Innehållsförteckning för September 2016 från Future Music

Nawksh Mythic Tales of Tomorrow II Guruguru Brain Mythic Tales of Tomorrow II is the beautifully abstract and wildly inventive debut physical album from Nawksh. Real name Danial Hyatt, Nawksh is a video game developer and producer from Pakistan who has emerged from a burgeoning underground scene in Karachi with a reputation for making surreal and adventurous music with real beauty. His debut LP is a fine example of his experimental and futuristic approach. He merges myriad electronic textures together into a diverse and wide-ranging sound palette. Grainy structures, broken rhythms and a psychedelic haze strain throughout this entire record. Merging Ambient, Techno, Rock, ethnic beats and shimmering drone, the record moves with startling creativity while still managing to foster a laidback and contented attitude. Set in a future fantasy…

EMERGENCY STUDIO SUPPORT 14 COMMON MIXING MISTAKES & HOW TO FIX THEM Improve your workflow in the studio and sweeten your sound with FM’s guide to the mixing mistakes we’ve all made – and how to avoid them! There are lots of different ways of doing things in the studio when it comes to both music production and audio engineering. Unfortunately though, it’s easy to make simple mistakes that can combine together to give less than ideal end results – and if these mistakes are made early on in the production or mix process, they can then influence other decisions which makes for a frustrating and long-winded experience in the studio. Even worse, these simple errors can become habit over time meaning that we repeat the…

3. Beat The Brightness With De-Essing De-essing is traditionally associated with vocal processing, but has a whole world of other uses for any high-frequency material Although you’d traditionally use a de-esser to tame sibilance in a vocal recording, it’s an equally useful tool when taken out of context and used on other material such as overly bright drums, guitar and synths – or even a whole mix! We could use standard EQ to remove unwanted frequencies from the high mid and treble areas a de-esser is normally tuned to but this will have the side effect of removing those frequencies permanently, giving a duller and less detailed overall sound. Instead, as de-essing is a dynamic process, it only works when we need it – leaving the high frequencies below the…

10. How to… Limit More Cleanly While some styles of music lend themselves to being heavily limited on the master buss, it usually sounds cleaner when the load is spread over two limiters. Try adding one limiter that’s set up for digital clipping with around 1dB of gain reduction dialled in before doing the heavy lifting with a second limiter. The clipping already applied will give the second limiter less to do, giving a smoother sound with less artifacts. Using your limiter’s oversampling can also help – with this enabled, the limiter will upsample the incoming audio before processing it and downsampling again; this can reduce artifacts at the expense of extra CPU load.…

13. Make It Work In Mono Although your mix might sound amazing in stereo, making it work well on mono playback systems too can pay dividends While a great sounding stereo mix is what we’re all after for our music, it’s just as important that it works in mono too. After all, there are lots of mono playback systems to cater for, including bar/club PA rigs, mobile phones – and even FM radio if the signal is too weak for stereo information to be received. If your mix has too much content in the stereo field, this will mostly cancel out when summed to mono and stop your mix from translating as intended. Bearing all this in mind, it always pays to check your mixes carefully in mono during the…

Shadow Child Jaydee – Plastic Dreams (Shadow Child Remix) Food Music 2016 © Joe Branston INCLUDES VIDEO VAULT.FUTUREMUSIC.CO.UK House music kingpin Shadow Child, aka Simon Neale, is no stranger to the pages of FM, but when he offered to show us the inner workings of his rapturously-received remix of Jaydee’s 1992 House classic Plastic Dreams we couldn’t make our way to his temporary studio in suburban Cambridge fast enough. Simon is apologetic about the state of his stopgap set-up, which is slightly galling considering it’s practically a living museum of legendary Dance hardware: from the humble Roland JV-2080 to the sought after TR-808 and 909, Simon’s arsenal is as comprehensive as one could feasibly expect from a single room, and it takes all of our collective willpower to…

