Innehållsförteckning för July 2023 från Future Music

Whether it’s better to work in- or out-of-the-box – ie with software plugins or physical hardware – has long been one of the great debates among electronic music makers. Predictably, despite what advocates of one approach or the other might say, the real answer is that whatever way of working suits you best is the one to go for. In 2023, however, the line between the two is increasingly blurring. Gear like this issue’s cover star – Ableton’s newly standalone-capable Push – as well as Apple’s brand new iOS version of Logic Pro, are taking the traditional DAW workflow away from the studio, offering new ways to be creative that don’t mean being bound to your laptop screen. It’s these approaches we’re exploring this month. Whether you want to be…

>Reason Studios has taken the wraps off Objekt, its new physical modelling synth. It’s available now to use inside Reason and in other DAWs via the Reason Rack plugin. Designed to emulate real-life acoustic sounds, Objekt promises to “open the hood on physical modelling” and present it like a synth. As well as helping you create bell, mallet, percussion and string sounds, you can also use it to produce natural textures, organic pads and more. Objekt gives you three resonating objects to work with. These form the basis of your sounds, and can replicate the likes of strings, skins and bells. The Exciter section dictates how the instrument is played, and there are plenty of parameters that can easily be tweaked to create entirely new tones. More than 500 presets…

>We’re guessing that, for PWM, the launch of its new Mantis ‘hybrid-analogue’ synth is somewhat bittersweet. On the one hand, it’s a product that the company is proud to have created, but the sad news is that Chris Huggett – the legendary synth designer who collaborated on the project – died before he could see it come to market. PWM’s Paul Whittington calls Mantis a “unique-sounding synth” and a “beautiful collaboration”, confirming that it’s being released with the blessing of Huggett’s family. “We are thrilled to bring you our new synth that we are sure will be loved as much as he was!” he says. Mantis is duophonic and features mathematically generated oscillators and an analogue signal path, both of which are based on Huggett’s designs. In fact, Mantis is…

>The headline says it all, really. Oberheim has unveiled a desktop version of its stunning OB-X8 synth and, aside from the omission of the keys and paddles, it’s pretty much the same as the keyboard version. With the all-analogue signal path in place, this means that the OB-X8 module should sound just as good as the standard synth. The Arpeggiator and Keyboard Split & Double functionality is here, too, ready to accept instruction from your favourite MIDI controller. Launched almost exactly a year ago, The OB-X8 takes the best bits of the OB-X, OB-Xa and OB-8 – manufactured between 1979 and 1985 – and packs them into a new eight-voice analogue synth. You get all the presets from those OB classics, plus the ability to combine their architectures to create…

>20 years ago, Korg’s microKorg helped to kickstart a trend for affordable, portable synths, and its built-in vocoder gave it an additional layer of hipster cool. To celebrate its 20th anniversary, a new semi-translucent version – microKorg Crystal – has been released, giving you the opportunity to see what’s going on inside. The redesigned chassis puts the microKorg Crystal’s electronics and internals on display, and the controllers (knobs, dials and wheels) are see-through, too. There’s also a stainless mirror-finish front panel that “blurs the limits between you and your instrument and provides a cosmetic impact never seen in any other musical instrument.” Yep, all that from a front panel. The wooden end cheeks have been given the heave-ho in favour of aluminium side panels, while the supplied transparent vinyl carry…

ALBUM Over a decade into his career, New York’s Anthony Naples has cemented his reputation as one of dance music’s most interesting artists. Whether producing rugged club tracks like 2001’s Pez Anthem or the more ambient tracks of his earlier LPs, Naples is adept at toying with the framework that underpins club music. The latest LP, orbs, finds him in a meditative mode again. The bulk of the album sees Naples pairing sparse electronic textures with loose bass and synth lines and crunchy, almost trip hop drums. Where it shines though, is in his ability to balance abstract soundscapes with solid melodies and progressions, as on lead single Silas, where a throbbing bass and broken-sounding drums lead to a delicate piano line, or the submerged after-hours sound of Strobe. Si…

‘DAW-IN-A-BOX’ 1The past decade has seen the advent of standalone hardware devices that offer near DAW levels of sound creation, sequencing and effects processing, albeit in a self-contained device that puts more emphasis on hands-on control. The obvious examples are Ableton Push, which offers a fully-equipped version of Live in standalone mode, NI’s Maschine+, a fully-featured version of the Maschine software plus some, but not all of Komplete’s synth and effect line-up, and Akai’s latest-gen MPCs, which combine extensive audio and MIDI sequencing along with an array of Air instruments and effects. These are as close as you’ll get to using a DAW without the need to rely on a mouse and keyboard. Into this category we could also include some of the better-equipped samplers and grooveboxes, such as Roland’s…

