Innehållsförteckning för October 2016 från Future Music

Track by track with Markus Schulz “When you look back at it we were so wet behind the ears. Look at the songwriting today, it doesn’t really work – ‘Without you near/How can you sit there watching someone else’. That track was almost like two songs. I was struggling with it personally because the lyrics didn’t make any sense, but it just sounded so cool. Who knew it would turn out to be one of the great classics? People would hold up signs with ‘Without You Near’ written on them. And after I played it, they’d hold them up again [laughs].” Clear Blue “This track started after I met this guy online called Elevation. He was 16 at the time and said he played organ in his parents’ church. He…

ALBUM OF THE MONTH Telephones Vibe Telemetry Running Back Norwegian Disco don Telephones’ debut album is a record brimming with colour, warmth and life. Released on Gerd Janson’s acclaimed Running Back imprint, Vibe Telemetry finds the Bergen producer, who has previously released standout Disco-flecked EPs for Sex Tags UFO, Full Pupp, Running Back and Love on the Rocks, in a jubilant mood. From the drifting ambience of its opener to the oddball synth and shimmering Disco that unfurls after it, it is an eclectic and far-flung concoction of sounds and styles that have influenced Telephones’ entire life. It feels like Telephones’ love letter to his home nation’s music scene, especially the glittering Disco movement of the early 2000s. Expertly crafting a heady mix of New York Disco, Italo House, groovy…

RECOMMENDED Warpaint Heads Up Rough Trade Following a 12-month period of pursuing solo endeavours, LA Indie rockers Warpaint have regrouped for their third studio album. Following on from 2014’s highly acclaimed self-titled album, the four-piece find their most mature and free sound yet on Heads Up. More laidback and expansive than their previous efforts, the new record has a dreamier, more Poppy and dancier aesthetic than we have seen from them before. There is still a dark, romantic undercurrent to the record but it comes with more bright and sanguine moments than you would expect. The album was made in downtown LA, in a new way for the band, working either in pairs or solo and never as a full band. This approach seems to have affected the writing process…

The Souped-Up Simpler Get to know Live’s workhorse sampler and its trio of sampling modes The star attraction of Live’s much-discussed 9.5 update was the revamped Simpler, redesigned to deeply integrate with Ableton’s Push 2 controller. Before the update, warping could only be applied directly within audio clips, but it’s now a key feature inside Simpler too – activate Warp and a clip’s timing information is retained, meaning your stretched clips will play back in time with your project. Cosmetically, it’s been given a visual spruce-up, with its layout streamlining the Live/Push experience significantly. You can even pop out its main waveform display into the main Device View via a right-click menu option. As well as a facelift, warping integration and the addition of several analogue-modelled filter types, the updated…

MASCHINE SAMPLING DOs & DON’TS DO… experiment with samples and effects chains. Maschine makes it easy to add several plug-ins after a sampler. Try adding in delays, phasers, distortion and other creative effects after a drum hit or one-shot. Now go back to your original sample and tweak the controls. What happens now if you pitch it up an octave, move the start point or loop your hit? It’s great seeing the unpredictable results these changes can have on a creative effects chain. DON’T… overlook Maschine’s Macros. Assigning multiple sampler parameters to a single rotary can be a great way to add a touch of sonic weirdness. For instance, add a chunk of audio into a sampler and see what happens when you tweak various combinations of pitch, start points,…

Sidechain Sorcery INCLUDES VIDEO AND AUDIO VAULT.FUTUREMUSIC.CO.UK Audio equipment such as gates and compressors will typically feature two signal paths: one being the signal that’s being processed, and the other being the signal that actually controls the behaviour. The control signal is usually generated by monitoring the device’s input level and is known as a sidechain – however, a lot of processors also offer the option of feeding in an external signal to control the processor’s behaviour. Now, this isn’t a new technique by any means but when someone mentions the term sidechaining, most producers will immediately think of the tired ‘ducking’ effect that’s been a staple of House production since before Daft Punk bought their first Alesis 3630. With pretty much every modern DAW having added sidechain…

QUICK TIPS 1 It’s easy to make an interesting gated synth or pad by using a percussive part of your track to trigger a sidechain enabled gate plug-in – with most synths’ in-built gate offerings sounding rigid, use a swung hi-hat or snare loop as a trigger to fit the gate effect with your track’s groove. 2 If you’re using your kick drum to trigger a sidechain compressor for a ducking effect, why not instead create a separate trigger track using audio? This allows you to alter the ducking effect without having to use automation or change the volume of the kick. 3 To get vocal narration and background music to sit together, use the vocal track to trigger a sidechain compressor on the backing track. Using a medium attack…