Audion Matthew Dear’s Techno alter-ego, Audion, returns to the fray with the exhilarating, hedonistic pulse of new album, Alpha. Hamish Mackintosh traces the ghosts in Dear’s machines © Chris Arace Matthew Dear is something of an electronic renaissance man. DJ, producer, artist and purveyor of eclectic but essential beats and basslines, Dear has seen his star consistently rise with albums such as the triumphant pristine Electronic Pop of 2007’s Asa Breed and 2012’s superb Beams. Dear’s skewed electronic songsmithery has earned him plaudits and converts aplenty – not least the support slot on a couple of Depeche Mode tours in the States along with a reputation as a top DJ and remixer par-excellence. Somehow, in between his successful Matthew Dear work, he’s managed to plough a purer Techno furrow…

Perfecting The White Noise Sweep Bored with the white noise sweep which offers little more than a low-pass filter opening up? So are we. Add some individual touches… The humble white noise sweep is perhaps the longest-serving transition element electronic music production has ever produced, used in countless tracks through the years. It almost serves the same function as an elongated reverse cymbal, building in volume and intensity as – usually – a low-pass filter opens up as the sweep approaches its climax. However, the fact that ‘common’ white noise sweep behaviour can be described in words highlights the problem; we’ve heard this sound too often. The good news is that there are loads of ways to personalise such sweeps and through the following steps we’ve explored some ways in…

Tom Oberheim Two Voice Pro £3,199 The Two Voice Pro adds modern features to Oberheim’s classic Two Voice. Dan ‘JD73’ Goldman checks out the beast! The OB-6 polysynth collaboration with Dave Smith may be the most heavily promoted Oberheim product in recent years but Tom Oberheim has been working hard under his own company Marion Systems for many years, keeping his classic SEM-based products alive and faithful to the original designs. The SEM (Synthesiser Expander Module) is the classic Oberheim 2-VCO monosynth design upon which many of Tom’s most-loved products are based; take for example the Oberheim 4 and 8-voice machines which pack four or eight SEMs into a single case with a keyboard. These beasts fetch crazy money these days and rightly so as they sound immense! One of…

THE ALTERNATIVES Yamaha MOXF8 £1,201 Features an 88-note weighted keyboard, Motif-based soundset and flash memory for importing Yamaha’s own, or third-party sound libraries. Also features plenty of effects, a powerful sequencer and DAW integration. www.yamahasynth.com Korg Kross 88 £785 Featuring lots of bread and butter sounds, 16-track sequencer, audio recorder, plenty of effects and an 88-note weighted keyboard, the Kross is Korg’s entry level workstation. www.korg.com Kurzweil SP5-8 £849 Taking sounds from Kurzweil’s well-respected PC-3 series, the SP5-8 also offers an 88-note weighted keybed, 861 presets, powerful effects, 16-part multi-timbrality and five real-time sliders. www.kurzweil.com…

Roland Aira MX-1 Mix Performer £499 The MX-1 is an interface, live mixer, multi-effect unit and DAW controller all in one. Si Truss gets mixed up… The Beat FX can be scaled back from obnoxious Vegas-style pumping into subtle, polyrhythmic territory Categorised by Roland, slightly awkwardly, as a ‘Mix Performer’, the MX-1 is part mixer, part multi-effect, part interface, and quite unlike anything else on the market right now. Design-wise, it bears a close resemblance to the Aira TR-8, housed in a plastic chassis of the same dimensions and sporting a similar – if slightly rearranged – selection of faders, knobs and sequencer buttons. It has a similar black/green colour scheme too, although doing away with the green trim around the top edge, which leaves the MX-1 looking ever so…

Softube Modular $99 Softube join the modular synthesis frenzy and Bruce Aisher gets plugging to see if their software expertise can deliver some analogue-style magic Softube are best known for their emulation-oriented audio plug-ins aimed at capturing the sound of specific hardware units. In more recent years this has extended into hybrid-hardware (Console 1), and virtual instruments, in the shape of their Heartbeat analogue drum module. Now Softube tackle perhaps one of the trickiest of beasts to distil into software form – the modular synthesizer system. Whether its because of the almost unlimited connectivity possibilities or even the ease of self-justification when buying small affordable modules, the current patching madness sees no sign of abating. This is perhaps where the modern story of sound synthesis starts, particularly with Bob Moog…