If you like Roland products, over the past few years you’ll have been spoilt for choice. You’ve got the original AIRA line, the Boutique range of the classic synth recreations like the Juno and Jupiter, and you’ve also got the powerhouse grooveboxes in the MC-101 and MC-707. So it was hard to see any holes in the range, but Roland had something else planned, and that was the new SH-4d. The SH-4d is a five-part desktop synth: four of those parts are melodic synth engines that use one of 11 oscillator modes, and the fifth part is a rhythm section that has plenty of its own sound-sculpting possibilities within. Each of these parts are coupled to a sequencer and an effect section, as well as a multi-effect that works on…

>The latest journey into jazzy hip-hop happenings from the SM camp, collecting 370 slick samples for all of the cool cats in Kangol hats. Boom-bap business meets be-bop hooks in this well attended meeting of musical minds. The result is a phat stack of punchy drum sounds and programming from the rap fanatic side of this the well crafted collection and all the smooth, deep grooves from the jazz head crew. Taking in Roy Ayers-level vibes, laid-back basslines, and wood and brass section stylings to noodle over for days, some come as they are, others are chopped and re-sampled to taste. And it’s all run through the right gear, to give it the unmistakable tape warmth, top-end mic clarity, and overall style and integrity that this type of street soul…

ADD PRESENCE TO A SIMPLE BASS Sine wave basses are great for subby low-end reinforcement but sometimes they lack a little weight, creating a frequency gap between the bass and the lower mid-range. You can’t open the filter on a sine-wave bass as there’s no upper frequency content present in the sound. Instead, send the bass to a distortion effect via an auxiliary and configure settings to hit the bass and ‘disperse’ this to overdriven higher frequencies. Why do this on an auxiliary rather than ‘in-channel’, via an Insert? If you use an auxiliary, it’s much easier to balance the dry original sound with the distorted treatment and, using automation, a doddle to vary that relationship from one section of your track to another. GATE EXPECTATIONS Heavy reverb presets with…

Full Review: FM397 | Push finally lives up to Ableton’s vision of controller-as-instrument, and standalone mode is a great new way to use Live Full Review: FM387 The MPC takes the winning format of the MPC Live and builds it into a keyboard workstation. It’s a logical, winning concept and well-executed Full Review: FM397 This is a fine update to the original MPC X – the new instruments and effects are really excellent. The retro look is very stylish too Review: FM349 It lags behind some rivals on the sampling front, but on the whole the 707 is a powerful and well-designed groovebox. A welcome return for the company’s MC line Review: FM363 There are some limitations, but Maschine+ delivers the core Maschine workflow in standalone form: inspiring, creative and…

>At last, Apple has released the long-rumoured Logic Pro for iPad, bringing its flagship DAW to a multitouch device for the first time. First impressions are that, as you’d expect, this takes some design cues from the iOS version of GarageBand, but goes further by offering a range of ‘pro’ features. Diving into the detail, an all-new sound browser puts all available instrument patches, audio patches, plugin presets, samples and loops in a single location, and you can tap any sound to audition it before you add it to a project. And there’s certainly plenty of content to play with: Logic Pro for iPad ships with 100+ instruments and effects, with the multitouchcapable interfaces letting you bring them to life. One of the instruments, Sample Alchemy, is brand new; an…

>Roland has added another synth to its Aira Compact range. The S-1 Tweak Synth takes inspiration from the classic SH-101 and joins the T-8 Beat Machine, J-6 Chord Synthesizer and E-4 Voice Tweaker in the family of diminutive instruments. While the S-1 uses Roland’s Analog Circuit Behaviour (ACB) technology to recreate the SH-101’s sound, it goes beyond its monophonic design to offer four voices of polyphony. And, while the simplicity of the 101 has been retained, there are a number of new sound design features, too. You get dedicated oscillator, envelope, filter and LFO sections, and effects with dedicated knobs. Effects include choruses, delays and reverbs, some of which are derived from classic Roland synths from yesteryear. The 26 multifunction pads, meanwhile, can be played like a keyboard or used for…

