Innehållsförteckning för August 2024 från Future Music

Ambient music tends to divide opinion – to some, it’s mind-bending and hypnotic, to others it’s nothing more than dull wallpaper music. Whatever your thoughts on the genre as a whole though, when it comes to sound design, ambient is home to some of the most interesting and evocative synth patches out there. There’s a lot you can learn from these sorts of patches whether you’re making ambient music or not. Whether it’s the backbone of your track, something to add texture to a breakdown or part of a dramatic cinematic piece, evolving and atmospheric synth sounds are one of those staple techniques that all electronic music makers should understand. This issue, we’ll guide you through the basics of making epic, atmospheric patches, whether you’re working with hardware, software or…

Universal Audio has announced the release of a new plugin. The LA-6176 Signature Channel Strip brings together emulations of three of its most highly-regarded pieces of analogue gear in a single plugin: the 610 tube preamp, 1176 FET compressor as well as the LA-2A tube compressor. UA’s 6176 channel strip is a hardware unit released in 2004 that combined the 610 Modular Amplifier preamp, introduced in the '60s and used on records from The Beach Boys, Johnny Cash and Ray Charles, with the classic 1176LN compressor. The company set out to recreate the 6176 in software for its 20th anniversary, but soon saw the potential to augment it with an LA-2A compressor. Universal Audio CEO Bill Putnam Jr gave his thoughts on the new release. “This is really a 'what…

With its motorised knobs, Melbourne Instruments’ Nina was one of the standout synths of NAMM 2022. Now we have a sister product, a bi-timbral polysynth called Delia, which is inspired by Nina but adds a 49-note velocity- and aftertouch-sensitive keyboard. This isn’t just a keyboard version of Nina, though: there are also ​new multimode analogue filters, high-pass and low-pass resonance control, 3-stage overdrive and more modulation possibilities. The 4-oscillator voice architecture, though, is definitely similar. Delia is described as having an “analogue soul with a computerised brain”. This refers to the fact that, as well as having “massively overdriveable” analogue ladder filters, it also features a digital front-end that runs its modelled VCOs, wavetables, high-pass filters and more. Among the features that Delia has inherited from Nina are 4-quadrant analogue…

Live 12 has introduced many new creative MIDI tools, to help us enhance existing parts, or create new ones from scratch. There are the Transformation and Generative tools, and then there’s the Pitch and Time Utilities tab. These tools really supercharge Live’s MIDI Editor and let us perform deeper editing functions without having to leave the workspace to find other devices or third party plugins. We’ve quickly adapted to using these new features; they’re now an indispensable part of our workflow. These controls are available in both Session and Arrangement views, and if you need to manage your space, fold them up by double-clicking on the Clip Title Bar, and organise them horizontally/vertically by dragging the right-hand edge of the panel, or right-clicking on the Clip Title Bar. These controls…

INCLUDES AUDIO We’ve come a long way in our use of MIDI. When the standard was introduced in the 1980s, getting different instruments made by different manufacturers to communicate with each other was a huge step forward. Decades later though, with MIDI firmly established and built into every piece of music hardware and software, we’ve transcended the basics, and human ingenuity has brought us to new creative heights. What is MIDI? For those needing a refresher, MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is the staple digital language we use to communicate musical performance data from controller to instrument. You don’t need to comprehensively understand what MIDI is and how it works in order to use it inside your DAW, but know that without it, making music via a computer would be…

It’s hard to believe when we look at our hard drives, full to the brim with algorithmic, plate, chamber, spring, and convolution plugin reverbs, that at one time if you wanted this amazing effect, you’d have to go to an actual room to get it. Only a performance hall or a specially constructed echo chamber – with a microphone at one end and speaker at the other – would get you a beautiful reverberated effect. But such was the demand for the sound in the all-new recordings of the time, the first reverb emulations were then developed. And software they were certainly not… The first of these was the spring reverb, created, believe it or not, to partially emulate the reverberated echo caused by the delay in early telephone lines,…