Mix(er) & match When you buy a new mixer, of course you try and find one with inputs and outputs to suit your needs. But if you come to the conclusion that such a mixer doesn’t actually exist, maybe there’s a case for designing your own. This might sound like I/O-filled pie in the sky but, thanks to Schertler Group’s Arthur, you can make it a reality. You can choose from a selection of Class-A input and output modules and configure them in any order and quantity you like, though larger mixers will require a bigger power supply. You can spec up your mixer on the Schertler website and preview it as a ‘virtual build’ as you go. Once you’ve got your components you can put them together using connecting…

Bentley Rhythm Ace Bentley Rhythm Ace Skint, 1997 Words by Roy Spencer © Patrick Ford/Redferns Back in the late ’90s, Bentley Rhythm Ace marched to the Big Beat of their own drum. As the Fatboy and Chemical clones dug up the same safe Soul samples, this Brummie duo were sticking German striptease records in their Akais, turning charity shop cheese into dancefloor dynamite. “A ‘magpie approach’ is a good way of describing our way of making music,” says BRA’s Richard March. “Our favourite thing was using really bad cover version albums and junk records. We used to go to the flea markets and spend a tenner each and come out with a hundred albums to sample from. Then we’d have a few beers and when we came across a couple…

LIKE IT? TRY THESE… Werner Müller and his Orchestra The Strip Goes On A fine example of the bonkers crates the BRA boys dug in back then. German striptease records? Go on then. ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: Bodybuilding, The Beat Goes On, Satisfaction Tony Paterson Orchestra & Singers A Salute to James Last Cheap and cheerful cover version albums can often hide gold. Some Bentley beats are hidden in this one’s grooves. ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: (Blame It On) the Pony Express, Cracklin’ Rosie, La Bamba Mikey Dread African Anthem This innovative Reggae album is chock full of classic spoken word samples, and even the odd ‘boing’ sound effect. A BRA fave. ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: Saturday Night Style, Headline News, Comic Strip Barry Mann Who Put…

Wild Beasts Boy King Domino UK Indie Rockers Wild Beasts follow up on 2014’s Present Tense with a new album that finds the Cumbrian four-piece in an upfront and aggressive mood. Their fifth LP, Boy King, is a meditation on masculinity and modern life. The record sees the band in a sharpened state, offering up an angular, more gritty and confrontational style. The whole album has an undercurrent of deep, grimy bass running throughout as Hayden Thorpe’s snarling vocals fly over the top of raucous guitar lines. There are still those sensuous melodies that Wild Beasts seem so adept at sewing into their music – it just arrives amongst a darker and more ominous atmosphere. When the anger and frustration subsides, there are moments where shimmering synths and explosive drumming…

1. Keep An Eye On Your Headroom Gain structure is one of those things that typically gets overlooked when producing or mixing, often leading to a degradation of sound quality that can easily be avoided. It’s vital to learn how to use the headroom we’re given in the right way to achieve the best possible end results. Back in the days of recording using analogue gear such as tape recorders and mixing consoles, it was crucial to get the gain structure right as running signals too cold would give a high signal to noise ratio, meaning that the noise present in the equipment being used was too loud compared to the actual signal being recorded. Equally, running signals too hot in the analogue domain can introduce unwanted distortion, giving unpleasant…

4. Use EQ In The Mix Correctly Some simple EQ filtering, notches and shelving can make all the difference to any mix… We load up a mix that has a good balance except for some frequency clashes between certain elements, such as the background drone and bass. To fix this, we use DMG’s EQuilibrium on the HouseDrone channel to add a 18dB/oct high-pass filter at 250Hz to free up some room in the low mid frequencies, giving the bass and kick drum some breathing space. After this, we use a 12dB/oct low-pass filter at 6kHz to remove some unwanted high frequencies. We then turn our attention to the kick drum; as this is a House track, the snare is layered over the kick on alternate beats. Between some careful listening…

7. Multiband Mastery: Control Your Bass Often used for corrective purposes in mastering, a multiband compressor is also a great tool for controlling individual instruments Although many pro engineers typically do not recommend use of multiband processing, in the right hands it can really help with transparently fixing dynamics issues, both on single channels and busses too. Whether it be a vocal take with overly resonant mids or a pingy snare in a breakbeat, the ability to close in on a fixed frequency area and adjust the dynamics is a lifesaver – particularly when dealing with parts that carry a lot of low frequency energy such as bass. Whereas normal downwards compression can add unpleasant distortion to bass heavy signals, a multiband used correctly can add the compression needed in…

