Innehållsförteckning för June 2023 från Future Music

We often dedicate a lot of FM to discussing the specifics of sound design, production and mixing, all of which are complex and varied disciplines worth studying and exploring, but none are of any use without an actual song to work with. To quote one of this month’s featured artists, Lewis Thompson, “the production should support the song”. While Thompson is often working with pop vocalists, the principle is true even for the most experimental, minimal or ambient tracks – unless you’ve a core song worth developing, no amount of mixing or mastering skill can paper over a lack of ideas. This issue we’re tackling the principles of songwriting from an electronic musician’s perspective, with tips and techniques along with deep dives into the theory behind a few classic tracks.…

>Sequential is doubling up the power of the Take 5 synth with version 2.0… but not quite how we imagined it. The diminutive but powerful Take 5 uses a similar set of core music-making ingredients to Sequential’s grandaddy of analogue synths, the Prophet-5: hence the ‘5’ in both names. However, when we reviewed it back in April last year, we loved the fact that, actually, it’s doing something new in comparison to the Prophet and taking the sonics into fresher territories. However, we did also suspect that an update would be on the way, because Prophet-5 can be updated (by hardware) to a Prophet-10, which doubles its polyphony to 10 notes. And it looks like we’ve just been proven right in some of our predictions, as well as completely wrong…

>Sound Particles is making quite a few claims regarding its SkyDust 3D synth, and with the backing of Jean-Michel Jarre, the Portuguese developer certainly has a heavyweight endorsee. SkyDust 3D is a “history making” virtual instrument, according to Sound Particles, but while it does boast some impressive-sounding features, we’re not yet totally convinced that it really does represent the “first time spatial audio can be used by musicians as a creative tool”. There is room for excitement here, though. SkyDust can not only play its sounds within spatial audio, but you can also use MIDI, LFOs, envelopes and other modulation to control that sound’s position over time. That means you can change the elevation and 3D position of notes as you would modulate a filter, or send arpeggiations off into…

Intro Tony: “It opens with the sound of a band, tuning up and getting ready to play. It’s from a record because you can hear us pitching it up and down on the turntable. That’s us paying homage to turntablism being an important aspect of our creative process. Then there are some strings, and a rap record, that are looped up in the background.” Charlie: “At that point in time people were listening to albums from beginning to end. So you almost wanted something that kind of set the mood. Like, you’re in our world now – settle yourselves in, and let’s go.” Blueprint Charlie: “The main sample came after a frustrating session. We started lots of frustrating sessions, and then, out of the blue, Tony would find something. Or…

ALBUM Anything new from Chris Clark is a must-listen: over ten albums and two decades, he’s made a name for himself as one of the most gifted artists in modern electronic music. No surprises, then, that Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke is a fan. Yorke acted as ‘executive producer’ for Clark’s latest album, and though he sings on Medicine, it’s actually Clark’s vocals that are the draw here. Drummer, programmer and synth wizard, Clark’s not known for singing on his own material, and Sus Dog is his first album to centre on his own voice. It’s a bold move, but one he pulls off magnificently, and his wavering, reedy croon forms such an apposite foil to his crunchy, fractured beats and uneasy synth lines, you wonder why he didn’t do this…

As an electronic musician, it’s important to be able to create and finesse the sounds of your productions. The ability to craft unique synth patches, shape and sequence distinctive beats and layer, mix and balance track elements are all essential strings to add to your bow. But these abilities amount to very little if they’re not deployed in service to a good song. Whatever genre you’re working in, the success of your track lives and dies on the quality of the core idea. Working with beats and being a genius sound designer is great, but creating a great track also requires knowledge of how these elements fit together; understanding how notes interlock, beats and basslines groove and how a central melody can truly engage the listener. At their simplest level,…