Maschine Jam vs Toraiz SP-16: in the studio and on stage They might be very different products at different price points, but both NI’s Maschine Jam and Pioneer’s Toraiz SP-16 are both pitched as hardware devices that will bridge the gap between studio workflow and live performance. Work out which will suit your workflow with our comparison guide… Pioneer Toraiz SP-16 On stage THE GOOD: Fast and fun workflow – plug in a memory stick of samples and away you go. Pro DJ Link allows seamless integration with industry standard DJ gear. Looks great on stage. No laptops! THE NOT-SO-GOOD: Built-in effects are a little limited. Touchstrip isn’t very effective at the moment. At the time of writing, it doesn’t MIDI sequence (this is hopefully coming in a future update!).…

INCLUDES AUDIO Dreadbox Hades Bass Synthesizer £219 Dreadbox’s new bass synthesizer, Hades, offers serious low-end punch. Si Truss goes underground... When a synthesizer is named after the Greek god of the underworld and features a big, prominently positioned knob labelled Drive, it doesn’t take a genius to work out the sort of sonic territory it’s aiming for. It comes as little surprise then, to find that Hades – a semi-modular, analogue bass synth from Athens-based outfit Dreadbox – is an instrument that values grit and weight over subtlety or nuance. At its heart, the Hades is a fairly straightforward analogue instrument. It features a single oscillator, switchable between square and saw wave shapes, with a glide control and a pulsewidth control for the square wave. There’s a big oscillator tune…

Hercules DJ Control Instinct P8 £100 Alex Blanco flexes his reviewing muscles on a second Herculean task in three months as he takes on the Instinct P8 As long as tiny jog wheels have featured I have claimed they’re a waste of space A few months back I looked at the Hercules P32 Advanced DJ Controller in combination with the DJUCED 40° software. This time it’s the same software with the much simpler DJ Control Instinct P8, a software/ hardware entry-level hybrid DJing package priced around £100. For a more detailed software rundown, check my review of P32 (FM306), but to sum up, DJUCED 40° is a simple and effective four-channel affair with optional tempo-syncing, a handy 2x 16-slot loop-playing function (with a decent Loopmasters library) and some nice DJ-centric…

My beats sound too robotic! I’m not great at playing in beats – how can I quantise yet retain a human feel? The quantise note value you use combined with the strength parameter (found in most DAWs and on many hardware machines) are key to simultaneous tightness and groove/ soul. Using 1/64, 1/32 or 1/48 quantise at around 50-75% retains some tightness, while allowing for a little looseness too. Further, you can play in a beat, quantise, then render to audio, cut out the parts and then nudge them about for different feels. Or if you use Logic, try the Humanizer on MIDI parts, or the audio delay. Here are some ideas… > Find a great feeling piece of audio. Then in Logic (most DAWs will do this) select this…

Pangaea In Drum Play Hessle Audio Having first appeared with uncompromising, experimental Techno back in 2007, Hessle Audio co-founder Kevin McAuley aka Pangaea now finally unveils his debut full-length album. In Drum Play finds Pangaea continuing to develop his distinctive, underground sound. Stripped-back Techno structures provide the backbone to the album, but it is Pangaea’s offbeat experimentation that provides the colour and atmosphere. Moving effortlessly between intense chunky Techno, melodic beats, simmering grooves, atmospheric pulses and upfront drive, Pangaea expertly weaves a myriad of moods, tones and textures with aplomb. The whole record retains a Ravey intensity without having to pummel into submission. Instead, the rhythms are considered and gather potency from Pangaea’s deft arrangements. The record’s power bubbles away beneath throughout, with the UK producer’s loopy experimentations skittering across…

The art of MODERN SAMPLING Modern sampling tools are more powerful than ever. With so much power, there are almost limitless ways you can manipulate sound. Let’s look at some tricks… Sampling is nothing new; musicians have been splicing and manipulating audio for well over 50 years now. It was with the rise of affordable samplers in the ’80s and ’90s, however, that sampling moved from being an experimental technique to a staple element of Dance music, Pop and Hip-Hop. Samplers have come on a long way since then, however. Whereas early sample-based genres were defined by the limitations of the hardware – from short sampling memories to low recording quality – modern sampling tools offer near endless flexibility. From instruments created from vast sample libraries…