9. How to… Add Parallel Compression Unlike applying compression directly to a channel, parallel compression lets us mix a hyper compressed version of the dry signal in to taste, allowing an increase in average volume levels without affecting the transients of the original sound. This is ideal for adding weight without losing snap and it’s simple to set up: add a compressor of your choice to an FX send using a 4:1 ratio, fastest attack and medium release before turning the dry channel’s send amount up until your compressor gives around 10dB of gain reduction. Experiment with attack and release settings; a shorter release setting will add extra body to drums for example.…

12. How to… Push The Envelope A good transient shaping processor (such as SPL’s Transient Designer or NI’s Transient Shaper) can make changing the dynamics of a sound child’s play. The two main controls – attack and sustain – can be used to easily remove unwanted reverb from a snare, bring out the attack of acoustic guitar or tighten up a flabby kick drum, for example. Transient shaping is also a great tool when combined with other dynamics processors, for example, adding a bit of attack back to an overcompressed breakbeat, or for a snappy yet controlled snare, placing a transient shaper with plenty of attack dialled in before a brickwall limiter.…

14. Listening At The Right Level Making the right mix decisions is key when producing music, and monitoring at the right volume level helps achieve clean, repeatable results Calibrating your monitoring to achieve a repeatable 85dB RMS listening level can make a huge difference to how you perceive the sound coming from the speakers. We’ve used Voxengo’s SPAN alongside the dB Meter app for iOS to calibrate our studio monitors. Firstly, we turn our audio interface’s volume control down to silence before loading SPAN onto our master output and importing a pink noise file already pre-levelled to -23dB RMS. Again, the right speaker delivers 82dB of volume when the audio interface is set at -12dB – as decibels are measured on a logarithmic rather than linear scale, a 3dB increase…

Samplers set to slice! Ignore your sample playback devices – we want live sampling and audio slicing! Luckily the Ginko Synthese Sampleslicer has just smashed through the front door… The Sampleslicer is live audio sampling and sample manipulation that slices the audio into a 16-part grid. Samples can be looped or one shot, with pitch manipulation and clocking to external sources. You can modulate the playback length from one to 16 slices and change the start position. It’s super fun, very quick and stands out with some unique features to the Eurorack format. It’s 12-bit and, to quote the website, this is “a lovely sound with a slightly raw character without being gritty… the MPC60 is 12-bit, the AKAI S9000 is 12-bit and the E-mu SP-1200 is 12-bit too.” So…

All About Transitions Moving seamlessly between track sections INCLUDES VIDEO AND AUDIO VAULT.FUTUREMUSIC.CO.UK Think of the word ‘transition’ and you’re perhaps more likely to think of the ways in which it’s possible to move between scenes of a movie file than you might consider anything to do with music production. But, of course, transitions in music are just as important as their movie equivalents. How we move from verses to choruses, how we build up tension leading to crucial moments, how we mute parts for extra drama… These are all considerations which need our attention and, across the next few pages, we’ll look at some key points on this very subject. We’ll discover how to design sounds which work well as transition points approach, as well as looking…

QUICK TIPS 1 Throw in a time-signature change. If you’re working in 4/4 time, try dropping a beat with a 3/4 bar, or add an extra one, 5/4. 2 Snare drum fills are popular ways of building momentum up to transitions but give the patterns of these sufficient thought. We’ve all heard running 1/16th snares a thousand times, so try your own patterns. 3 If you’re too busy to build your own risers, libraries like NI’s Rise & Hit, Heavyocity’s Gravity and HybridTwo’s Project Bravo are awash with sonic (and cinematic) approaches to bridging transition points. 4 Listen to how DJs transition between tracks. They don’t have access to stems or individual parts, so get creative with how to produce seamlessness from contrasting material. This can often provide inspiration.…

Creating your own dramatic, hybrid risers Often the most effective risers are a warped blend of electronic and processed acoustic instruments 01 > We’re starting with the bones of a trailer style arrangement, with strings doubled by synths, alongside toms and taikos. The synths and strings are grouped so that they can be treated to reverb effects together. Towards the end of this track, we’re going to build our own riser. 02 > The first riser layer is a screaming synth note from Massive. The pitchbend range both ways is two octaves. We draw a D note for eight bars. The pitchbend range starts at the bottom and rises to the top – a 4-octave change. 03 > It’s always fun to use live instruments in risers, even if you…