>Make Noise’s Spectraphon is another collaboration between the US brand and Soundhack’s Tom Erbe, who previously contributed to the company’s excellent Erbe Verb and Morphagene modules. Spectraphon is a complex dual oscillator capable of additive, vocoder and spectral synthesis-style sounds. This results in brilliantly bright and characterful digital synth tones. As with the best Eurorack voices, it really comes to life with modulation, with plenty of CV to keep the synthesis techniques and timbres moving. From our demos it seems like another experimental powerhouse from the brand. The Spectraphon is also the first module to make use of Make Noise’s new digital hardware platform. Engineered by Jeff Snyder and Tony Rolando, the company claims this provides “more I/O at higher resolutions and a lower noise floor than we have ever had…

>Released in 2016, Elektron’s Analog Heat offered eight stereo analogue distortion circuits, and could be used for both “enhancing and destroying” your audio. A second-gen version in 2018 offered a few hardware improvements but nothing in the way of sonic improvements, but you certainly can’t say the same of the new Analog Heat +FX. Those eight stereo distortion circuits are still here – as is the stereo multimode analogue filter and 2-band stereo analogue EQ – but on top of that you also get a whole bunch of digital effects. Specifically, we’re talking Reverb, Delay, Chorus, Warble, Bits, Compressor and Bass focus. All of these effects can be re-ordered as you see (and hear) fit, and your patches can be saved in the 512 preset slots. There are modulation options,…

Electronic musician, visual artist and lecturer Damien Roach has spent close to two decades experimenting with sound, images and ideas under the alias patten. His latest project, Mirage FM, is perhaps his most experimental yet: it’s the first album to be made entirely from samples produced by generative artificial intelligence. The samples in question were created with an AI-powered text-to-audio sound generator called Riffusion. Type in any prompt that you can think of – anything from “electric guitar solo” to “serialist G-funk theme tune for ’70s cop show” – and Riffusion will begin playing a short, looped clip based on the prompt you’ve entered. Though the sounds it produces are garbled, lo-fi and often unrelated to the text input, the results are still fascinating. After spending several late nights feeding…

ALBUM It’s tempting to compare Overmono with fellow UK duo Bicep. Both have a sound that leans heavily on ’90s dance, distilling rave breaks and sampled synths into modern club tracks. Both are responsible for some genuine anthems too – Overmono’s So U Kno isn’t quite as ubiquitous as Bicep’s Glue, but the two make use of similarly infectious, skippy beats and sampled hooks tailor-made for festival sets. Overmono have less of a revivalist sound though. Spiritually, the duo’s music is reminiscent of post-dubstep, channelling UK garage, hardcore and dubstep but without shying away from cuttingedge production flourishes. So U Kno makes it onto the album and is still a banger, but tracks like the R&Binflected Walk Thru Water or emotive Is U show them at their most interesting. Si…

RESAMPLE! 1If you’re using any kind of gear with built-in recording or sampling capabilities, get into the habit of capturing and manipulating your own patterns and creations. For one thing, this can help work around limitations of your gear, bouncing down multiple sounds to a single loop to save on track counts and CPU strain. It also opens up a well of creative possibilities, such as playing back loops at unusual pitches, layering effects or slicing and resequencing sounds. HARVEST SOUNDS 2 One of the benefits of using a portable DAW-in-abox or powerful sampler is the ability to capture sounds away from your usual studio environment. Take advantage of this in order to create sample-based instruments from sources you may not normally be able to access. Record ‘found sounds’ out-andabout.…

“I work on Ableton. With each track, it works differently. Sometimes I’ll come up with the lyrics first and then think about, ‘okay, what kind of music will suit this?’ Otherwise I’ll start by coming up with a drum beat working on a drum machine, or just working with the guitar or a synthesiser or whatever it is. “It’s different every time, but for one example, the opening track on the record starts with a harmonium recording that I made in Pakistan and then put through loads of effects. That track, In Light, I came up with by working on a loop pedal. I guess you can hear that in the structure, because it has a lot of different layers of guitar that build up along with a lot of…

>You’ll still find phasing, chorusing and flanging available mostly as separate plugins, but there are some options for getting those three effects out of a single one. Waves MetaFlanger, for example, offers flanging into higher rates that cover chorus as well, and the plugin has both phaser and doubler effects to sate your phasing, chorusy desires. You could try Soundtoys Crystallizer for combined phaser, pitch shifting and delay effects – using shorter delay times on a medium Mix level will introduce that flanger or chorus style you’re looking for. MeldaProduction’s catalogue is also on-hand for effects like these. In MPhaserMB, a multiband phaser is joined by a chorus effect too, and there’s multiband control over all. For more combinations of these effects, any amp simulator package – Guitar Rig, AmpliTube…