Resampling Hardware Synths With Simpler And Sampler Live can be thought of as one giant sample-manipulating tool. Here’s one way to combine sampled outboard synthesizers with creative in-the-box techniques After building a basic 120bpm beat-and-bass groove, we use a monophonic hardware synth to create an inspiring arpeggiated lead line. The synth is being triggered using Live’s External Instrument – to sample four bars of this riff, we right-click on the lower half of our MIDI clip and select Freeze; right-click again and select Flatten to render the frozen signal to an audio file. Drag the newly-created audio clip into the bottom window of a new MIDI track to load it into an instance of Simpler. As our track is in G, we’ll create a new MIDI clip and draw in…

Creating Drum Variations With Loops Importing the same sample multiple times, before creating variations to each iteration can really spice up your drum programming… The only problem with one-shot samples is that, even with velocity enabled, the ways in which you can bring individuality and variation to the hits in a pattern are extremely limited. So, it’s worth thinking of ways to bring unpredictability to your drum hits whenever possible. One way is to use multiple instances of the same drum hit, with each sample mapped to its own unique key in the EXS24. Then, by enabling the loop function on each variant of the core sample, you can give each hit its own ‘loop’, either by creating a short buzz (with a short loop), or more of a rattle…

Sample-Tracking Synthesis With Form We get you started with Form, Native Instruments’ latest synth… The latest virtual instrument to emerge from the Native Instruments camp (as part of the new Komplete 11 bundle), Form is a Reaktor-based synth that wholeheartedly encourages you to load in your own samples as oscillators and “twist and turn them into completely different sounds” as it tracks their pitch. Form’s main window houses an inviting ‘drag & drop sample’ dialogue box. Do just that, and Form analyses the file for resynthesis. In addition to pitch-tracking, additive synthesis capabilities and effects, you can layer up to 12 different variations and switch between them via its Perform section. Over the next three steps, we’ll give you a quick taste of Form’s basic features, using a female vocal…

Sampling With Padshop Pro Steinberg’s Padshop is an excellent and somewhat unpredictable synth. Pay £7 to go Pro and you get custom sample import In some respects, the closest you currently get in Cubase to having a simple single-sample instrument is Padshop Pro. It certainly wasn’t designed to just do this, but drag any audio from the Project window into Padshop and it is almost immediately playable across the full keyboard range. The window at the top of the interface displays the sample in full, with sliders to trim the start and end points. There are also conventional filter and amp envelopes, an elaborate modulation section and the possibility to layer two complete sound engines. But let’s not forget Padshop’s raison d’être – granular synthesis. This takes raw audio and…

NZCA Lines Two Hearts Memphis Industries © Joe Branston “The concept of the record is that it’s a far future Earth and the sun is expanding and about to consume us, and as such it’s very warm. Consequently it’s actually quite nice, and people are partying a bit, but in a slightly desperate way.” INCLUDES VIDEO VAULT.FUTUREMUSIC.CO.UK Following up their quirky eponymous debut with Infinite Summer, a sci-fi concept album about a pre-apocalyptic Earth, NZCA Lines aren’t exactly playing it safe in 2016’s increasingly homogenous Pop scene. Thankfully their iconoclastic approach appears to be paying off with plaudits from BBC Radio 6 Music, The Guardian, Drowned In Sound and other similarly beard-stroking media outlets. NZCA Lines comprises Ash guitarist Charlotte Hatherley, Hot Chip drummer Sarah Jones, and Michael…

Sidechaining: Behind The Scenes Both external and internal sidechain routing is something that’s been used for many years. Even if you’ve not used it directly in your music making endeavours, you’ll still probably have come across it, both in the studio and in daily life. A simple example is your smartphone. Next time you receive a text while playing music from your handset, you’ll probably notice that the music dips in level when the text alert sounds. This is managed by a sidechain compression algorithm built into the phone’s audio system. Sidechain routing is also frequently used in broadcast audio, for example using sidechain compression to automatically reduce the level of background music or noise during spoken dialogue, increasing the clarity of the dialogue without completely muting the background or…

Creative sidechain compression of send effects Sidechain compression can be a very creative tool – here we apply it to some vocal FX processing sends 01 > We can add huge reverb and delay to a vocal take without it swamping the whole mix by using some clever routing and sidechain compression. First up, we’ll set our DAW’s bpm to 124 before adding a basic ping pong delay on an FX send. 02 > Next, we’ll set a delay with a wet/dry mix at 100% before creating a -2dB send from our vocal track to the delay. After this, we’ll add any reverb to a second FX send, again with the wet/dry mix set to 100%. 03 > We’re after a huge effects sound for this walkthrough, so we set…

