Innehållsförteckning för Autumn 2023 från Future Music

In 2023, ‘house music’ is a sprawling, multifaceted thing. Spanning from mainstream chart hits to outsider underground parties, house music is still a dominant force on dancefloors from Ibiza to Chicago to Japan. It’s split and cross-pollinated into a multitude of sub-genres, spanning electro house, deep house, micro house, lo-fi, booty house... We could go on and on. So how to tackle the concept of making house music in 2023? For a start, we can go back to the fundamentals – the classic sounds and techniques that form the backbone of house music in all its forms. This issue we’ll explore some of the general rules and classic sounds of house, which are useful to know – even if you ultimately decide to subvert them. We’ve also handed over a…

Cherry Audio has unveiled a new synth plugin. Harmonia is inspired by the vector and wave sequencing synths of the '80s and '90s, building on these techniques with a modern architecture that harnesses additive synthesis to create "lush, evolving and polyphonic sounds". Harmonia is equipped with two sample-based oscillators, each of which can generate up to eight pitches using waveforms in the plugin's library. These pitches, or harmonics, can then be tuned individually to create harmonically complex timbres. The volume of each of these harmonics can also be tweaked individually, adjusted collectively through a handy slider, or even modulated to produce evolving textures, through a process Cherry Audio has named “interpolated harmonic scanning”. Cherry Audio claims that Harmonia's waveform library contains "hundreds of meticulously sampled waveforms sourced from various synthesisers,…

Stalwart manufacturer Dubreq has announced the release of Stylophone Beat, an affordable, pocket-sized drum machine featuring the same stylus-based design as its flagship Stylophone synth. The drum machine offers four drum kits that can be played by tapping different segments of the touch-sensitive interface with the attached stylus. Stylophone Beat can also play four bass sounds. You can record, layer and loop drum patterns, mute individual sounds, change overall tempo and quantise your beats. It has an onboard speaker and is batteryoperated – you can take it anywhere. That's about all there is to say, really – the main draw of the original Stylophone was its cutesy simplicity, and that's also the case with the Beat, which is a nifty and affordable little music-making device that's tailor-made for delivering simple…

Bristol, 2 September Now in its second year, the 2023 edition of Bristol’s Forwards Festival offered a solid case for the idea of electronic music as a truly ‘live’ proposition, as opposed to something confined to clubs and DJ booths. First night highlight Bonobo has long been one of dance music’s best live performers, and his commitment to touring with a full live band featuring keys, drums, a brass section and guest vocals is laudable, and pays off in the form of a varied and engaging career-spanning set. Similarly impressive are Neil Barnes’ revived incarnation of Leftfield, whose set combines pulsating sequenced basslines with live percussion and numerous synth filter freakouts. The main event comes in the form of Aphex Twin, playing the final date on his short run of…

A AND B SECTIONS 1 Houseas a genre is a little more ‘song’ focused than loop-focused techno or DnB, which puts a lot of emphasis on builds and drops. While your track doesn’t necessarily need full verses and choruses, before tackling an arrangement for your house track it’s worth developing at least two distinct sections, labelled A and B. These should be variations on one another, giving you two versions of your main hook to switch between to keep the listener interested. If the main emphasis is a sampled vocal, try using two different looped lines or phrases to make different sections. If your track is built around a distinctive riff or progression, try swapping the instrument in the second section or inverting its direction so the notes progress down…

Puzzling, complex and yet still oddly accessible, Lukid’s 2012 album Lonely at the Top suggested an electronic artist approaching the peak of his powers. Few might imagine, therefore, that Luke Blair would abandon returning to Lukid for a further decade. Instead, the North London-based producer became hot property in the world of advertising sync, whilst side-stepping into the self-described functionality of drum & bass/jungle with Jackson Bailey, under the name Rezzett, alongside his own Refreshers side project. The only other constant has been Blair’s monthly show on NTS Radio, allowing him to keep abreast of the latest cutting-edge sounds in dub, hip-hop and electronica. All of the above have fed into Blair’s belated return as Lukid, which serves as a timely reminder of just how comfortably he sits among his…