You may wonder why Future Music – a magazine that would rather holiday at a synth-packed and rain-soaked Superbooth in Berlin than lay on a beach in Bermuda sipping cocktails – would put Steve Albini, a famously stubborn anti-studio tech producer (in fact, a famously stubborn anti-producer) on any kind of pioneer-labelled pedestal. Well, just as superheroes don’t always wear capes, so pioneering studio whiz-kids don’t always use the latest 3D softs synths, cathedral-modelling convolution reverbs, 200GB orchestral libraries and AI. Steve Albini didn’t go anywhere near any of that lot in his production career, nor did he even – according to him – have a production career. But it’s this kind of anti-establishment, anti-technology, anti-normality attitude that actually made Albini such a studio pioneer. So while most 21st-century producers…

Blezz Beats – HumBox $50 Blezz Beats are purveyors of a relatively small, but quite diverse, range of plugins and sample packs. It’s fair to say, though, that a broad ‘retro’ theme can be found across their various offerings – whether it be cheap, old-skool preset FM synths, chiptune noises or synthesised ’80s funk vocals. Humbox fits squarely into the later of these, and is a sample-based instrument designed as a simple way of accessing talkbox-style vocals beloved of bands such as Zapp (who went on to influence, and be sampled by, West coast hip-hop producers in the ’90s). Unlike a vocoder which uses an audio source to modulate another audio stream (usually a rich synthesised tone) a talkbox involves actually inserting a tube carrying a sound into your mouth…

Arturia Keylab Essential Mk3 €199 Full Review: FM399 Better and slicker than its predecessor, Keylab Essential 3 delivers great control features, quality design and good DAW integration. NI Kontrol S-Series Mk3 from £649 Full Review: FM405 The newly refreshed versions of NI’s flagship Kontrol keyboards are of most use for heavy Kontakt users, but the refined design has plenty to recommend for all users. Akai MPK mini mk3 £90 Review FM363 A very decent upgrade with genuinely pro features, fixing its position in the top rung of mini keyboard controllers available. Novation FLkey | £89 Review FM383 Novation’s FLkey range has provided FL Studio users with the pro-level controller range they’ve always deserved. Donner DMK-25 Pro £125 Review: FM395 The DMK-25 Pro stuffs loads into a lightweight, compact, and visually appealing package.…

Audient Oria £880 Full Review: FM411 Oria is a well-conceived interface aimed squarely at serious immersive and multi-channel music makers and producers. Arturia AudioFuse 16Rig £1,150 Arturia’s new flagship AudioFuse interface is designed as more of a studio hub than just an interface, with MIDI, USB and CV connectivity considered alongside audio I/O. Audient iD4 MkII £138 Review: FM373 A simple 2-in/2-out design coupled with smart, user-friendly features and impressive build quality. Possible the best budget interface out there. SSL 2+ £226 Review: FM356 The 2+ more than lives up to the promise of offering the Solid State Logic name and sound from a piece of budget-friendly audio gear. Universal Audio Volt 76 from £215 Review: FM379 UA’s first affordable interface are great, with a spritz of hard-to-resist recording history…

Every DAW has features that its users love more than others, and even when we switch to another DAW, we often wish we could bring them along for the ride. On FL Studio it’s its step sequencer, a relatively simple but versatile tool for pattern creation with an intuitive interface that’s quick and easy to use. If you've departed Fruity Loops for pastures new but find yourself missing its sequencer, you're in luck, as developer YRAKI has designed a Max for Live emulation for Ableton Live that recreates FL’s sequencer with the addition of new features and capabilities. Juicy Loops, now in its second iteration, recreates the UI of the FL sequencer and gives you six tracks with up to 32 steps. Each track’s length can be varied to produce…

Billed by iZotope as “Hollywood’s favourite toolkit for intelligent audio repair,” the company’s RX software has been updated to version 11. Stacked floor-to-ceiling with machine learning technology, this offers both new tools and improvements to existing ones. RX 11 comes in three versions – Elements, Standard and Advanced – and most new features are available in the top two packages. The enhanced Dialogue Isolate module (available in Standard for the first time) now comes with a De-Reverb option, and Loudness Optimize can maximise perceived loudness for streaming platforms. Relatedly, the new Streaming Preview module enables you to hear how your music will sound on different streaming platforms. Music Rebalance, meanwhile, gets a new neural network that enables you to access the individual parts within a full mix. There’s now a…

