Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2022 i Computer Music

The world of the browser DAW is a crowded one and getting more sophisticated by the day. One of the earliest titles, Amped Studio, has just been given a fresh injection of creativity with the addition of Chord Creator. As you might expect, it allows you to add individual chords and progressions, all with a simple click of a mouse, and also lets you edit tempo, sound, key and rhythm. It’s “a fast way to add chords, but it’s also a great way to learn about chords and chord structure”, Amped say, and a free upgrade to the online DAW which is well worth giving a go. More info at.… ampedstudio.com…

Ableton Live is a DAW that needs no intro and its combination of performance and production features mean it’s as popular with performers and DJs as it is with creators. Live 11 Lite is a cut-down version of Ableton Live, with all of the essential workflows, instruments and effects, but with limited track count, and for many years this has been bundled with apps and hardware products. This month, we are very excited to say that Live 11 Lite comes bundled with this copy of Computer Music! To mark this momentous occasion and also to get you started using this fabulous software, we’ve put together two tutorials. In this first one, we’ll run through the basics, including claiming and registering your serial number and then downloading, installing and authorising the…

One of the most important rules of building a live setup, for any size of show, but especially for larger ones is ‘don’t change anything’. Before the tour or gig, there’s a window where it’s good to test new things, to do firmware and software upgrades, maybe even to buy a new computer. But once that window closes – and it should be a week or more before the first gig – don’t do it. If everything is working and tested, leave it alone! Disable any auto update features, at OS or software level. It’s good to know you’re using the latest version of everything – you can get a kick out of it, sure – but save it for later, or for your backup rig. Everything in your setup…

The Launchkey and Push are connected to the computer via the USB hub. The RME is connected directly The MalletKAT’s sound module, and the Korg KP3 will be connected directly to an external mixer, so they can be brought into the set at any time in case of computer issues; it’s good to have something like this as a backup for larger dates. Ideally there’d be a second computer ready to go as well, but that’s something that might come later. Overall, this setup is fast to put together, with reliable elements and simple routing, and a degree of protection against computer failure.…

One sound that’s instantly recognisable is the pumping synth. This came right to the front of the mix with the onset of 90s dance culture, but its history extends back further. The ‘pumping’ sound was originally conceived quite by accident, as large amounts of compression were applied to entire drum kits. That’s the well known effect where it sounds like the cymbals are splashing around, being interrupted by the sound of the main drums themselves. Move on 20 years or so, and the concept of side-chaining compressors became commonplace, as many different sustaining sounds would again be interrupted, but by instruments such as a bass drums. Apply this to 4-to-the-floor of disco and 90s dance music, and you had yourself a neat little effect, which became ever more present in…

Blue Cat Axiom £170 Though it sports a wealth of impressive amp sims, it’s Axiom’s multifaceted selection of effects that really piques our interest. Its more than 70 in-built effects can be loaded into any of its 32 plugin slots, including a variety of delay and distortions that are out of this world. It can also accommodate third party AU or VSTs into its signal chain. bluecataudio.com Positive Grid BIAS FX 2 £131 While Amp 2 has your virtual amps and cabs covered, FX 2 enhances your Positive Grid rig with an amazing effects processor. FX 2 sports a heap of virtual stomp boxes, modelled rackmount effects and custom-designed weird and wonderful sonics via ToneCloud. You can also use its Guitar Match software to change your instrument’s tone…

After Logic Pro 10.5 – where Apple introduced, among other things, Live Loops, to add a somewhat ‘Live’ slant to the software – we know that an Apple point update can be as dramatic as a full integer update for other DAWs, and the latest Logic Pro 10.7 certainly backs this thinking up. The headlines might well be yet more top-line producers spreading their mixes and samples across the software – 2800 new samples from the likes of Mark Ronson, Boys Noize, Tom Misch and TRAKGIRL, being the bulk of them – but the real story is the expansion of what was already a wide spatial remit in Logic to more immersive levels, so you can export your projects as Dolby Atmos files, all ready to play on Apple Music…

Adding bass to any track can be tricky, and sometimes even experienced producers can struggle when it comes to unleashing those all-important low-end frequencies. Part of the reason for this is that lower frequencies are generally harder to monitor than higher ones. Smaller speakers struggle to reproduce bass (you’ll find it impossible to hear sub-bass on laptop or cheap multimedia speakers, for example), and even if you’ve got great monitors, unless your room has been acoustically treated you’ll find that sub-bass notes of different frequencies can appear to have wildly different volume levels. Clearly, this can make mixing bass parts tricky, but we can combat these issues by taking a methodical approach to our bass and using spectral analysis to check that its pitch and volume level are right. Making…

