Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2016 i Computer Music

“It’s a true privilege to come full-circle” Last issue, after ten years of service at Computer Music HQ, long-standing Editor and all-round top bloke Lee du-Caine penned his final Welcome before leaving for pastures new. We’d like to raise our glasses and wish him the best of luck in his future endeavours. Bon voyage, Lee! Which leaves the new mugshot down in the bottom-right corner of this page – yep, that’s me. After sitting in the Features Editor’s chair for several years, I’m taking the helm to sail the good ship towards new horizons. My music-making career began over a decade ago with a knackered old PC and a copy of Computer Music, so it’s a true privilege to come full-circle. If you hadn’t noticed it on the cover [should…

Here at,cm we pride ourselves on bringing you the best free software and samples every single month – and this issue is no exception, as not only have we brought you one of the most epic softsynth giveaways of all time, but we’ve also teamed up with A-list sample label Samplephonics to bring you an unbelievably phat collection of sounds. The pack Samplephonics CM Pack 2016 is an exclusive 2GB sample pack crammed to the max with 693 premium-grade one-shots and loops, all lovingly picked from 47 – yes, 47! – of the brand’s best commercial packs. All manner of musical styles are covered – from hip-hop, techno, DnB and house through to ambient, acoustic, soul and disco – so you’re guaranteed to find some form of aural gold, no…

“The idea of creating a decent reverberation unit with just a single delay line just blew my mind!” cm Tell us more about the company – who works at Audiority, and how did it get started? LC “Audiority and Epic SoundLab are basically just me. I started back in 2003 with Progsounds, as a forum for progressive metal keyboardists. I started programming sounds, writing tutorials and helping other keyboardists to join the ‘dark side’ of synthesis and sound design. In 2010, I decided to quit my regular job and make a living with what I truly love… and that’s how Audiority began. It’s a one-man band: the code, the GUI (almost all of them), the sounds... everything you see on both sites is the hard work of yours truly!” cm…

If you’re partial to last month’s free Sinevibes Cluster 2 plugin, here’s another to check out. Recoded from scratch since v1, Switch 2 is a rhythmic audio gating effect using up to 32 gates with adjustable smoothness and duty time (ie, how long each step stays open vs closed). It’s “capable of applying tremolo, gate, pumping and stutter patterns on any kind of audio material”, and the new audio waveform view gives instant feedback on how the plugin is processing your signal – which it does using around half the CPU of v1. Switch 2 is out now for Mac AU for $29. URL www.sinevib.es…

CLEVER CANS With every other piece of technology becoming ‘smart’, why not your headphones? After a brief setup, the Nura cans promise to ‘match’ themselves to your ears and make your music sound better. Their Kickstarter campaign has ended up a resounding success. BETTER THAN A HAPPY MEAL We thought we knew what to expect from a McDonald’s, but that was before the McTrax mat: a paper controller that hooks up to your phone and lets you trigger loops and record your voice. Sadly, it only appeared briefly in Amsterdam and is unlikely to be seen again. SPOTIFISE THIS DJ mixes look set to arrive on Spotify thanks to a new deal the company has signed with Dubset Media Holdings. Dubset’s MixBank technology will supposedly analyse the content of mixes…

Though Roland’s Jupiter-8, SH-101 and TB-303 get the lion’s share of developers’ attention, there are a fair few musicians out there who long to get their mitts on a JX-10 or JX-8P, complete with a slider-laden PG programmer box. Thankfully, back in 2009, Martin Lüders gave ‘em exactly what they wished for, albeit in virtual form. PG8X’s interface was a note-for-note copy of the PG-800 programmer wrapped around an emulation of the JX8P synthesiser. For a while it was only available for 32-bit Windows hosts, but it was eventually recoded in C++ to bring it up to 64-bit and for Mac compatibility. bit.ly/LudersPG8X…