In the first step of the following walkthrough, we’ve explored the scale of C minor and drawn up all of the associated harmonic chords with each of its root notes. If you use any of the bass notes and write a melody which uses any of that note’s associated harmonic accompaniment, you’ll write a melody which makes ‘perfect musical sense’. But it may not be the world’s most interesting tune. By the third clip, we’ve boldly made the fourth chord not an F minor (as per Step 1) but an F major instead, shifting the accompanying note to A. > In C minor, here is the scale (the bottom note) and the associated ‘third’ note of ea> chord. If you write a harmony part using any of these bass notes…

While, in theory, a variety of notes can underpin any chord within your track, most of the time either the root note of your chord or another note directly related to that chord will sound most ‘comfortable’. In other words, if your track is in G minor, a bass note playing the note G will sound most ‘rooted’ under the chord, with either Bb or D having the potential to work well, too. However, this is where things get tricky, as sometimes other notes can be effective too, particularly if you’re looking to write a bassline which transitions from one chord to the next smoothly. Let’s suppose the second chord of your track is an Eb major chord. As the bass note drops from G to Eb to reflect that…

>A seminal early Chicago house classic track, the original version of The Whistle Song is a track found on Frankie Knuckles’ 1991 album Beyond the Mix. For clarity, we’re examining the EK 12” mix of this tune, which has different instrumentation to the album version, swapping out the original’s real flute for a synthetic version. In the key of C major, this iconic floor-filler takes the form of a simple, alternating two-chord pattern, switching between two bars each of CMaj7 and FMaj7. The CMaj7 is played in the 2nd inversion (G, B, C, E), while the FMaj7 is voiced in root position (F, A, C, E). Interestingly, when swapped around and played with the FMaj7 first, followed by the CMaj7, this alternating progression forms the basis of Gymnopedie No.1, a…

So far we’ve been discussing theory through the lens of acquiring knowledge. Now, we’re about to round up a few pieces of software that know it all already, and can help you to get it right. Some of these tools will be able to suggest chords to fit into a progression, or a melody that will go over the top of what you have already, while some are just facilitators for getting your notes in order, or doing something you already know more quickly. Some of the tools we’ll cover could be thought of as entire ‘cheat codes’ or ‘easy mode’ for writing music, but that’s not quite the right way to look at them. But this doesn’t mean that our new AI overlords have made a knowledge of music…

01 > “I started this song with one of my really basic ideas”, Lewis explains. “I was inspired by old Chicago and Detroit music where they just took a sampled chord and played it back at different pitches. I took a really basic loop into a writing session, and Clem started singing some melodies.” 02 > Next, Lewis records Clementine’s vocals over a loop in a new DAW project. “For me, it really helps to treat vocal production and your main track as two separate things. In pop and house music the vocal is really important, so I’ll give that its own project. Then I’ll bounce it and commit to it, then bring that into the main production project.” 03 > In the main project, Lewis imports the vocals and…

1 Recording with an external mic We asked Teenage Engineering’s experts how best to record samples on the OP-1 Field: “The built-in mic is super handy,” say TE. “Some people use the OP–Z as a mic with the OP–1 Field. The interface of choice might be the TX–6, which has been field tested a lot.” The TX-6 is a channel mixer with on-board effects such as EQ, filters, compressor and other sound tools. The built-in mic also gives options for a low res voice recording. This is good quality but takes in the room sounds and is beneath the surface of the instrument, so sounds are directed in through the body rather than directly to the mic itself. TE also created the OP-Z; a synth programming tool which can be…

> Ableton has released Live 11.3 into public beta. This is a free update for all users and a particularly generous one at that, seeing as it adds an entirely new instrument as well as giving several others a refresh. The core focus of 11.3 is on making use of MPE (MIDI polyphonic expression). MPE compatibility was added to Live with version 11, allowing users to create MIDI parts where each individual note has its own pitch bend and expression data, either using a compatible MPE controller or the revamped sequencing tools in Live’s MIDI clips. Although Ableton introduced MPE modes for a handful of core devices, for the most part MPE compatibility in Live has been most useful when working with third-party tools. Now Ableton has added a new…