How did you get into music software? SO “My two main obsessions growing up were music and computers, with my first sequencer being MIDItrack Performer on a BBC B computer. I was making demos in my teens as well as being in a band at school, The K-Creative who signed to Gilles Peterson’s Talkin’ Loud label. After releasing our debut album, QED, I started writing with artists, making jingles, and playing at sessions. This led to a record deal with Columbia and three solo albums: Life Changes, Rising Son and Short Circuits. I have played keyboards with Galliano, Raw Stylus, Two Banks of Four, and Kylie Minogue, remixed 50+ tracks, and worked at Xenomania. I now release on my own label, Primaudial Records, continue writing and producing with Incognito, Dave…

GRAPPLE WITH YOUR APPLE In a move that will please hi-tech DIYers, Apple have announced a new Self Service Repair scheme, which means that you’re now able to fix the most recent iPhones (12 and 13) - and, soon, M1 Macs - yourself. We’re not sure we’ll be brave enough to try it, though... LE FREAK, C’EST SLEEP He’s known for funky guitar parts, but the only place Nile Rodgers wanted you to ‘get down’ recently was in your nice warm bed, as he read Story For Sleep: A Peaceful Winter Night, for Apple Music. With Spatial Audio sounds aplenty, it had us drifting off in no time. HOT WEEKND Congrats to The Weeknd, whose song Blinding Lights recently became the number 1 Billboard Hot 100 song of all time.…

If you’re familiar with plunderphonics, hip-hop sampling and 00s garage, you’ll have doubtless heard songs where an original vocal has been manipulated, chopped up to say something completely different or even just to act as an atmosphere or mood maker where any lyrics aren’t even important. I think about songs like Slum Village’s Players, where producer J Dilla expertly flipped the song Clair by The Singers Unlimited, the rhythmic bounce of the garage classic Flowers by Sweet Female Attitude and records like Burial’s Untrue as great examples of how electronic music has allowed creators and producers to push boundaries with the voice as an instrument. In this guide I’ll walk through some of the tools I’ve used in my own body of work to manipulate both my own vocals and…

One part of the hobby or entertainment market which has ballooned exponentially in recent times is the home recording market. This leads us to two conclusions: 1) that there’s an incredible appetite for good quality, budget audio interfaces, and 2) that there was a lot of music being made last year. Lighting the fuse! Arturia’s first foray into the audio Interface market came after many years of development, via the AudioFuse. This relatively substantial and capable product has been quite a success, spawning similarly branded devices, and competing at a price point that is occupied with some serious contenders. Arturia’s newest batch of interfaces provides a completing of the circle; MiniFuse 1 and 2 are smaller, tidier versions of the larger AudioFuses, with less functionality, but with everything you realistically…

Some of the most impressive new ‘other’ additions to Logic Pro 10.7 include updates to the Step Sequencer introduced in 10.5. Live recording is the main one – and something we confess we thought it already had. Here you can add beats using the keyboard or external controller. It’s easy to use and includes useful note velocity, quantise and length options. There’s also a new real-time step mode that lets you input notes more easily, plus a mono mode for entering non-overlapping basslines (for example). Other Step Sequencer additions include automation and note pitch options and all of these extras make SS one of the highlights of the new Logic Pro and one feature alone that other developers would have introduced in an integer update. 10.7 also adds those 2800…

Tape emulation plugins offer a quick and convenient way to access the great sound of analogue tape, and there are already a number of excellent emulations that capture classic tape machines and tape formulation. Taip (VST, VST3, AU, AAX) from Baby Audio is a new plugin that uses artificial intelligence (see boxout) to deliver its tape emulation. This novel approach is coupled with a fresh, slick interface with three colour schemes, and distinctive reel-to-reel style graphics that are animated during playback. Nevertheless, you won’t find typical tape machine options such as speed, tape type and bias. What you have instead are more creative settings (Glue, Wear and Noise), coupled with Single and Dual machine modes and three types of EQ (Hi, Lo and Presence). Factor in more than 100 pretty…

1 Crack open the pack’s Cyclick folder and delve into the four BPM-labelled folders (120, 125, 128 and 132bpm), where you’ll find twinkly synth loops, organ lines, twangy bass grooves and bell riffs. As ever, the pack is royalty free, so don’t feel bad for using a loop in its entirety. 2 The dissonant nature of FM synthesis makes it ideal for synthesising percussion, and you’ll find a bevy of quirky drum hits in the Cyclick > Percussion Hits folder. These range from noisy clap ‘tails’ and springy toms through to short clicks, claps and zaps. 3 Groove Criminals’ Loops folder is crammed full of random cyclical melodica – think gnarling basslines, reversing pianos, esoteric bleeps, technoesque piano chords and more. Plus, both Cyclick and Groove Criminals have provided multisample…

James Bluck has been producing music and DJing at some of the biggest venues including Ministry of Sound, XOYO and Fabric, while Blinkie has millions of streams for his tracks including over six million alone for the track Don’t Give Up (On Love). And as well as producing their own music, both Bluck and Blinkie have remixed a huge number of acts between them, including Fleur East, Disciples, Varski, Mabel, Craig David, KSI and Sam Smith. The two producers have even remixed each other’s tracks so it was really only a matter of time before their production worlds collided and they ended up in the studio together, producing one of the house tracks of 2021 , On Your Mind, featuring vocalist Taet. Here they reveal more about their studio setups,…