CME Xkey £74 Light and slim, also comes in ‘Air’ flavour with Bluetooth MIDI connectivity for £179 www.cme-pro.com KMI K-mix £529 Squishy USB mixer/controller that’s also an 8-in/8-out interface www.keithmcmillen.com Arturia SparkLE £159 TR-style sampling drum machine – hooks up to your computer to control Spark 2 software www.arturia.com Novation Launchpad Mini £74 Pretend to be an angry giant while launching clips in Ableton Live www.novationmusic.com Arturia MiniLab £75 Diddy controller, includes Analog Lab software full of vintage synth sounds www.arturia.com Korg nanoKontrol Studio£108 USB or wireless MIDI controller featuring basic mixing and transport functions www.korg.com Keith McMillen KBoard£69 Expressive ‘smart fabric’ keys that respond well to all kinds of fingering www.keithmcmillen.com FaderFox UC4 £185 USB DJ controller providing MIDI control over hardware and software www.faderfox.de…

In a studio career spanning almost 25 years, Dave has engineered, programmed and played keyboards on records for a string of artists including George Michael, Kylie Minogue, Tina Turner and Estelle. These days, in between writing articles for and other magazines, he collaborates on occasional songs and videos with singer/songwriter Lucy Hirst, aka Polkadothaze. www.daveclews.com RECOMMENDED LISTENING BEYONCE, LOVE ON TOP Every tune has at least one key signature, so I’ve picked a couple that have loads! Love On Top runs through a selection of them during the outro choruses. DAM’NCO, FRENCH KISS This track not only features outstanding musicianship but also key changes aplenty from drummer Damien Schmitt’s jazz fusion ensemble. bit.ly/damncoFK PRO TIPS QUICK ID TECHNIQUE To quickly identify a key with a…

ALL EARS Marco Korbar Q I’m still a beginner at music production and money is an issue. I wonder if I can get still good results with a pair of studio monitors which cost €200, instead of expensive ones (€500 or above)… A My advice to you is to spend that €200 on the best pair of headphones you can find instead. Some people don’t like producing on headphones, but I think you can get used to them. Ideally, you’ll have decent headphones and decent speakers, but I’ve heard some great productions done on mid-budget cans, so it’s definitely possible to cut some corners there. Do try to test your material on speakers as often as you can, though, so you learn how to compensate. OP TRI YOUR BEST Darren…

Every now and then a software developer taps into a bit of forgotten science and really impresses us with the result, and iZotope’s latest could be one such example. Mobius (VST/AU/AAX/ RTAS) takes the Shepard tone concept (see The good shepard) and cleverly applies it to a filter, for what iZotope call a “perpetual motion machine”, giving the impression of an infinitely rising or falling sweep. Significantly, it does this across the full frequency range, thus differentiating it from your typical filter effect, where removal of frequencies is the norm. Mobius has two filter modes – Phaker and Peak, the former applying both frequency dips and peaks, the latter just peaks. Phaker is the ‘stronger’ effect of the two, although, in general terms, they’re actually pretty similar. The filter movement…

Incipit’s Modulation Matrix, housed in its own page, is particularly easy to use. Most of the front panel controls are made available as modulation destinations on the vertical axis, while the four LFOs (which can modulate each other) and three Macros are listed across the top. To assign a source to a destination, simply set the slider at their intersection point in the matrix to any positive or negative value. Multiple modulators assigned to the same destination are combined and scaled using the Global Scale control at the end of that destination’s row, and the Mod Scale control on the front panel adjusts the overall depth of all modulation signals. Our one major gripe is the lack of an Undo function for the quite-easy-to-press-by-accident Reset button. Other than that, Incipit’s…

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Our fantastic software, samples, videos and tutorial files are now available to download! To get access to this content, go to vault.computermusic.co.uk on your PC or Mac’s web browser. You’ll be asked to register and answer a few simple questions to prove that you’ve got the mag. You’ll then be given access to our content! You can sign in any time to register new issues and download d p moredent content. For more info, see our Vault FAQ: bit.ly/cmvaultfaq * Please note that the Producer Masterclass video is not available as a download via our Vault, though Apple Newsstand users can watch the video via built-in internet streaming.…