Elsa Hewitt’s music is a kaleidoscope: the closer you peer into it, the more you begin to notice complex shapes and intricate patterns beneath its shifting layers. Obscuring her ethereal vocals in a haze of warped synths and samples, the British artist crafts hypnagogic beats that feel like a half-forgotten dream, its narrative thread vanishing from memory to leave behind only an inscrutable emotional resonance. Hewitt has been exploring this musical space for more than a decade, progressively revealing new layers of her artistry with each release. Her singular sound collides dream pop with experimental electronica, its introspective lyricism met with densely textural sound design, producing songs that feel somehow both abstract and personal. Her latest project is Chaos Emeralds, an album crafted across four years, begun during the pandemic…

LET’S CREATE A patch that makes use of a variety of the concepts discussed on the previous page. To do so, we need a synth – or combination of synths – that allows us to blend both analogue (or virtual analogue) sound generation with digital synthesis techniques. Here, we’re using Kilohearts’ Phase Plant plugin, which includes VA, sample and wavetable engines. It’s also semi-modular, and therefore offers lots of flexibility for creating multilayered sounds. Similar approaches can be applied in other multi-engine plugins such as Arturia Pigments, Spectrasonics Omnisphere or Logic’s Alchemy. In the hardware realm, multi-timbral hybrid instruments like UDO’s Super 6, Novation Summit or Arturia’s PolyBrute are perfect for these kinds of sounds. Don’t be put off though, if you don’t have access to one of these top…

A good drone helps set and underpin the mood of your track, while allowing harmony to move freely above it. Drones are generally characterised by a long, sustaining single note or chord (often on the root note of the track) and technically speaking (in musical terms), a drone is a ‘pedal note’. Of course, if your drone is just a single oscillator with no movement/modulation it’ll soon get boring, so in these next steps let’s use a few tools to inject some movement into our drone. Note: 12dB (2-pole) filters are usually good for drones as they have a solid low end but still let some high-frequency harmonics/energy through even at lower cut-off settings. Here are a few ideas……

For some, a slowly evolving drone is all that is needed for a satisfying ambient piece, so let’s take a look at how to build one. This can be simple or complex but to start with, keep it basic. Even a single note can work wonders with the right modulation. We’re using the wonderful RYK Algo for this but you can use any sound source you like. The Algo works well as it can be modulated in interesting ways, from wave folding to cross mod and each of the four operators. The direct results can be a touch harsh, for ambient at least, so choose your favourite filter to take out some of the fizz but modulate that too, then we can finish off with a simple reverb. Or, if…

INCLUDES VIDEO Every aspiring artist or bedroom beatmaker reading this will have made something they don’t like; it’s a near-universal experience among creatives of all kinds, but it’s not always an easy one to move past. British electronic artist Will Phillips, better known as Tourist, has some sage advice for those disheartened by such a creative block. “You will make so much shit music, and that’s absolutely great,” he says, “because you’re never going to get to the good stuff unless you stop being hard on yourself.” Arriving on the electronic music scene in the early 2010s, Tourist has spent over a decade refining his sample-heavy brand of dreamy, atmospheric electronica, earning himself a Grammy Award in the process. His fifth studio album, Memory Morning, takes this sound to new…

It’s an exciting time to be a Logic User. The Mac-exclusive DAW received a huge update in May 2024, changing it from Logic Pro X to Logic Pro 11. Along with many improvements and added features, Logic has received some fresh MIDI functions. MIDI Routing gives you the capability to control as many instrument tracks as you like with a single MIDI region. Say you’ve recorded MIDI data to an Instrument Track. You can now open up a separate Instrument Track, load up a fresh software instrument, route the Internal MIDI In to the output of the first track, and it will play the same data. This is great for swiftly creating harmony between tracks. You can use this to record the pre-existing data to the new track as well,…

01 We’ve set up the Plate as an auxiliary effect rather than an insert to let us send multiple tracks to it and give the song a more unified feel if each track sends even a small amount to the same ‘verb. It also gives a more authentic, old-school feel to a track, as access to a single plate would have been more common in the ’60s, unless you were lucky enough to record at EMI studios. 02 The controls are classic faders for both input and output levels, bass cut and treble boost controls – the latter sounding like a dramatic HPF – and pre delay and mix controls for reverb. You also get drive and analog controls for extra grit, hum and noise. A damper control reduces reverb…

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. Moog Spectravox $599 Full Review: FM411 The latest addition to Moog’s range of semi=modular instruments can function as both a filter bank and an analogue vocoder. 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 Moog format. Moog DFAM £549 Review: FM333 A unique percussion synth, and the perfect partner to the Mother-32. The…