As we write this, Black Friday has just passed, and as well as the questionable number of actual deals this marketing-bandwagon-jumping exercise actually generated, it also destroyed the news. Every email from the music tech community during this period tells us about their deals rather than any news. So what to do? Well, seeing as we’re in shopping mode, how about a Computer Music Gear Of The Year? We’ll start with the most exciting category… Best Softsynth of 2021 It wasn’t the busiest of years for the softsynth, but let’s just say ‘quality rather than quantity’. Bundles-wise Korg’s Collection 3 impressed us with its spread of vintage loveliness and Arturia’s V Collection 8 arrived as expected with four new additions, but perhaps it was the company’s Pigments 3 (now 3.5…

Berlin-based DJ and producer Cinthie has been immersed in the city’s electronic music scene, not just as a music maker but as a label owner and, right at the opposite end of the scale, working for music software icons Ableton as a day job. Since being inspired by early electronic tunes in the mid 90s, she has become an in-demand DJ, touring across the globe, but her passion also lies in music production and she has built a stunning studio merging the best hardware – described as “a wide spectrum of some of the most noteworthy vintage drum machines and synthesisers in existence” – with the latest plugins to produce her own unique house and techno tunes. These have appeared on her own label, 803 Crystalgrooves, while her debut album,…

16” MacBook Pro running Ableton Live 11 2019 16” MacBook Pro, macOS Catalina, 32GB RAM, 2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 4GB, Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB. USB hub Ableton Push 2 controller Novation Launchkey 49 MIDI keyboard USB hub for low power peripherals Alternate Mode MalletKAT two-octave mallet controller MalletKAT optional 1-octave expansion Alternate Mode gigKAT 2 sound module for MalletKAT RME UCX II audio interface Quiklok DJ233 height adjustable metal tables Laptop/CDJ stand, clamped to tables, with two shelves, to support the MacBook Pro and Push Korg KP3 Kaoss Pad sampler and effect controller…

> Step by step 1. Setting up Live 11 Lite and a quick overview 1 We’ll assume you have an account at the Ableton site, and have used your unique serial code that comes with this magazine to download Ableton Live 11 Lite and have it installed on your Mac/PC. If not, there are more details in the first of these tutorials from p18. You can also check out the accompanying ‘Intro’ video from filesilo.co.uk or our Youtube channel. 2 When you load Live 11 Lite for the first time it will have the demo set loaded – a complete song for you to check out. On the right hand side of the screen (outlined in red in the above grab) is the Help View of Ableton Live 11 Lite…

Fiery distortions, angelic choruses and delay-coated melodies are all fashioned by effects pedals. The first forays into effecting the signal chain in odd ways were found within amplifiers way back in the 1950s and 60s. Though these mainly spatial effects would subtly shade certain contemporary genres (such as the slap-back echo of rockabilly, or the spring reverb-coated surf genre) it was in the studio where the likes of The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Pink Floyd began to explore how tweaking things in unconventional ways could fundamentally alter their guitar’s tone – particularly when speed was manipulated with tape, and the expansive characteristics that real life reverb chambers could impart. It wasn’t long before transistor-based solid-stage effects pedals became de rigeur, and allowed those without access to high-end studios the…

As if the prospect of a feature-laden MiniFuse interface isn’t enough, at this competitive price point, Arturia’s worthy desire to ensure that you have everything you need to get going helps to seal the deal. All MiniFuse interfaces guide you in the direction of registration with Arturia, at which point you will be able to download a very large bundle of software, much of which offers considerable use outside of simple recording, no matter where you intend to roam musically. Firstly, there’s a free DAW in the shape of Ableton Live Lite. While many OS platforms will offer their own freebies, (and in the case of Mac OS, GarageBand is an excellent starting point) the option to jump on a popular commercial DAW is tempting. But that’s not all; Analog…

cm/experts Our resident music production gurus walk you through their specialist fields every month VOCAL PRODUCTION ATMOSPHERIC AND MOODY VOX SYNTH MASTERCLASS PUMPING SYNTH ACTION TWO LIVE LITE WORKSHOPS! Not one but two tutorials on creating a tune with your free Ableton DAW BACK TO BASS-ICS How to create more weight in your bass using pitch modulation…

…using the cm Suite! A set of features we’ve been wanting to bring you for months, where we identify all the processes you need to know about in a typical production and then show you how to do each and every one using the free plugins from the cm Plugin Suite. It is, as they say, an issue not to be missed! PLUS! u-he for free! u-he’s Bazille CM gets an update, free next issue! Reviews Top tests! Expressive E Imagine, Spectrasonics Extensions and more! Guitars! It’s the final part of our huge computer guitar guide…