If you’re at all into hardware dynamics units, you’ll be familiar with the buzz around Empirical Labs’ famous Distressor, a super-flexible compressor that hit the market 20 years ago and has remained a studio staple ever since. Now the company are bringing the Distressor’s sound to software with their first self-released plugin, Arousor, with which they claim “it is almost impossible to get a bad sound”. Arousor’s feature list includes adjustable saturation, high- and band-pass sidechain filters, a brickwall ratio dubbed Rivet, and the AtMod control, which “changes the shape of the initial attack, and can lengthen attack times in a different manner than the Attack control”. Available in VST/AU/AAX, Arousor costs $349 and you can buy it today. URL www.empiricallabs.com…

Last year, veteran Polish plugin masters PSP Audioware took a break from compressors and EQs to deliver something no one expected: a Leslie rotary speaker emulation, L’otary. Now they’re back with this counterpart, which recreates (and expands upon) the analogue vibrato/chorus found on the Hammond B-3. There are three chorus and three vibrato modes, a Quality dial for authentically lo-fi B-3 sounds or “modern enhanced high-resolution algorithms”, detailed control over pulsation speed, and more. B-Scanner is out now, priced $83, in VST/AU/AAX formats. URL www.pspaudioware.com…

Stick this plugin on your master bus, select from one of a dozen options in the Simulation panel, and you’ll hear how your mix might sound on a home hi-fi, smartphone, tablet, TV, car, etc. The idea is to gain insight into how your tracks should translate in the real world, saving you having to actually check the mix on all these systems. Optionally, you can use the Compensation section to let the plugin know that you’re listening on 5" or 8" speakers, or headphones, and it adjusts the sound further in response. MixChecker costs $149, comes in VST/AU/AAX formats, and is out now. URL audified.com…

“There was also praise for NI’s plugin controller Kore” We featured what can only be described as a pair of winged synth robots on the cover of cm102, as we gamely attempted to illustrate our ‘synth vs synth’ feature, in which we put a selection of commercial plugins up against freeware counterparts. We drew no definitive conclusions, other than to say that both types of instrument were deserving of space on your hard drive. How’s that for being even-handed/ completely noncommittal? In the reviews section, we took the unusual step of including a guitar. We hadn’t gone all hairy and rocky, though: the instrument in question was the JamMate UG-1, one of a new breed of axes to feature a USB audio output. Phew. There was also praise for NI’s…

I remember wanting to have stereo bass in my productions from very early on in my learning, but I was frequently told that stereo bass was ‘wrong’. When you’re not quite getting the sound you want, it can be hard to have the conviction to go against what everybody else advises, but some seriously good productions do exhibit stereo bass. Still, you’ll hear people insist that our ears can’t hear stereo in the low end. It’s true that our ears have trouble localising frequencies below roughly 80Hz, but when you’re listening to music on headphones (where most music is enjoyed these days), that ‘rule’ pretty much goes out the window. In fact, producing the absolute biggest stereo image requires the inclusion of width way down as…

THE MAGIC MAN Scott Stevenson Q Can I get your opinion on what makes Sasha’s tracks so magical? A In my opinion, what makes Sasha’s tracks magical to me is the spatial atmosphere – in a sense, that’s just a description of the magic rather than an explanation of the ingredients, though. For me, I really like what he does with reverb and stereo width. He creates a sparse yet large atmosphere. OP DEDICATED FOLLOWER OF FASHION Angelo Caspers Q The big question: to follow or not to follow a trend in the music industry… A It’s a personal choice, Angelo. Do it if you’re really feeling it. Don’t do it if your heart’s not in it. Don’t do it just because everyone else is doing it. Don’t…

Our promise We bring you honest, unbiased appraisals of the latest computer music products. Our experts apply the same stringent testing methods to all gear, no matter how much hype or expectation surrounds it. What the ratings mean 1-4 A seriously flawed product that should be avoided 5 This product’s problems outweigh its merits 6 A decent product that’s only held back by a few flaws 7 Solid. Well worth considering 8 Very good. A well-conceived and executed product 9 Excellent. First-rate and among the best you can buy 10 Exceptional. It just doesn’t get any better than this! Want to see and hear the latest software in action? Then check out our ‘2 Minutes With…’ videos! Wherever you see the red icon, you can head over to the Vault…