Sennheiser HD 490 Pro from £349 Full Review: FM406 | Sennheiser has done an excellent job creating headphones that meet the demands of mixing and mastering. Pricey but fab. Røde NTH-100 £149 Review: FM384 The NTH-100s are the best over-ear headphones we’ve tried for their price bracket. Go-to cans for all listening scenarios. Focal Listen Professional £219 Review: FM342 Honest, transparent circumaural phones that cause little fatigue over long periods. A favourite choice in the all-rounder category. Beyerdynamic DT 700 PRO X £219 Review: FM380 A reliable pair of headphones that combine great build quality with excellent sound. Austrian Audio Hi-X15 £89 Review: FM386 Superb cans for those tracking and mixing on a budget. Their compact size and light weight will also appeal to pros on the move.…

UK-based synth maker UDO has unveiled its latest instrument. Sitting in the middle of the line-up between its debut synth, the 12-voice Super 6 and the beast-like 20-voice, multitimbral Super Gemini, the Super 8 packs many of the features of its bigger brother into a slightly smaller, lighter form and reduced price tag. Super 8 offers 16-voice polyphony when not used in its binaural mode, which reduces the number of voices to eight. Aside from the reduced polyphony, the most notable difference between the Super 8 and Super Gemini is the omission of the Gemini’s ribbon controller and the extra set of controls that could be used to control the bitimbral synth’s second sound layer. (Super 16 is still bitimbral, but you’ll have to switch between layers on one set…

AberrantDSP is the maker of some of our favourite software tools, and we're not the only ones partial to their processors: Billie Eilish’s producer (and brother) FINNEAS is a noted fan of Aberrant’s SketchCassette tape emulation plugin. So when we heard the company was announcing a new product, we had high expectations, and Aberrant hasn't let us down. Described as an "occult reverberator", Lair is one of the weirdest reverb plugins we've come across in a very long time; it’s the only plugin release we're aware of that’s accompanied by a mysterious short story that describes the maker of the plugin sacrificing his ring finger to gain access to an interdimensional portal. Beyond the occult theme, Lair is a pretty capable reverb plugin, equipped with three reverb modes: Artifact is…

Arturia’s MiniBrute was the French brand’s second ever hardware instrument; previously known for its synth plugins, Arturia first released the Origin in 2008 before following it up with 2012’s MiniBrute. A monophonic 25-key analogue synthesiser with a single VCO and multimode Steiner-Parker filter, the instrument earned a big following, paving the way for later products bearing the Brute name, like the recently-released PolyBrute 12. Now, Arturia has announced the release of MiniBrute V, a plugin emulating the MiniBrute in software. The plugin aims to capture the "ferocious" character of MiniBrute’s single analogue oscillator, augmenting this with seven additional voices, effects, a unison mode and more. For MiniBrute V, Arturia has modelled both the original synth’s oscillator and sub-osc along with its Steiner-Parker multimode filter. The oscillator offers square, sawtooth and…

“I was prepping a lot at home, moving between my flat and a new house. I had PBM-8 Tannoy speakers, an Allen & Heath desk and an Alesis ADAT. Then, at that point, an Akai S3000 sampler. And, halfway through, an MPC 2000XL, for one song. It was a simple set-up. “Then we went to my engineer Bruce Wood’s Touchwood Audio studio in Hyde Park, in my neighbourhood in Leeds. It was in his house, in the basement, and such a beautiful space to be in. “We also used an Atari 1040, with C-Lab. And Bruce had a Tascam M3500 32-channel in-line analogue desk, a MSR 16-channel Analogue Multitrack, and a two-track DA-30 DAT machine. “Then, four Drawmer DS201 noise gates, four LX20 compressors, a DL251 Spectral Compressor. Roland SN-550…

ALBUM OF THE MONTH Nonkeen, All Good? Leiter Arriving some eight years after their previous album, this latest effort from the German trio of Nils Frahm, Frederic Gmeiner, and Sebastian Singwald is – according to the accompanying spiel – created as a tribute to one Herbert Laszlo Laser, a Berlin watchmaker turned experimental jazz musician and creator of a revolutionary instrument called the Synthar. While it’s certainly an evocative story, and the band claims that “Laser remains largely unrecognised, a cult figure – at best”, the fact that Google fails to turn about any mention of him beyond that band’s own feed makes me wonder if this could be more of an act of creative world-building than anything else. There’s certainly a sense of playful creativity in the way the…