EP Italian producer Piezo has been quietly building up quite the résumé over the past decade. Releasing across a series of imprints (Idle Hands, Orson, Swamp81 and Wisdom Teeth) known for mapping the DNA of the variously mutated strains of post-dubstep and bass music to emerge out of the early ’10s, Piezo has singled himself out as an inventive producer using his ample talent for sound design to reimagine club music in bizarre new shapes. His latest EP is a four-tracker for his own label, Ansia, that runs the rhythmic frameworks of garage, techno, gqom and footwork through a sonically unhinged filter. Though they’re all worth a spin, our pick of the bunch is Sensory Overdraw, a wigged-out UKG belter that pairs precisely dialled 2-step with the kind of vehement…

01 > We start with a simple melody, accompanied by a new bass note every bar. We’re in C minor and as the melody steps up through three bars, the bassline steps down. Both drop on the final chord. So the bass moves from C, through Bb and Ab to arrive on G for the last bar. There’s no tension in the melody because each phrase of the tune resolves ‘perfectly’ on each downbeat of the bar. So the tune hits a Dover the Bb (part of a Bb chord) and an Eb over the Ab and so on. 02 > Let’s extend the duration of each of the previous notes before each resolves, so that there’s an ‘overhang’ at the beginning of each new bar. We call this a…

>The root of this, believe it or not, goes back over 300 years in the form of a 1695 composition by the English baroque music composer Henry Purcell named Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary. In 1971, composer and Moog aficionado Wendy Carlos famously based her theme music for the notorious Stanley Kubrick movie A Clockwork Orange on this Purcell piece. This soundtrack then later provided the inspiration for Cygnus X’s The Orange Theme, which then itself became the inspiration for Clockwork. Quite a journey! It’s the mechanical, cyclic nature of the chord progression here that fascinates and delights, continually modulating (changing key) with the mathematical precision of a clockwork device. At the same time, the continuous shifting from minor to major tonality and back again brings us constant…

CONTACT roland.com KEY FEATURES 7 synth engines, over 4000 presets, 5-part i-Arpeggiator, Vocoder, Pitch Bend/Modulation Lever, 2 x Wheel, 2 x Assignable Slider, 3 x Assignable Switch, 128 x 64 dot Graphic LCD Display, Expandable via Roland Cloud DIMENSIONS: 1090 x 447 x 119mm WEIGHT: 16.9kg Since Roland’s Jupiter-4 synthesiser first brought the Jupiter moniker to our attention in 1978, it’s fair to say that it has since become a byword for synth excellence. The Jupiter-8 that followed in 1981 was a massive 8-voice, polyphonic analogue synthesiser with a unique sound that quickly established itself as the Rolls Royce of analogue polysynths. This is why functional examples of the Jupiter-8, and its more affordable, MIDI-equipped successor the Jupiter-6, are currently fetching astronomical amounts on the secondhand market.…

KEY FEATURES Roland digital piano with ZEN-Core sounds, interactive accompaniments, vocal effects, Bluetooth audio/MIDI support, onboard recording, computer connectivity, and expansion options via Roland Cloud Increasingly, manufacturers are blurring the boundaries between home keyboards, synths, digital pianos, stage pianos, arrangers and workstations, resulting in some interesting hybrids. Roland’s FP-E50 is a case in point. On first inspection, it looks like a home digital piano but then you spot the pitch and mod wheels on the left and start to wonder. There are more buttons and sliders than you’d expect on a living room keyboard, too. And that’s because, while the Roland FP-E50 can happily function as a home digital piano – it has a PHA-4 keybed (with Escapement and Ivory Feel, we might add), Roland’s SuperNATURAL Piano engine, built-in speakers…