01 > The first thing to do to ensure your knob movements are recorded is to enable Motion Recording, which by default is turned off! In order to do this, go into the Pattern menu by pressing Shift and Pattern, and scroll down to the Motion Sw setting. Make sure this is set to On. 02 > Starting the knob recording process is like recording notes into the sequencer: press Shift and Start and you’ll see the recording dialogue box again. Any knob movements you make in record mode are added to your sequence, with a few exceptions. 03 > Unfortunately, at this moment in time, there’s a limit to four knob values per step. These can be edited from the same window as the gate and velocity values. Hold…

In March this year, the music world lost one of its most influential figures. Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away from cancer at the age of 71, leaving behind a legacy that marks him out as one of the most innovative composers and producers in contemporary music. Across a career that spanned more than five decades, Sakamoto bridged the divide between the popular and the experimental, inspiring countless artists from all corners of the musical map, from hip-hop to techno to classical. Sakamoto was born in 1952, the very same year that John Cage composed the entirely silent piece 4’33, a serendipitous fact that Sakamoto was often keen to remind interviewers. Synth magic His affinity for synths was sparked while studying ethnomusicology in Tokyo, as he tested the boundaries of early instruments…

KEY FEATURES I/O: 2x input jacks, 2x main output jacks, headphones out, ADAT in and out (up-to 10-in/10-out), USB-C, USB, MIDI in and out (via adapter), 2x pedal/CV ports. PRICING: Push controller $999 / €949, Push standalone $1999 / €1899. Upgrade kit (available in late 2023) $1049 / €999 THE PROS & CONS + MPE pads are responsive, versatile and very easy to use Workflow is tight and intuitive in either controller or standalone mode Slick continuity between standalone and desktop - Transfer of sample/ Drum Rack presets is a little clunky Browsing audio loops could be slicker Only bundling Live Intro feels a little on the cheap side Ever since version 1 arrived in 2013, Ableton has been calling its Push hardware an ‘instrument’. In the past this has…

>We’ve not been shy about our love of UDO’s Super 6, and now the Bristol brand has followed it up with a second synth in the range – the Super Gemini. Billed as a “bitimbral analogue-hybrid powerhouse”, this has a dual-layer, bi-timbral design and promises to give you a huge amount of control. The “spectrally rich digital hardware oscillators” are said to be unique, and offer the likes of wave morphing, cross and ring modulation, bi-directional sync and more. These feed into an allanalogue signal path that’s inspired by vintage instruments from the past, creating an instrument that’s said to fuse a state-of-the-art FPGA digital architecture with a typical voltage-controlled synth. UDO is making a big deal of the Super Gemini’s dual levels of synth control, which let you tweak,…

>Erica Synths is offering something a bit different with Steampipe, which is a fantastically named ‘true’ physical modelling synth with eight voices of polyphony and no conventional oscillators. We’ve seen plenty of physical modelling instruments in software down the years, but not so many in hardware. Steampipe is designed to mimic the way that sound is generated by wind instruments, strings, pipe organs and more, and has three major sections. First up, there’s Steam, which mimics a musician’s lungs and mouth. More specifically, it simulates airflow, with the envelope section determining the force with which air is blown out. DC/noise refers to the sound that’s generated when ‘blowing out’ – this can be replaced with an external audio source if you wish. The Pipe section, meanwhile, is akin to a…

>Already pretty striking, Arturia’s MicroFreak synth now has an even sleeker look thanks to the release of a new limited-edition Stellar version. This gives the MicroFreak a slick black finish, and also adds some “spaceage graphics” that are designed to reflect its controls. There are some exclusive new presets as well. Alongside this – and perhaps even more notably – Arturia has unveiled a v5 firmware update for all MicroFreak owners, including those who purchase the Stellar. It looks like a pretty significant one, too. You can now import, play back and loop your own samples, and they can be manipulated using the three new granular engines. The MicroFreak’s keyboard can be transformed into a S&H modulation source, and the synth’s envelopes can now have even shorter attack values for…

>AJH Synth has come up with the nifty idea of combining a selection of its MiniMod modules with the Cre8audio Niftykeyz controller keyboard to create a self-contained synth inspired by the Minimoog. With its walnut end cheeks, the so-called MiniMod Keyz certainly has the look of a Model D, but the truth is that it’s actually considerably more powerful. It offers three VCOs, two shaped sine sub bass generators, a classic 24dB vintage ladder filter, 6dB and 12dB high-pass VCF, dual cascaded VCA, dual contour generators, a glide noise module, a ring modulator, tap tempo VC-LFO and a second multi-function modulation LFO. Phew. And then there’s that 49-note synth action keyboard, which gives you CV outputs for both velocity and aftertouch. There’s also a five-mode arpeggiator, a two-mode modulation wheel, aftertouch…

