of samples. So instead of capturing every nuance of an acoustic source through the use of huge numbers of multisamples and clever scripting, they have embraced Spectral Modelling – an emulation technology that starts with real recordings, but with DSP employed to analyse and rebuild the instruments using an adaptable mathematical model. This model can then be tweaked using simple controls and respond to note and control changes as appropriate. The latest Sampleson product to utilise this technology is MetaPiano, which weighs in at only 60MB (though the website gets its bits and bytes muddled and incorrectly mentions Megabits/Mb). This is based on an…

COMPACT DIGITAL SYNTHS Korg Volca FM2 £149 Full Review: FM388 | Amini DX-7 in your pocket! The Volca FM was already a favourite of ours and version 2 is an improvement all-round… Teenage Engineering OP-1 Field £1999 Full Review: FM388 The OP-1 remains one of the most impressive compact synths of all time. But that price is hard to get past... Arturia MicroFreak £299 Full Review: FM344 Packing tons of power and innovative features into an affordable box, Arturia’s new offering is weird, wonderful and downright fun. Roland JD-08 £349 Review: FM386 Adds lovely modern flourishes in an unashamedly nostalgic look and does it all within a ridiculously compact design. Elektron Digitone £620 Review: FM330 A fun and very well thought-out box that can cover a wide sonic palette; takes…

Arturia updated their rapidly-growing FX Collection bundle earlier this year, adding a pair of new distortion plugins in the process. Those two effects – Dist Tube-Culture and Dist Opamp-21 – were both based on vintage hardware, each offering a distinctive, nuanced take on analogue drive. While they were undoubtedly welcome additions, they left a noticeable gap in the FX Collection lineup for a less subtle, more modern form of distortion. Enter Dist Coldfire, Arturia’s latest effect processor, which, like EXF Fragments and Rev Intensity, is among the few all-original, non-emulated effects in Arturia’s lineup. Coldfire is described as a ‘dual distortion reactor’, offering two individual processors that allow users to pair a multitude of drive and distortion types. These range from analogue styles such as Tube, Tape and Transistor, through…

> Cherry Audio have had another delve through the annals of synth history and had their emulative eyes caught by the Elka Synthex, an 8-note polyphonic Italian analogue synth, first released in the early ’80s. The result is Elka-X, a plugin version of said synth that offers more features for a fraction of the $12,000 you’d probably have to pay for a second-hand original. Designed by Italian engineer Mario Maggi, the Synthex offered digitally-controlled analogue oscillators and a four-pole multimode filter. It was multitimbral and had its own four-track sequencer. In 2015, a new team attempted to bring back the Synthex in hardware, but its crowdfunding campaign was unsuccessful. Maggi broached the idea of a Synthex 2 that same year, but this hasn’t, as of yet, seen the light of…

> Already recognised as one of the best free DAWs you can download, Tracktion’s cross-platform Waveform Free has been updated for 2022. This latest version of Waveform Free is based on the essential features of Waveform Pro 12, Tracktion’s paid-for DAW, and imposes no restrictions on track counts, exporting/rendering, project saving or use of third-party plugins. It won’t time out, either. The 2022 edition of Waveform Free includes a completely new browser that lets you specify tags, favourites and smart lists. 15 of the audio effects have been refreshed, too, and there are now six utility plugins. These include a convert-tomono tool and a spectrum analyser. The Actions panel, in the meantime, enables you to favourite your most-used actions and create a range of custom actions for one-click recall.…

Clark Body Riddle Warp, 2006 As he was making his third album for Warp, Chris Clark was living a happy little life. Weekends were spent in Welsh caves, chanting with chums into a dictaphone. And, days went by, either drumming to Krautrock in his Birmingham studio or pitch-shifting creaking door recordings until they sounded like free jazz experiments. He was doing as he pleased, fusing it all with evocative waves of sombre electronica, organic beats, glacial soft synths, and icy acid. It was a sparse, odd flavour. And the telling sound of a man making music with little money, on a diet of mainly liquified vegetables. “I was really skint at the time,” says Clark. “Basically eating cabbage and bean soup. But, I was the happiest I think I’ve ever…

01 > Akai’s classic early samplers employ a complex signal chain that comprises input gain, pre-filtering, A-D and D-A conversion and post filtering, and all these stages influence the sound, introducing soft saturation, noise and subtle aliasing. Even so, to feel the full effect of these stages, start with some decent high-quality audio. 02 > Without a doubt the most significant aspect of early samplers is their 12-bit resolution. This is substantially lower than the 16-bit or 24-bit we typically use for recording audio nowadays. Nevertheless, it’s easy enough to achieve using a bit reduction plugin and many DAWs include these as standard. 03 > Insert this plugin across some suitable high-quality audio and gradually reduce just the bit resolution. You’ll notice subtle changes to the accompanying noise as you…