HOW DOES IT WORK? The CV/Gate system has two parts: the control voltage itself and a separate gate (aka trigger) signal. Both trigger a note, but the CV element can be thought of as the part that determines the pitch, while the gate determines the note on/off timing. CV control needs two separate signals, often transmitted over two cables for flexibility. Given that it emerged in the years before standardisation of equipment control protocols, it’s unsurprising that there are multiple variations. Most notably, not all synths expect control voltages in the same range. Vintage Korg and Yamaha synths tend to use the Hz/V (Hertz per volt) system, where the frequency of the oscillator rises and falls in proportion to the voltage of the CV signal, while most other manufacturers…

PSYCHEDELIC PHASERS One way to make a section of your track pop is to treat it to retro phaser action. High feedback settings and low modulation speeds instantly create psychedelic textures, suiting any number of instruments but especially effective when applied to an entire drum group. Set the speed of the effect manually for a proper retro effect and use a high-pass filter to ensure a clean low end. EXTREME REVERB Used to extremes, giant washes of ambience and searing delay feedback almost become timbres of their own. Try splashing a short melodic sound in extended reverb, bouncing down the result, then loading the reverbed audio file into a sampler. The reverb signal can now be played back almost like a synth tone of its own. If the reverb…

>Bitwig has announced Studio 5, the latest version of the DAW that may become even more people’s first choice music production application than it already is. After admitting that it “might not look that impressive on first look” in its launch video, the Berlin-based software developer goes on to detail some of the biggest updates it has made to Bitwig Studio. Better still, the company has neatly packaged all of these updates into five main areas. Pure coincidence, we feel. There’s an all-new browser, modulators added to the mixer, Remote Controls on the track and project, new clip launcher features and, perhaps most importantly, additional MSEGs (Multi-Stage Envelope Generators). Like the best things in music tech, MSEGs (pronounced ‘m-seg’) are a little hard to understand, but actually easy if you…

>Bastl has had skin in the mini mixer game for a while, with its popular Dude hardware released in 2017. Now the company has reimagined that little box of delights and released Bestie, a revamped version that offers flexible stereo connectivity and has been built with portable USB setups in mind. But there’s more. Bestie has a dirty little secret: channel 3 is pre-routed as a feedback channel that can be used to add distortion. Used in this manner, levels before 12 o’clock add distortion and gain, and you can move into self-oscillation territory beyond this. Pushed to the max you’ll hear tremolo-like effects. There are five channels in all, and if you choose not to use the feedback feature, Bestie promises to be a clean mixer that offers up…

Why aren’t Attica Blues household names? Their faultless blend of sweet soul songwriting and street tough hip-hop aesthetics should have propelled them firmly into the mainstream – the UK’s answer to the Fugees’ success story. Up there on the ’90s trip-hop-era Mount Rushmore next to Massive Attack and Portishead. And they’d agree. “I thought this record was going to blow up and we’d become pop stars,” says poet and DJ, Charlie Williams, who, alongside super-producer Tony Nwachukwu and vocalist Roba El-Essawy, coined and minted a new sound in British Black music. The sound is as lushly orchestrated as any Bond theme, with a dusty record crate-sample-flipping ingenuity basically unrivalled on either side of The Pond. But, as the record dropped, tastes changed. Mo’ Wax, once a label brokering deals over,…

In 2018, Nabihah Iqbal ditched her Throwing Shade alias in order to release her debut album, Weighing of the Heart, under her given name. While not entirely removed from the groove-focused electronics of her earlier work, that album allowed Iqbal to explore less dancefloor-focused realms, incorporating her own vocals as well as a heavy dose of ’80s influence. Follow-up Dreamer has been a long time coming: Iqbal lost nearly a whole album’s worth of work in a studio burglary, followed by a forced stretch of downtime in Pakistan prompted by the pandemic. The final product is worth the wait. During her time in Pakistan, away from her usual studio tools, Iqbal acquired a traditional harmonium, and wrote many of the album’s basic ideas using just that and a guitar. As…