“The Key module can be employed to play Virta like a traditional synth” KEY Determine how Virta responds to incoming MIDI data AUDIO Can be used as a modulation source or for even more interesting uses LFO Boasts some unusual features, including a Buchla-style pseudo-random noise shape and a ‘blip’ wave OSCILLATORS A standard analogue-style ‘Classic’ oscillator, plus the ‘Vosim’ oscillator for vowel sounds ENVELOPE Each stage of this ADSR generator can be modulated DELAY Can sound remarkably like an analogue bucket-brigade delay. Modulate the parameters for maximum weirdness! GATE A classic Buchla-style opto-isolator gate design with a low-pass filter FORMANTS Houses four vocoder algorithms and converts pitch and formant data to be used by the vocoder’s multiband filter PATCHER Route signals from one module to another Initially inspired by…

Mobius applies the concept of the Shepard tone to filter sweeps. A Shepard tone (or scale, named after cognitive scientist Roger Shepard) is an auditory illusion that gives the impression of a continuously rising or falling tone that never reaches a destination pitch. This sonic ‘barber’s pole’ illusion can be achieved using a series of overlapping rising or falling three octave scales, each separated by an octave. For it to work well, the higher and lower notes in the scales have to fade out and in respectively, focussing the listener’s attention on the middle notes. A variation on the scale developed by French composer Jean-Claude Risset uses gliding tones for a continuously rising or falling pitch. Looking at the spectrum analyser, we can see that Mobius uses three or so…

Don’t let the name and look of PSP Audioware’s delay plugin (VST/AU/AAX/ RTAS) fool you – there’s much more than just echoes on offer here. At its heart, stompDelay is a tape-style delay housed in a performance-orientated ‘stompbox’ interface that enables and encourages real-time adjustment of the delay time (or tape playback speed). This is done either manually or via the onboard LFO – hence the prominence and size of the LFO Rate knob in the top panel, alongside the Delay Time knob itself. Both can be set in Hertz or locked to a range of note values, either at a user-defined tempo or synced to the host DAW, and the LFO offers ten shapes, a low-pass filter (for smoothing the action in certain circumstances) and a Width setting, which…

VIRSYN CUBE 2 Cube (VST/AU) offers 512 partials per voice, both harmonic and inharmonic spectra, three 64-segment envelope generators, morphable filter banks, arbitrary noise spectra and a pair of LFOs. Resynthesis of audio files is possible as well, and effects are on hand in the form of chorus, phaser, flanger, distortion, echo and reverb. www.virsyn.de APPLE ALCHEMY Long before it was included in Logic, Alchemy started life as an additive resynthesiser from Camel Audio called Cameleon 5000. Inspired at least in part by Kawai’s synth (the clue’s in the name), it quickly grew and expanded into something much more complex, with a vast sound library of interesting sounds, earning a dedicated user base in the process. www.apple.com IMAGE-LINE MORPHINE An often overlooked additive powerhouse, Morphine (VST/AU) offers four oscillators with…

Tutorial videos High-quality videos to guide you through our tutorials. Wherever you see the icon on the left, there’s a video version to watch See this issue’s entire video content on the next pages Tutorial files A folder full of audio examples, synth patches and project files to help you follow our tutorials This digital content has been thoroughly scanned and tested at all stages of production, but as with all new software, we still recommend that you run a virus checker before use. We also recommend that you have an up-to-date backup of your hard drive before using the content. Future cannot accept responsibility for any disruption, damage and/or loss to your data or computer system that may occur while using this magazine’s programs and/or data. Consult your network…

EASY GUIDE KEY SIGNATURES Every song’s got one, but how do you interpret the theory behind the notes? Read the full article on p80 Our resident gurus walk you through their specialist field every month – plus, see readers’ questions answered by Owen Palmer on page 84! GEEK TECHNIQUE STEREO BASS Throw conventional wisdom to the wind and see how it’s done Read the full article ad on h p82 ll DR BEAT HYBRID DRUMS Get the best of acoustic and electronic worlds with this video tutorial Read the full article on p86…