THE ALTERNATIVES DSI Pro 2 £1,500 Uses four digital oscillators and routes them through a Prophet-5 style LPF and/or an Oberheimstyle State-Variable filter. Has a powerful MIDI/CV sequencer, effects and paraphonic capability for chords. www.davesmith instruments.com DSI OB-6 £2,250 With SEM-based oscillators and 2-pole SVF, the OB-6 has a mixture of the SEM and DSI sound, with 6-note polyphony, polyphonic step sequencer, digital effects and plenty of modulation options. www.davesmith instruments.com Analogue Solutions Telemark-K V2 £949 + VAT Based on the SEM, the Telemark-K has a 2-pole Obie-style filter, plus ring mod, a square wave LFO and sub oscillator. www.analogue solutions.com…

Hypersynth Xenophone Monophonic Synth £795 Bruce Aisher gets tweaking to see if the Xenophone can compete for your hard-earned cash Although best known for their synth editing software, for a while Hypersynth made a hardware SID-chip synth system. Ultimately, they pursued the software emulation route with their SIDizer VST plug-in, but they’re now back in the hardware game with the Xenophone, a monophonic, multi-oscillator desktop synth. There are some nods to the SID, but this is an altogether more advanced beast. The synth comes in the form of a somewhat plain looking, rectangular box laden with LEDs, interspersed with knobs, and hosting a basic LCD screen. Angled wooden end-cheeks do improve the aesthetics somewhat, and help provide a better view of the controls and screen. The unit is powered by…

THE ALTERNATIVES Pioneer RMX-100 £529 Pioneer’s DJ-focused Remix Station range offers a similar spectrum of rhythmic effects. www.pioneerdj.com Native Instruments S8 £829 This Traktor controller is very much a different beast to the MX-1, but it has a similar approach to performance, mixing analogue and digital inputs with creative effects control. www.native-instruments.com Allen & Heath ZED Mixers from £95 Looking for a live mixer-come-interface without the need for the complex effects and extra functions? Then check out A&H’s excellent ZED range. www.allen-heath.com…

THE ALTERNATIVES Mini Doepfer System A-100 £879 It’s the real deal. A ready-rolled, MIDI controllable dual VCO modular system with patch cables. www.doepfer.de Arturia MicroBrute £209 It isn’t a modular, but its Mod Matrix and back panel ports provide useful analogue interfacing capabilities, and give a glimpse into the modular universe. Very good value. www.arturia.com Native Instruments Reaktor 6 £169 Described as a Modular DSP Lab, Reaktor is a monster of customisable digital sound design elements. Version 6 added Blocks functionality and CV connectivity. www. native-instruments.com…

COMPRESSOR PLUG-INS ACME Opticom XLA-3 | $299 Full Review: FM297 Every DAW set-up needs at least one compressor of this style and this is one of the best we have ever tried. UAD-2 Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor | $299 Review FM261 Another highly-coveted hardware ‘legend’ undergoes a successful UAD transformation. FabFilter Pro-C | £114 Review FM297 New features make this a stunning plug-in compressor with as much flexibility and capability as you’re likely to need. Brainworx bx_pan EQ | $299 Review FM306 A three-band fully parametric EQ where each band is full range (40Hz to 20kHz) and can have a near surgical Q. Corrective and creative, it’s a real must-have. Slate Digital Virtual Buss Compressors | From $99 Review FM270 A highly versatile and characterful set of stereo compressors which…

InMusic add Rane to their line of DJ brands InMusic have announced that they are set to acquire Rane, the American manufacturer best known for their ranges of DJ and live mixers. The acquisition, which is set to be completed this summer, will bring Rane under the same ownership as fellow DJ brands Numark and Denon DJ. It’s anyone’s guess what this will mean for Rane’s product line at this stage, but bearing in mind some of their recent products – such as last year’s MP2015 rotary mixer – have skewed towards the top end of the DJ market, it’ll be interesting to see how they end up fitting in next to their new sibling brands.…