Machinedrum How does playing in a marching band and banging a djembe lead to making polyrhythmic Jungle on a DOS-based MIDI sequencer? On the eve of a new album release, Danny Turner coaxes Travis Stewart into an explanation © Ye Rin Mok Despite his acoustic background playing guitar and djembe in an African ensemble, it was a hand-me-down PC and a copy of Cakewalk that really fired Travis Stewart’s imagination. By the tender age of 19, Machinedrum was born, prior to Stewart’s first release on Merck Records under the pseudonym Syndrone. In the ten year period from 2001-2010, Stewart released eight albums and 20 remixes, plus collaborations with controversial singer/songwriter Azealia Banks and Techno producer Jimmy Edgar as Jets. Originally a Hip-Hop/Jungle crossover, Stewart has successfully evolved Machinedrum’s sound into…

Burnski After spending a decade refining his craft and reconceptualising Dance music, Burnski’s career is now ready for take-off. Danny Turner talks tech with the DJ/producer on the eve of his debut album release, DNA © George Fairbairn The most talented producers tend to have a solid recognition of their generic heritage. For James Burnham (aka Burnski), Detroit Techno and Chicago House form the bedrock of his debut album DNA, where classic traits are welded to create minimalist, yet deeply addictive, Dance mechanisms. Despite his youthful appearance, Burnski is a decade into his career. He’s put in the hard graft and built solid momentum with a slew of releases on assured labels, including his own imprint, Constant Sound. As a DJ, he also melds past and future, bringing things back…

Pioneer DJ Toraiz SP-16 £1,279 Pioneer take a bold step into the production world. Si Truss asks if this is the standalone sampler we’ve been waiting for… For some time now, there’s been a bit of a gap in the market for a decent, fully-fledged standalone sampler. With 16-channels, each capable of sampling up to 30 seconds, plus a step-sequencer, performance pads, touchscreen control and an analogue filter courtesy of Dave Smith, it looks tentatively like Pioneer’s Toraiz SP-16 could be the standalone machine that old-school MPC fans have been dreaming of for the past few years. The first thing you notice upon unboxing the SP-16 is that it looks like a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of other production gear – which is because that’s sort of what it…

Antelope Audio Zen Tour €1,570 If you are looking for a high-quality portable interface with built-in DSP this could be it. Stuart Bruce investigates It stands up very well against the other interfaces in my studio but its incredible flexibility is the real winner Antelope don’t tend to scrimp on quality for their products and the Zen Tour is no exception. It is very compact for its functionality and feels solid. It has a small but accessible touchscreen which allows you access to all the basic functions of the unit with the most used functions, like input gains, headphone levels and talkback, directly accessible using buttons on the front panel and the large ‘soft’ knob. At the front are two headphone outs, two re-amping outs and four line/Hi Z inputs,…

DRIVE & FILTER Bass synths tend to live and die on the quality of their filter, and fortunately the Hades comes up trumps here. The filter is a 3-pole (-18dB/oct) low-pass design with cutoff and resonance controls. It’s capable of creating restrained, brooding subs and snarling, resonant squeals. It’s well complemented by the Drive circuit too. Both the Drive and VCA are built around OTA (operational transconductance amplifier) designs, and cranking both results in some lovely mid-range rasp that’s great for adding presence and character to bass sounds.…

SOUNDS & SAMPLES Heavyocity Gravity Scoring Guitars $99 For most Kontakt users, Heavyocity will need little introduction. Besides their own sound libraries, they also create custom content for Native Instruments themselves. The focus in these, and many other Heavyocity libraries, leans toward film and TV music – not least the recent Gravity instrument. Subtitled Modern Scoring Tools, at over £300 it is certainly not a casual purchase. Recently though, Heavyocity have offered Gravity Pack spin-off products that use the excellent Gravity front-end interface to deliver additional specialist content. An important thing to note is that these do not require the full version of Gravity (or Kontakt), so are really separate libraries. Scoring Guitars, though based around excellent underlying guitar recordings, provides a wide palette of flavours by utilising processing that…

Rockschool PART 1: LISTENING WITH PURPOSE Rockschool course tutors Hannah V and Sam Vasanth take us through the nine levels of their graded Production Syllabus in our new series With this nine-part series we are going to look at various essential production tools and techniques using Rockschool’s brand new graded Production Syllabus. Production has had a massive shift in the last ten years – the introduction of new software, advanced DAWs and the sheer affordability of equipment nowadays has spawned a new generation of talented producers. The competition out there is tough, but we are firm believers that the right attitude and skill set can set you apart. In our opinion, the best producers have a healthy combination of instinct and technical abilities. They know what they are doing, they…