What do you want the tune of your next track to do? What do you want it to make the listener feel? Euphoric? Sad? A sense of indestructibility? Empathy? Do you want it to help those listening to fall in love? Or do you want it to be imbued with some other quality? As this subject is huge, we’ll begin the process of being a little more tactical with the notes we write, to help wrest a greater emotional arc in our melodies. Because ultimately, that’s what a melody is; a tune which encourages the listener to feel emotion, no matter which of the many emotions you want to tap into. The melodies we forget are those which leave us unmoved; the ones we remember can bear repeat listening because…

Download audio examples, images and MIDI files at: musicradar.com/how- to/future-music-396- downloads Discussions of music theory can – to state the obvious – all come across as a bit theoretical. It’s easy to discuss concepts such as scales, modes, chord voicings and the like in isolation, but that doesn’t always make it easy to put these ideas into practice. You may, for example, grasp the concepts behind turning a simple progression or melody into something more elaborate, but how much complexity is really necessary? Does the two-note bass riff you like so much have enough to sustain a listener over several minutes? Is your lead line too obvious? Or too noodly? The obvious answer to all of these questions is that you should trust your ears. If your track sounds good…

>A delicately beautiful amalgam of skittery modular beats and runaway synth arpeggios, at first listen Floating Points’ Last Bloom seems like a relatively structureless wander through an experimental soundscape without much actual theory involved. But if you know anything about Sam Shepherd, the driving force behind FP, you’ll realise that a lack of theory knowledge is anything but the case. What we have here, then, is one of those occasions where a lot of effort has been put into making a minimalist end product that on the surface appears abstract in nature, but when you dive deep, a very well-thought out structure does become apparent. Shepherd’s random tweaking of the envelopes and pattern programming of the modular synth providing the drum track only serves to reinforce the resulting feeling of…

American composer, engineer, inventor and genre creator Wendy Carlos is one of the most innovative figures in the world of synth and electronic music. After studying physics and music at Brown University, Rhode Island, she became a mastering engineer and eventually pursued a more compositional role in New York. She was becoming fascinated with timbre, and taking much of her science background and applying it to the art of sound. She met Bob Moog at an Audio Engineering Society event and ended up acting as an advisor for him as he was developing his modular systems, and ultimately helped bring his hardware synthesiser vision to the masses. “They had this collaboration,” Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory says on a videocast for The British Library. “Moog was one of the few synthesiser designers…

Soundiron – Voice of Rage 2.0 $119 >We get to test a very wide range of soundware at FM, with some perhaps having a little less broad appeal than others. However, it is also fair to say that it’s often those that at first sight appear useable in only in very niche contexts that end up being more inspiring and universally applicable than first impressions suggest. It’s with this in mind that I came to Soundiron’s Voices Of Rage 2.0. Its name and packaging clearly give away the intent of this Kontakt-based instrument library, but to be clear, this is not simply a bank of recordings of angry choristers! VOR is based around recordings from a range of vocalists that fit firmly in the death metal and hardcore universe. There…

DIGITAL POLYSYNTHS ASM Hydrasynth Deluxe £1,489 Review: FM383 The Deluxe is a great-sounding, flexible polysynth, ideal as a performance-led keyboard that can successfully reach a wide range tones and textures. Korg Wavestate £699 Review: FM353 Wavestate walks the line perfectly between paying tribute to a ’90s classic and offering cutting-edge tools. A fantastic update to a much-loved synth line. Roland Jupiter-X £2,432 Full Review: FM396 | A fabulous-sounding instrument that, despite being 100% digital, manages to capture the spirit and grandeur of its famous analogue namesake. Waldorf Quantum £3,500 Review: FM336 A stunning piece of hybrid synth design – setting a new benchmark for features, interface and sonics. It’s expensive, but a synth that you’ll find inspiring for many years. Arturia MiniFreak £539 Review: FM391 Although less of a trailblazer…