Track by track with Richard March “We would do things like have five or six drum loops running at the same time, then just switch them out on the mixing desk. We were looking for different ways to come up with rhythm tracks you wouldn’t necessarily have programmed if you’d sat in front of the rather lovely Atari 10” screen.” Let There Be Flutes “It opens with a sample from Fireman Sam. Then there’s a little sample of a girl being tickled, which we took from an old record they’d play us at junior school to encourage movement and dance. That record appears at various points throughout the album. “The flute came in after we went round a friend’s house and heard this girl playing. She was a student at…

ALBUM OF THE MONTH Ian William Craig Centres 130701 Centres is the beautiful, haunting new album from Vancouver-based vocalist and composer Ian William Craig. His ninth full-length album, Centres comes after widespread acclaim for 2014’s A Turn of Breath and 2015’s Cradle For The Wanting. The new record is once again wildly experimental, combining his operatic vocals with analogue synths, reel-to-reel machines and faulty tape decks. The album crackles, hisses, clicks and bubbles with an intimate intensity. He creates vast soundscapes of rich beauty and emotion as his swirling, orchestral vocal harmonies interplay with complex and highly textured structures. His powerful, choral voice surges through layers of grainy textures and drone-like fuzz to wash the tracks in creaking light and colour. Unpredictable, dream-like and drenched in emotion, this album feels…

RECOMMENDED Cass McCombs Mangy Love ANTI Mangy Love is the most wide-ranging and direct album yet from the prolific Californian singer/songwriter, Cass McCombs. Settling into an eclectic excursion across an expansive landscape of alternative Folk Rock, McCombs delivers a bold and confident album that sends out a strong and blunt message. Lyrically assertive and provocative, Mangy Love deals with a number of socio-political themes with stark clarity and a confrontational attitude. This searing, seething social commentary is perhaps disguised beneath McCombs’ tranquil guitars, gentle voice and laidback serenity. Looking deeper into the songs reveals a more powerful and profound side to the content. The record casts a wider web sonically too, showcasing McCombs’ ability to drift through a wide range of styles such as hazy Psychedelica, shimmering guitars, heartfelt Folk…

5. Dynamic Range: Peaks And Troughs The dynamic range (difference between the loudest and quietest passages) of a piece of music can really affect how the listener reacts to it. Classical music is a superb example – the wide dynamic range of an orchestra allows soft playing to become incredibly loud and impactful in an instant. However, as the human ear naturally prefers louder sounds to quieter ones, most modern music sacrifices dynamic range for overall loudness by using processing such as compression and limiting to reduce the dynamic range, increasing overall average loudness (RMS) levels. This can make the music stand out more initially but, when overused, typically makes it fatiguing to listen to over an extended period of time – and less impactful to boot. Use dynamics processing…

8. THE DOs & DON’Ts OF COMPRESSION DON’T… dismiss your DAW’s built-in compression. Although that priceless vintage Fairchild compressor is what we all dream of, your DAW’s offerings can give excellent results. The compressor in Apple’s Logic Pro X, for example, offers models of character-filled, revered hardware units from the likes of Focusrite and Universal Audio – as well as the default, pristine mode that’s ideal for transparent work. DO… try using hardware and software compression together. One common complaint about software compressors (especially recreations of classic kit) is that they don’t sound as good as outboard gear when pushed hard. So do the heavy lifting with your hardware unit before using a software compressor to get the last bit of gain reduction; a great method to combine hardware vibes…

11. How to… Pick Your Compressor For most compression work, using a VCA-based design offers the most flexibility. VCA compressors can provide plenty of gain reduction with accurate control over attack and release times. However, VCA compression can lack character compared to using a tube-based Variable Mu design such as the legendary Fairchild 670. Variable Mu compression is input dependent – the hotter the input, the higher the ratio and amount of gain reduction applied. This can give Variable Mu compression a more musical sound as it reacts to each piece of input material differently – great for buss compression work if used gently.…