GRANULAR SYNTHS ARE wonderful for ambient music. They work by sampling tiny fragments of source audio, the capture and playback of which can be randomised for unpredictability and texture. Throw a sample of a vocal or acoustic instrument into a granular synth of your choice and it will immediately turn into an interesting textural sound that’s great for pads and chords. Increase the number and randomisation of the grains used to create an ambient ‘cloud’ effect, or use fewer grains for stutter effects. One of our favourite ambient tricks, however, is to load a sample of an arpeggiated chord to create glitchy pitch effects. 1 We’re using Max for Live’s Granulator III. We drag a recording of a simple arpeggiated minor chord into its sample slot. Our track is in…

EFFECTS TREATMENTS FOR AMBIENT SYNTHS Effects are a crucial part of ambient sound design. The obvious first port of call is reverb – reverb places a sound into an imagined space, and by its very nature creates ambience. While it can be tempting to simply crank your reverb for maximum ambience – which can be an interesting approach, see below – often it’s better to aim for a level of reverb that sounds natural for your synth sound. You want something that feels like a part of the sound itself, rather than an obvious effect that sits over it. Ditto for delay. That being said, ambient is a great place to explore more extreme and unusual effect treatments. Pitchshifted delays are a great example, as they can add additional unusual…

KingKorg Neo is the latest 37-key digital synth from Korg which, at first glance, appears to sit neatly alongside the all-new MkII versions of the company’s rather excellent 37-noters, the Modwave, OpSix and Wavestate. Heck, let’s even put it next to the Minilogue XD, although that particular synth is mostly analogue and only boasts eight voices of polyphony, whereas KingKorg Neo has 24 and is firmly digital. But really, in actual fact, KingKorg Neo shouldn’t be considered as a member of this particular gang, as it is actually a follow-up to Korg’s original and bigger KingKorg, released back in 2013, and a synth that did well – or eventually well enough to result in this update – even though it was a VA released on the cusp of the analogue…

If it weren’t for Apple’s misjudged commercial, that depicts a large collection of creative gear being ‘crushed’ into the company’s new iPad Pro – including several musical instruments – the launches of the new versions of Logic Pro (version 2 for iPad and version 11 for Mac) wouldn’t be considered in the least bit controversial. Combine that marketing mishap with the new software’s heavy focus on AI, though, and you begin to ask yourself a few questions. Does Apple want to rid the world of real ‘stuff’ and leave the iPad as the one remaining creative tool? And does it want to automate the music production process so much that all the user has to do is press a button? Without giving too much away, we can reassure you that…

Bitwig Studio From €49 Full Review: FM411 Arguably the most forward-thinking DAW around, the latest version of Bitwig Studio – v5.2 – adds three new EQs and an overhaul compressor. Logic Pro 11 £199 Full Review: FM411 Version 11 of Logic Pro is finally here – alongside Logic for iPad v2 – and adds AI-aided keys and bass players, along with in-DAW stem separation and a new ‘instant warmth’ plugin. Best of all, it’s free for current users. Steinberg Cubase £497 Review: FM404 On the face of it v13 isn’t a ground-breaking Cubase release – and there will be no doubt be some disappointed users out there - but there is enough here to satisfy many. Tracktion Waveform Pro from $119 Review: FM345 Waveform is now friendlier, contains more creative tools…

IK Multimedia iLoud MTM MkII £399 Review: FM411 | Despite the size, these pack a punch, but what sets them apart is the simple, powerful ARC integration and accompanying software. KRK GoAux 3 and 4 from £280 Full Review: FM394 A great solution for those on the move or short of space. Not the cheapest, but reasonable value, with flexible features. Genelec 8010A £270 (each) These distinctive compact monitors are a modern classic for small spaces. Not cheap, but far more ‘pro’-sounding than size suggests… JBL One Series 104-BT £150 Review: FM346 The One Series 104 is a stylish compact monitor that delivers decent sonics, flexible connectivity and solid build, all at a very attractive price. Focal Solo6 ST6 £1,149 (each) Review: FM396 For their size, these are sublime, top-drawer…