SEMI-MODULAR SYNTHS Intellijel Cascadia £2,025 Full Review: FM401 A bit of a master stroke. Cascadia merges different synthesis types wonderfully and houses them in a format that works extremely well. Bastl Softpop SPII £445 Full Review: FM393 Softpop is an instrument that offers vast tonal options and great sequencing, connectivity and portability. A huge leap over its predecessor. Korg Volca Modular £190 Review: FM342 A West Coast synth in a compact package. It may be fiddly, but give in to its experimental ethos and it’s endless fun. Moog Mavis £339 Review: FM387 Mavis can’t be faulted at this price. It covers a wide range of tones, is well built and brings new options to the classic Moog. Moog DFAM £549 Review: FM333 A unique percussion…

Serato has added some extra allure to its Sample plugin; namely, the stem-splitting technology that has also found its way into the company’s Studio DAW and DJ products. Released in 2017, Sample was always designed to be fast and fun. Drag in an audio file and Serato’s acclaimed Pitch ‘n Time technology will detect the tempo and key, enabling you to match these to your current project. Slices of the sample can then be assigned to pads and triggered in old-school fashion. Sample 2.0 is cut from similar creative cloth, but adds the ability to extract vocals, melodies, bass and drums from the audio, giving you instant access to them in your DAW. This has the potential to make it a valuable remixing tool. “Innovation is at the centre of…

Universal Audio has revealed the latest tweak to its acclaimed Apollo audio interface line, which looks set to open up its Twin X's box of tricks to Windows-based musicians and producers. The Twin X USB retains the key USP of its predecessor, the impressive Apollo Twin X – inheriting A/D and D/A conversion from the rackmounts of the pro Apollo X range – but at the same time it also adds the benefit of USB 3 connectivity for Windows users. Of course, UA's secret weapon is still very much in play, with UAD-2 DUO Core processing allowing you to work through preamps from Neve, API, Manley, and more, with UA’s Unison technology allowing for low-latency recording through analogue hardware emulations. The Apollo Twin X USB is available for order now,…

Vision Recordings EP Portuguese producer Holly and American beatsmith Machinedrum link up for a third time on River of Heaven, a six-track EP showcasing mind-bending, maximalist EDM of the highest order. Novaform is the record’s heaviest hitter, taking us back to 2013-era dubstep with its superbly-sculpted wubs; Hide Sun is a potent slice of liquid DnB, while Blueshift is the most intriguing pick of the bunch, contrasting a whimsical lead synth line with a frazzled, face-scrunchingly weighty trap beat. As is often the case in Machinedrum’s music, the devil is in the details: the madcap sonics of Blueshift’s transitions, the reversed vocal snippets in the opening track and the dizzyingly complex drum programming in Luminae. It’s the attention paid to these little flourishes and points of difference that makes the…

Paper Dragon demonstrate their reamping process Bristol-based three-piece Paper Dragon only have a handful of releases to their name, but they’re certainly not newcomers to the world of dance music. Each member has their own, varied roots in the industry. Jon Savage has spent several years on the road managing and working with acts including Fred V & Grafix and KOAN Sound. Bruce Turner is a multi-instrumentalist who has played guitar for acts such as drum & bass artist TC and teaches at Bristol’s dBS institute, while Kris Burton has worked as an engineer at Abbey Road. Formerly a four-piece fronted by vocalist Ruth Royal, Paper Dragon returned this year with a refreshed lineup and a stellar EP of nostalgic, rave-influenced tracks, Amplified Nostalgia. We caught up with the trio…

It’s all about the numbers with Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin, whether it’s the frankly enormous number of pseudonyms, the freakish number of songs released, the ever-growing list of myths, or simply the colossal array of genres he manages to pack into his infamous live shows and DJ sets (and very often into just one song). And with these numbers, James truly is a pioneer of all music, not just electronic. Not that he’d like being called one… Raised in Cornwall, James enjoyed some early breakthroughs thanks to the dance music sweeping from the States across Europe at the end of the ’80s (although he would certainly repay any debts back into that scene over the following decades). He started playing at local raves and free parties and produced…