“The latest BitJam podcast compiles an eclectic selection of notable competition entries” After a gap of six months to the day, we finally see a new release of old favourite OpenMPT. Among the highlights are an enhanced Find & Replace for searching ranges of data, plus the ability to replace entries with relative values or percentages. Sample playback now has floating-point precision, and one or two previously pluginbased features are now directly integrated into OpenMPT, such as MIDI Input/Output and Ogg Vorbis/Opus support. Nothing overly sexy, but these under-the-hood changes have lead to important improvements in the replay routine library (libopenmpt) and will supposedly open up new features for future OpenMPT releases. Linux users can also rest easy thanks to a bug-fix released a day later, addressing an issue where…

Two packages comprising four modules have been released for Slate Digital’s Virtual Mix Rack (VST/AU/AAX). FG-116 Blue Series FET Compressors ($149) contains Vintage and Modern models, one recreating the original Urei 1176 ‘blue stripe’ revision A, being “rich, colourful and musical”; the second a custom design that “blends the old-school tone with new-school topology”. Both offer two circuits, sidechain filter, and dry/wet mix. Next up, the Air and Earth filters from Eiosis’ AirEQ now come as VMR modules. These imbue treble air and bass heft, with built-in high-/low-cut. They’re $49 via Eiosis’ website or free if you own AirEQ Premium. All out now and available in Slate’s bundles. URL www.slatedigital.com…

SoundGym “Producing and mixing music are complex missions. Audio ear training can break this complexity into simple, distinct abilities that can be trained and improved. Once you’ve mastered these core skills, you’ll perform faster and make more accurate decisions while producing, recording and mixing. “At SoundGym, we also give members an indication of their progress and ability for core listening skills like frequency, gain and compression detection, so each member will know what they’re good at and where they can get better. Ear training is not a replacement for experimenting or learning while making music, but it can accelerate the learning process and make it much more effective.” – Noam Gingold iZotope “Ear training software can be enormously helpful in developing a strong connection between the technical language of music…

Duran Duran, Rio This slinky slice of synth pop was utterly inescapable back in 82, not least because of keyboardist Nick Rhodes’ catchy, quirky sequence, courtesy of the first synth to carry the Jupiter sub-brand. Often miscredited to the Jupiter-8, it was actually just a C major 7th chord played using the Jupiter-4’s random arpeggiator function. bit.ly/RioJupiter4 Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Relax This groundbreaking slab of 80s innuendo had a difficult start in the studio, only coming to fruition once session muso Andy Richards was brought in to add chords from his Jupiter-8. Producer Trevor Horn was so impressed with Richards’ patches that he sampled the best of them into his beloved Fairlight, putting them to use on the rest of the album. bit.ly/FrankieJ8 Second Phase, Mentasm Joey Beltram and…

If you’ve ever tried to read a piece of sheet music, you’ll know how important the key signature is. For the most part, every piece of music (in Western tonal music, at least) has a key that represents its tonal centre. The key signature is a symbol found at the beginning of the stave, between the clef and the time signature, that lets the player know at a glance what key the piece should be played in. Easily identifiable once learnt, the symbol shows which notes in the piece need to be altered in pitch – in other words, sharpened or flattened – to make the piece conform to that key. In practice, one sharp or flat placed on a line in the key signature implies that every note on…

As an in-demand dance music engineer, Owen’s worked with a slew of outstanding underground artists behind the scenes from his London studio. After years of meticulously studying what makes a great production tick, he’s promised to share his most coveted techniques each month exclusively in . You can sign up for Owen’s free email course on making mixdowns easy at… www.owenthegeek.com/cm PRO TIPS UNISON BASS You can save yourself a whole load of hassle when designing any stereo sound by using the unison or unisono feature on your synth, if it’s available. This works similarly to a chorus effect, by having the synth generate multiple instances of its oscillators, all slightly detuned from each other. Imagine a gang of hippies with guitars singing Kumbaya around a campfire with each voice…