Formed in 2013, London-based trio The Comet Is Coming remain hell bent on defying electro-jazz orthodoxy. Comprising saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, drummer Max Hallett and synth player/producer Danalogue, since their 2016 debut album Channel The Spirits the threesome have synergised their collective talents to create an unrelenting smorgasbord of jazz, electronica, funk and psychedelic rock. The last few years have been spent on tour or constrained by Covid, hence the band decided to get out of the city and record their third album Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios. With the help of their engineer Kristian Craig Robinson, the group embarked on a four-day process of intergalactic improvisation before returning to Danalogue’s studio for a torturous round of post-production. Tell us a little bit about your personal history…

>Launched in 2020, Twisted Electrons’ MEGAfm was designed to put the FM sounds of the Sega Mega Drive (or ‘Genesis’ in the US) in an accessible hardware synth. That’s not quite game over, though, because we’ve now got word that a new version is on the way, and it’s based – appropriately enough – on the Mega Drive II. This was a feature-tweaked, more compact version of the Mega Drive that was notable for using a slightly different iteration of the YM2612 sound chip – the YM3438. And, wouldn’t you know it, Twisted Electrons are following suit and putting a pair of YM3438s in the MEGAfm MKII, too. There’s also a new circuit layout which means that users can now access the sound chips simply by removing the bottom panel. You…

> Baby Audio have just turned three, and are celebrating by revamping their much-loved I Heart NY compressor plugin. IHNY-2 is touted as a compressor that’s “designed especially with modern genres in mind” and “optimised for loudness and impact, without a loss of clarity” that will “make your tracks slam and sing”. Best of all, they claim it’s “the hardest hitting compressor in the industry”. IHNY-2 is designed to work in parallel, effectively being an all-in-one parallel compressor with no additional plugs required. It aims to let you compress more, while still preserving the dynamics of your original track. IHNY-2's improvements come in the form of additional controls over the effect and an Autogain algorithm for keeping a consistent output level. Users now have control over Attack and Release, as…

> Once again we’re using Ableton Live for this but other DAWs are available! Not only can we sample, then crop, then slice audio beats, and rearrange them, it’s about options: we can process them with audio effects and add entirely new sounds to the mix. Because we’ve sliced the beat, we’re free to apply new processing to each individual hit, instead of just the entire beat as we might normally do. If you’re trying to capture a vibe of the past, early days of sampling, you might even take a beat, crop it, and then let it play pitched up or down, depending on the project tempo, an effect often heard on earlier sampled tracks. One thing you might have to wrestle with is timing: this can be an…

CONTACT WHO: PWM WEB: 1pwm.com KEY FEATURES Semi-modular ‘all analogue’ monosynth (patchable for paraphonic use). 32-note velocity-sensitive mini keyboard with arpeggiator. I/O: Line out, headphone out, MIDI in and out, USB MIDI, analogue clock in and out, 19-in/19-out front panel patchbay. DIMENSIONS: 690 x 320 x 160 mm WEIGHT: 3.7kg THE PROS & CONS + Wonderfully characterful and raw sound Neat, knob-perfunction interface Pairs very well with other modular/ semi-modular gear - Joystick implementation is slightly questionable No patchable utilities No sync/trigger for the LFO Malevolent may be the debut instrument from equally new British outfit PWM, but it nevertheless arrives with substantial design pedigree. The analogue electronics were developed alongside Bristol’s Future Sound Systems, and its design team includes ex-Focusrite, Avid, M-Audio and Roli employees. It’s described by its…

CONTACT WHO: Elektron WEB: elektron.se KEY FEATURES 8 audio tracks and 8 MIDI tracks, 2 LFOs, 2 filters, delay, reverb, and overdrive per track, Elektron step sequencer Before the Digitakt came along all the way back in 2017, if you wanted to enter the Elektron world you had to be willing to play with the big boys. At that point the brand was focused on bigger, more expensive boxes like the Octatrack, Analog Rytm, and Analog Four, each of which boasted a plethora of features to go along with their premium price tags. But the arrival of the Digitakt, first released at just $659, allowed the Elektron brand to be opened up to a whole new stratosphere of producers and gear consumers. The eight-track ‘drum computer’ and sampler also featured…