Impact Soundworks – Water Piano $69 >Sometimes the strangest and craziest ideas lead to fruitful creative territory, and out of all the conventional acoustic instruments the piano seems to have borne the brunt of invasive sonic experiments. Pianos ‘prepared’ with a host of sound-altering mechanical elements have been captured and distilled into digital instrument libraries over the years, though the recording of a burning piano for Spectrasonics’ Omnisphere arguably represented the ultimate example of an instrument suffering for art’s sake. Impact Soundworks has chosen to explore the polar opposite with its new instrument library based around a piano filled with water! Water Piano was created in partnership with YouTuber Mattias Krantz and involved filling a waterproofed piano case with lots of water and recording it at different water levels. Within…

BLEASS has announced the release of an innovative new distortion plugin: Fusion utilises waveshaping techniques in order to distort and saturate your sounds and the developers are claiming that this will make Fusion the "most versatile and adaptable" plugin of its kind. Fusion's waveshaper is equipped with 58 wavetables, each of which fine-tunes the character of the distortion or saturation being applied. The user can also import their own custom wavetables, meaning that Fusion is capable of producing a hugely diverse variety of sounds; everything from warm, analogueinspired saturation through to abrasive digital clipping. The plugin's interface is divided into four tabs; Waveshaper houses the waveshaping controls, while Filter is home to a pair of resonant multi-mode filters; filter types include high-pass, low-pass, bell and notch, and each filter can…

Winspear ALBUM Sam Hall’s Rainbow Music was one of our most-played albums of 2022. Under the alias ghost orchard, Hall repurposed the rhythms of DnB and UKG into a lo-fi bedroom pop context, sounding a bit like PinkPantheress if she grew up in Michigan and owned a 4-track Tascam and a handful of effects pedals. That record has now been reimagined by ten underground music-makers for an endearingly chaotic remix album, with a new track and two reworks from Hall himself. Re: Rainbow Music is a messy affair, reeling from gaucherie to genius in the space of just two tracks: Pudding Club’s silly-but-fun electroska take on Bruise precedes the only cut that threatens to top its source material. Miyauchi Yuri’s blissful, starry-eyed remix of Jessamine strips out the breakbeats and…

CONTACT WHO: IK Multimedia. WEB: ikmultimedia.com KEY FEATURES Digitally-controlled analogue synth with 3 oscillators (variable waveshape), paraphonic architecture, 2 filters (2/4 pole, HP/LP), 2 LFOs, 3 envelopes, 16 slot Modulation Matrix, 10 effects (2 modulation, 5 delay, 3 reverb) in 3 slots, 64-step sequencer, arpeggiator, 256 presets DIMENSIONS: 333 x 150 x 50mm WEIGHT: 800g CONNECTIONS: MIDI in/out, audio out x 2 (6.3mm) plus 3.5mm headphone; audio in (3.5mm); 2 xCV Gate in and out, USB C (can be powered by this), PSU jack THE PROS & CONS ➕ Lovely sounds and loads more hands-on control over them compared to previous UNO synths Different effects and Drive control mean the sound can be more varied The price is still very good considering what you get ➖ The ‘keyboard’ really…

The hard-hitting impact of any sound is its transient: a short, sharp spike at the very start of a waveform that contains huge amounts of high frequencies and inharmonic content compared to the rest of the signal. Often referred to as the ‘attack’ stage of the traditional ADSR envelope, this high-energy peak will generally be the loudest part of a sound, and the louder the transient, the more snap or crack it will appear to have, due to the fact that our ears and brain respond to that sudden impact. The most hard-hitting sounds in a mix will have the most transient presence, so you need to be able to manipulate their amplitude at source. While traditional compressors and limiters offer the ability to raise or lower the level of…

USE SATURATION INSTEAD OF COMPRESSION ​Saturation and distortion methods reduce a signal’s highest peaks, clipping a waveform as an audio circuit’s capacity is overloaded. This process, while adding harmonic content, also serves to reduce the difference between the waveform’s highest and lowest points. This reduces a signal’s peak level while increasing its average level, adding perceived volume while actually hitting lower levels in your DAW’s channel. DISTORTED CHORDS Applying distortion to polyphonic material will have a vastly different effect compared to using it on a monophonic source, and the results can be harmonically pleasing or unpleasant depending on the relationship of the pitches used. Fifths and octaves generate the most controlled results, with minimal intermodulation. This is why guitarists rely on them for impact. FLANGED HATS The robotic nature of…