Jam out the Kicks Korg unleash an MS-20-driven kick drum synth, ARP module and a revamped microKorg HIGHLIGHTS… Korg have unveiled their, now traditional, annual autumnal onslaught of new products, including a new addition to the Volca range, a revamp for the much-loved microKorg and a desktop-friendly version of last year’s ARP Odyssey reissue. Certainly the most eye-catching of these announcements is the new Volca Kick – a compact, battery-powered kick drum synth based on circuitry from the MS-20. Rather than use a standard oscillator as its sound source, the Kick is based around a version one MS-20 filter with the resonance pushed up into self-oscillation. This then utilises ‘MS-20 Resonator’ controls – Pitch, Bend and Time – to shape the kick tone, along with Pulse Colour and Level, and…

Markus Schulz Without You Near Armada, 2005 Words by Roy Spencer Markus Schulz’s debut album is rightly regarded as a Trance classic, yet it almost transcended Trance when it first dropped. In a genre defined by shiny happy instrumental anthems, Without You Near was kind of an anomaly. “Back then there was nothing but uplifting Trance going on,” says Schulz. “What really set this album apart was that it was darker and more personal, and there was nothing else out like that back then.” As a producer, and a person, Schulz has never really been drawn towards the light. A ‘hard childhood’ saw him seek solace in the melancholy of Psychedelic Rock bands like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and that deeper, troubled texture shines through in his music. “When…

LIKE IT? TRY THESE… Markus Schulz Watch The World Schulz’s brand new album is his deepest yet, going acoustic and reflecting on subjects close to his, and the Trance community’s, heart. ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: Destiny, Let It Rain, You And I BT Movement In Still Life The way BT segued the tracks on his albums was a big inspiration to Schulz. Dig out this 1999 classic to get a sense of the movement. ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: Movement In Still Life, Ride, Madskillz-Mic Chekka Gabriel & Dresden Gabriel & Dresden Eponymous debut from Schulz’s good buddies and collaborators. It dropped just after Without You Near and makes for the perfect companion piece. ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: Dust in the Wind, Tracking Treasure…

Grant Cranks Mörk Enigmatic US producer Grant drops his second album, a free-rolling and highly atmospheric Deep House record for Lobster Theremin sub label, Mörk. Cranks is the follow-up to last year’s debut LP, The Acrobat, and finds the West Coast producer exploring a more immersive sound than before. Built around lush grooves, deep, surging bass and emotive pads, there is a timeless, classic sheen to the entire record. Blending together elements of West Coast House, dusty beatmaking, Detroit Techno, Jazz and ’90s Rave, Cranks has an eclectic vibe while maintaining a focus on supple grooves. Filtered breaks and snapping drums inject a restless quality throughout, but it is the long, laidback grooves and deep, grumbling bass that provide the backbone to Cranks. The elongated pads and fluttering melodics add…

Inspiring Sampling Tricks With Push 2 Mix up modern MPC-style techniques to jam out inspiring rhythmic chops and cuts on the fly Let’s use the hardware-software combo of Push 2 and Live to generate inspiring rhythmic vocal chops. Load a spoken vocal in a new Simpler instance on the first pad of a Drum Rack. Assigning this Simpler’s Transpose parameter to the Drum Rack’s first Macro will give us global hands-on control over pitch. We apply EQ, compression, sidechaining and delay to give our sound vibe and character against our drums. Hold Duplicate, tap the first pad, then tap the adjacent pad to copy that Simpler instance to the next pad within the Drum Rack. On this second pad, we’ll use Push 2’s top encoders to alter the sample’s Start…

EXS24 Workflow Integration Here’s how effortlessly the EXS24 can bring variation to a drum loop within the context of a developing Logic production We start with a track in progress which is using a two-bar beat loop added from the Apple Loop library. It doesn’t feel like ‘our own’, so we Ctrl-Click and select the option to convert it to a new Sampler Instrument. We choose the Transient Marker option to slice the loop into individual pieces, then set about reprogramming the pattern to place hits where we want them. We also copy one of the snare sounds and assign it to a new key. We unclick one-shot mode on this duplicated snare and select the Reverse option so that it will play backwards for the duration of our choice.…