The advent of cheap, powerful personal computers utterly revolutionised music making. Even as electronic music gear became more affordable on the secondhand market throughout the 1980s, the act of actually recording and releasing music still required inaccessibly expensive studio gear. Sure, the likes of Tascam’s Portastudio allowed musicians to make rough, lo-fi recordings at home, but it’s been the advancement of software DAWs and plugins that has truly made music-making accessible to DIY musicians. That trend has really accelerated in the 21st century. On the music making front, even free or budget DAWs now contain pretty much all a budding producer needs to record, create and mix full tracks, and a mid-spec laptop can emulate the capabilities of a fully-equipped pro studio. What’s more, music making software has escaped the…

Modulation effects are early staples of music production and electric instrument soundcraft. As producers, we almost all know how flange, chorus or phaser effects sound, and we know that the range of sonic possibilities are vast. Take a signal, make a copy and modulate the copy, applying some processes to its fast or slow movement. Modulation effects have been with us for a long time, because their early forms were quite easy to bring about. It was a relatively simple step for an experimental engineer to duplicate a taped audio signal and to rhythmically slow one copy down and back up again. This would be exactly the same mechanism that first produced flanging, which is so called because the pressure was applied to the ‘flange’ of one of the reel-to-reel…

The SH-4d’s mixer mode is incredibly useful, as it lets you not only change volume and panning for each part but also reverb, chorus and delay send values for each. Accessing the mixer is slightly more fiddly than you’d expect, as it’s two button presses as opposed to one: first press the Pattern button to access the Pattern page and then press Sound to access the mixer page. The four faders default to the volume levels for Parts 1-4, while the Timbre knob controls the volume of the rhythm part. The keyboard buttons also act as individual mute buttons for each drum sound in the rhythm kit, making it very easy to drop out the kick for those classic buildups. Buttons 1-5 also act as mutes for each of the…

Upon the release of their debut album Native Speaker (2011), Braids received critical acclaim for their cerebral yet surreal approach to music-making. Determined to do things their way, the Montreal-based trio evaded collaboration before agreeing to enlist a producer for their fourth album, Shadow Offering (2020). However, despite being a positive experience, the pandemic killed off the promotional tour, leaving them crestfallen. Three years later and the band return with their fifth album, Euphoric Recall. Looking to heal their creative spirit and more determined than ever to act on their instincts and self-produce, the LP sees Braids at the height of their creative powers. The meticulous combination of electronics and live strings gives Euphoric Recall genuine emotional weight, amidst Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s powerfully expressive yet abstract vocal prose. Braids were very…

>UVI are back again with another sample-based Soundbank. As with their previous outings, this can be used within their (premium) Falcon instrument or (free) Workstation host. Although the name ‘Percussion Factory’ spells out the remit here, the subtitle ‘Creative Rhythm Designer’ provides more of a clue as to the broader intent. The main instrument screen gives a good overview of things. The 500+ presets are selected from the drop-down menu, with the eight percussion instruments that make up the sound element of the current preset shown below. Above each is a simple diagrammatic representation of its pattern (and it’s good to see multiple length patterns supported here). At the bottom are six controls for adjusting global parameters in real-time. These allow you to alter step length, dynamics, simplify patterns, apply…

POSITIONING YOUR MONITORS: 7 EASY STEPS ORIENTATION 1Decide an orientation within the room. If your shortest dimension is around four metres or more, consider setting up so that the width is the longest dimension. Space to the sides of the monitors helps support stereo imaging and reduce the effective strength of side wall reflections. Setting up longways allows for a greater depth of bass trapping at the rear of the room and provides more space at the front to keep your listening position out of the middle third of the room. WALL SPACING 2Decide how close to the front wall (the one you face) the monitors will go. Unless your room depth is over ~9m it’s best to keep the distance from the wall to the front of the monitor…

Full Review: FM394 | Roland have released a lot of retroinspired gear in recent years, but this synth/drum combo is a real sonic playground Full Review: FM384 Play’s capabilities aren’t quite ‘DAW-replacement’ level, but the sequencing workflow and live performance tools are some of the best going Full Review: FM392 Building on the successes of multiple other Elektron instruments, Syntakt is a top quality analogue-meets-digital groovebox with a lot of power under the hood Review: FM357 Despite its retro influences, Tracker is less esoteric than it first appears. This is a sleek, well-designed hardware sampler that’s both fun and inspiring Review: FM369 Circuit Tracks is an excellent update to one of the best value hardware instruments on the market. MIDI, samples and synths in one bargain box!…