Wild Beasts Initially an Indie Rock band, Wild Beasts steadily shifted towards synths, samplers and software. Having fully embraced technology now, Ben Little explains to Danny Turner how it all became an irreversible addiction © Joseph Branston Hailing from the rural hills of Kendal, Cumbria, Wild Beasts’ debut album Limbo, Panto (2006) made an immediate critical impact, with much of the attention focused on lead singer Hayden Thorpe’s astonishing falsetto vocal. While under the guidance of Domino, the band gained access to their inspiring stockroom of artists. The syncopated electronic tones of Kieran Hebden’s Four Tet provided a particularly persuasive argument for moving beyond the confines of a traditional four-piece Rock band. After much experimentation, Wild Beasts’ transgression from Rock to Dreampop to Electro Pop has been seamless. New album,…

Getting Prepared To Sample We prepare ourselves with a range of audio sources, FX and modulation ready to sample INCLUDES VIDEO First things first, you’ll need an audio source (to sample) and clock signal so you can sync the sampling with your other gear. You can use a square wave LFO for a clock if you don’t have a specific clock source to hand. We recommend trying both audio and CV in the audio input as we’ve successfully managed to sample and slice CV signals. We’re familiar with sliced up audio in electronic music but CV slicing isn’t so common. Plug in an LFO and hit sample to record and jam away on your favourite LFO. If the LFO is clocked in time with the clock source for the Sampleslicer…

A Musical Approach To Transitions Almost irrespective of the musical styles you produce, there’s a high likelihood that repetition plays a crucial role in your tracks. Whether this is the inclusion of individually repeating figures like drum loops, or entire sections which play over and over again, the human ear has always drawn strength from identifiable patterns; and there are few clearer ways to make a pattern identifiable than by repeating it. However, set against the power of repetition come the twin problems of over-familiarity (repetition can become boring) and the seemingly innate desire we have for musical development. We like music to take us on a journey and the most memorable journeys that we take in life often include the most unexpected detours. So we are trying to balance…

Marshall Jefferson As a DJ/producer in Chicago in the mid-’80s, Marshall Jefferson was one of the founding fathers of House. Now living in Manchester and running a new label, Si Truss discovers Jefferson is anything but stuck in the past… © Marie Staggat Marshall Jefferson sits amongst a select group of producers, numbering in the single digits, who can truly lay claim to being founding fathers of Dance music as we know it. Starting his career as a DJ in Chicago in the early-’80s, Jefferson quickly graduated to producing and releasing records of his own, as well as taking on an active role behind the scenes of the influential label Trax. He would go on to have a hand in several of House music’s seminal tracks: his release Move Your…

Roland Juno-DS88 £779 The latest 88-note Juno model offers a lot for a pretty modest outlay. How does it fair? Dan ‘JD73’ Goldman investigates… The modern Juno range has always been about offering a strong set of features and solid sounds for a reasonable price and the 61 and 88-note DS models are the latest models built with this ethos in mind. Weighing in at 35lbs, the Juno-DS88 is pretty lightweight as far as weighted boards go (the Nord Stage 2 EX 88 which is currently one of the lighter 88-note boards is 5lbs heavier) so for players who demand a quality weighted action but don’t want their backs to break when transporting, the Juno-DS88 is immediately a serious contender! The 88-note ‘Ivory G’ keyboard is superb – it’s almost…

THE ALTERNATIVES Dave Smith Instruments Mopho £300 Less flexibility in oscillator or filter terms and only a few controls, but can be edited via software for a fuller synth experience. A four-voice version is also available. www.davesmith instruments.com Studio Electronics Boomstar From Range £699 The Boomstars come in a range of filter ‘flavours’. Direct control only and no effects but great sound. www.studio electronics.com Arturia MatrixBrute £1,539 A physical monster, and double the price of the Xenophone, but perhaps the final word in modern monosynth flexibility. www.arturia.com…

Busses for quick mixing? Can you tell me more about how to use the busses in Logic X for speeding up mixing? Ask any mix engineer and they’ll tell you they get sent lots of DAW mixes that have busses set up pretty haphazardly. There is often confusion as to how to use them. We use busses as a fundamental part of our mixing process from the get-go, so we can make broad EQ or dynamic changes across whole sets of instruments (such as drums, keys, vox, mix etc) and often trying this first results in much less need for individual EQing later and unnecessary ‘fiddling around'! Here are a few possibilities to try out for speeding up your mix process… First off, let’s deal with multiple tracks from a…