Going Old-Skool With Maschine & Maschine Jam NI’s Maschine platform is great for replicating the sound of chopped-up breakbeats. Jam’s sequencer now makes it even easier The sound of ‘old-skool’ Dance genres like ’90s Hardcore and Jungle was largely defined by the limitations of the gear used to make them. Samplers offered a cheap way to capture sounds, but they largely had short memories and low recording quality. It’s these factors that influenced the short, choppy and pitched breakbeat sound we know today. Short bursts of drum beats were captured at a low bit rate, and then played back at differing pitches to fit the speed and groove of a track. Native Instruments’ Maschine allows us to recreate this workflow very easily, thanks to its emulation settings and MPC-like design…

Resampled Percussion With The Pioneer Toraiz SP-16 Sampling and playing back part of an existing beat is a great way to make creative percussion that fits well with your project. This can be done with simple routing in software, but the SP-16 lets us do it with hardware We start with a completely empty project. Let’s load up a trio of fairly standard percussive sounds – taken from the Loopmasters factory packs supplied on its hard drive – across the first three pads. Turning on the metronome for reference, we program a straightforward single bar beat loop, which can either be done via the sequencer or recorded with the pads. Let’s resample our little loop. In a new sample channel we open the Sampling/Edit window. We set the Input to…

Using Samples With Groove Agent SE Besides being a useful drum machine with a ton of presets, Groove Agent SE can manipulate full drum loops in some interesting ways Import a drum loop. If it’s not at the project tempo, use one of the élastique algorithms to stretch it. The élastique Pro Tape algorithm has the least audible artifacts, and is closest to sampling off vinyl. If the tempo is stored with the file, it will stretch automatically. Otherwise, enter the correct tempo in Pool window or use the Sizing Applies Time Stretch pointer. Double-click the audio to enter the Sample Editor. Head to the Hitpoints tab and use the Threshold slider to adjust which beats are detected. Sometimes dropping the Threshold drastically but increasing the Minimum Length (between samples)…

Make Your Kick Fit Without Ducking While many producers use sidechain triggered compression to create extra breathing room for their kick drum, there is a more transparent route… With modern electronic music typically boasting a full, dense sound, it’s always good to make the main elements of a track stand out – and the kick drum is no exception. Many producers will use the kick as a sidechain trigger to temporarily reduce (duck) the volume of synths, bass or effects, creating extra headroom for the kick to stand out. However, if you’re after the extra separation that ducking brings without the clichéd sound, using a sidechain enabled dynamic EQ can give more transparent results. This analyses the frequency content of the trigger signal before removing those frequencies from the effected…

Into an expanding world of FX Join us for the second part of our special on the Tiptop Audio Z-DSP Last month we kicked off a two-part special looking at the awesome Z-DSP from Tiptop Audio. To quickly overview, it’s a stereo FX module that works with cartridges which hold different FX algorithms. You get stereo input, level control, analogue feedback paths, dry/wet blend and CV over nearly every parameter. This issue we’re going to look at the new Clocked Delay, Grain De Folie and Halls of Valhalla cartridges. The guys at Tiptop have brought some wizardry to the platform with a clock input (timing clock, not to be confused with the sampling clock onboard which controls sample rate). Using a clock signal that has a gate length of 25-50%…

Native Instruments Maschine Jam £319 NI unveil a completely new take on their Maschine concept. Si Truss goes in on a Jam session… NI’s latest Maschine controller isn’t Maschine 3.0 – in fact, it’s not an evolution of the original hardware, even though it’s still part of the Maschine ecosystem. Maschine Jam provides a completely new way of interfacing with the Maschine software, which remains largely unchanged; one that neither supersedes nor replaces the original hardware, yet provides a very different user experience. For the uninitiated, NI’s Maschine ‘groove production’ platform provides unlimited groups of up to 16 sounds or instruments, along with pattern sequencing, song arrangement, mixing, effects chains, plug-in hosting, automation and more. The software element runs either as a standalone application or plug-in, and is designed to…

IN & OUT The SP-16 is well connected. It features eight analogue output channels, along with a stereo input that can be sampled or routed through to the mixer. There’s MIDI I/O – currently only for sync, but expanded MIDI sequencing is promised in the future. A USB connection allows computer sync, with further interface options promised in future updates too. A second USB port, meanwhile, allows for extra memory for samples and projects. Finally, Pioneer’s Pro DJ Link allows for a LAN hook-up to CDJs or DJ mixer, so the SP-16 can be tightly integrated into DJ sets.…

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…