Ronan Macdonald Having previously served as Editor of drummer’s bible Rhythm as well as Computer Music, Ronan is clearly the right man for this particular gig. He’s been playing drums for over 30 years and making music with computers since the 90s. For many computer musicians, it can be all too easy to fall into the trap of dividing drum sounds cleanly into ‘acoustic’ and ‘electronic’ categories, then sticking to one or the other for any given track – the former represented by samples, the latter by synths, generally speaking. Restricting your thinking like that, though, means you miss out on a huge and colourful palette of sounds that can only be achieved by enthusiastically bringing these two seemingly disparate worlds together. Mixing up electronic and acoustic percussion enables you…

“StiX’s Advanced page houses each sound source’s resonant Filter, three Envelopes and two LFOs” DRUMPADS AREA Select one of ten sounds for editing PRESETS Global presets combine drum kits and patterns, although kits, sounds & patterns can also be handled independently MOD MATRIX Pre-wired assignments for applying core modulations ADVANCED/EASY Switch between the Advanced and Easy parameter editing panels PATTERNS Select one of 12 pattern slots, and copy, paste and randomise patterns PATTERN/SONG Switch between single pattern playback and song playback EFFECTS Activate and edit the three global auxiliary effects: Delay, Reverb and Phaser OSCILLATOR Each drum sound is made using two virtual analogue oscillators and one sample/noise oscillator SEQUENCER Switch between Multi, Beat and Single sequencer panels ENVELOPES Edit and apply the three main envelopes: Amplitude, Filter and Pitch…

“Each of the four operators includes two mix-blendable waveforms” OPERATORS Use Wiggles four flexible FM operators to generate and sculpt your source signal FM MATRIX The colour-coded knobs make modulator/carrier assignments easy to follow and control AMP Each operator has its own AHDSR envelopes built in CONTROL POINTS Nodes in the waveform that can be modulated horizontally and vertically MORPH Use the Motion feature to morph between up to four synth parameter snapshots ENVELOPE/LFO These editable modulators can be set to envelope or LFO mode MACROS Assign these controls to multiple parameters for quick sound manipulation EFFECTS Wiggle includes a decently stocked effects section PHASE DISTORTION Modulate an operator’s waveform with preset or customised modulator waves Wiggle (VST/AU/AAX/standalone), the debut soft synth from fledgling developer 2nd Sense Audio, uses what…

One of the most ‘analogue’ aspects of stompDelay’s sound is the way in which changing the Delay Time causes the virtual tape delay action to speed up and slow down. Whether this movement is defined manually, or via automation, tap tempo or the LFO, the Glide control has a major influence over it. Glide sets the time it takes the delays to move from one Delay Time setting to another. At zero, the amount of time it takes for this change to happen is instant; but as Glide is raised, the speed of the transition decreases, so that at higher settings the change lags behind the movement of the Delay Time knob itself (depending on how fast you move it, of course). To further simulate real tape, the volume level…

Inear Display’s novel delay and pitchshifting plugin, Incipit (VST/AU), comprises three identical effects chains feeding into a multimode filter, with modulation provided by four LFOs and three macros, all assigned in a rather brilliant modulation matrix. Each of the three chains can achieve a range of detuning, harmonising, delay and chorusing effects on its own, but when used together, they’re capable of much more. Chains 2 and 3 can each be set to run in parallel or take their feed from the preceding chain. In parallel, incredibly rich layered textures are the order of the day, while in series, things move into serious timbre-bending and sound-mangling territory. The first section of each effects chain hosts a+ /-24-semitone Pitch Shifter that speeds up or slows down the incoming signal to achieve…

Niche Audio Dark Bass House £25 Available in Ableton Live and NI Maschine formats, Dark Bass House gives you plenty to get your teeth into: 13 full projects, plus 15 Groups/ Drum Racks and 21 Simpler-based Instrument Racks for Live, built on 240 samples and a ton of MIDI clips. The production quality throughout is stellar, with each DAW’s effects fully deployed in the successful pursuit of that sinuous, rolling bass house sound. The only criticism we can think of is that Niche haven’t made use of Maschine and Live’s Macros, but that’s nitpicking. www.loopmasters.com 9/10 Rhythmic Robot Soviet Organ £25 In sampling the extremely quirky Junost-70 Polyphonic Electronic Instrument for their latest Kontakt library, Rhythmic Robot recorded both the output of the instrument’s own speakers and the “clearly basically…