Innholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2019 i Future Music

WELCOME Solid foundations In these pages, we often like to go on a little journey to the weirder, more creative ends of what’s possible in electronic music. But as much as out-there effects and complex textures are great, it’s important to focus on the fundamentals sometimes. That’s what this issue’s cover feature is all about. Kick, snare, clap – these three elements form the backbone of almost all dance music genres, providing the punch, groove and weight your track needs to make an impact on the dancefloor. That’s why we’re dedicating nine pages of this issue into exploring ways to shape, refine and customise these core drum sounds. We’re not foregoing the creativity completely though. Head for our new regular Creative Inspiration column on page 76; in our first instalment…

The Future Of Music Reason 11 brings the Rack to other DAWs with plugin compatibility Plus, Propellerhead become Reason Studios When Ernst Nathorst-Böös, one of the founders of Propellerhead Software, was replaced as company CEO earlier this year, it seemed clear it would no longer be business as usual for the Reason developers. And so it’s come to pass: the fact that Reason 11 is on the way should come as no surprise, but there’s a big change in that it’ll also run in other DAWs as the Reason Rack Plugin. What’s more, Propellerhead Software will now be known as Reason Studios. The news seemingly points to a new strategy for the Reason developers, as they seek not to encourage users of other DAWs to switch to their software, but…

The Future Of Music UVI’s Toy Suite puts the sounds of ’80s childhood playthings in your DAW Music technology has a habit of making you feel like a big kid – studio gear is basically just a substitute for a toy collection, after all – but if you want to go back to the stuff you actually played with in your youth, UVI have just the thing. Toy Suite is a massive sample library that contains what we’re guessing will be all the toy timbres you’ll ever need. The exhaustive content list includes tiny pianos, guitars, organs, drums, percussion, whistles, metallophones, bells, shakers, moo-cans, music boxes, drum machines, melodicas, accordions, harmonicas, trumpets, samplers, style-o-phones and talking toys. Better still, there’s also a dual-layer 8-bit synth, offering sounds from the likes…

The Future Of Music Arturia’s MicroLab aims to be the perfect portable keyboard controller Arturia are embracing the joy of smallness with their latest MIDI keyboard controller, the MicroLab. A super-portable, 25-note ’board, this promises several features that set it apart from the rest of the mini crowd. The velocity-sensitive keys are of the same slim design as those on Arturia’s KeyStep controller, which we found to be reasonably playable, given their size. A Hold button can be used to add sustain, which is a nice touch, while a push of the Shift key takes you into Chord mode. This enables you to program a chord and then play it back with a single finger. Modulation and pitchbend are covered by dedicated touch strips – these can also be used…

TRANSIENT CONSIDERATIONS Generally speaking, your kick drum and snare/clap supply the rhythmic one-two punch that defines your overall beat’s power and impact. This means that you need to pay close attention to their transients – ie, their initial front end – and how they cut through the mix in relation to the other sounds going on at that point in time. Many different instruments feature front-heavy components that can occur at the same position as your drums on the timeline, which can blur and smear overall transient detail. The character and prominence of your kick, snare and clap’s transient is often dependent on the genre you’re producing, plus the other sounds going on in the mix. With that in mind, let’s look at a trio of considerations for transient success.…

REVERSED LAYERS Often, an electronic kick or snare may sound a little stark when playing in isolation. One way to emulate the effect of a live drummer’s ‘flamming’ technique, therefore, is to layer a second ‘click’ sample over the main hit’s transient, then adjust its timing until it plays earlier or later in time. In the below tutorial, we’re going to demonstrate one way to achieve this effect using common samples. When sourcing drum layers, any snappy sound can be deployed as a characterful beat component, so be experimental with your selections – closed hi-hats, vinyl ‘pops’, finger snaps and short noise bursts can all spice up plainer one-shots when layered and positioned correctly. Once you have a decent MIDI bass drum laid down, create a new sampler instance on…

Kick. Snare. Clap! Stereoising drums As a general rule, you should keep your most important, powerful drum sounds down the centre of the mix, while your ancillary percussion can be a little more stereo. This will ensure that your mix will hit hard over a mono sound system – you want your hard-hitting bass drum and snare to punch through! However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t get creative with stereo treatments. In fact, an excessively mono or centred mix will probably sound amateurish when heard on stereo playback systems such as headphones. The secret is to strike the right balance between mono compatibility and stereo width… Firstly, try panning your snare and clap left or right by a tiny bit. This may be all that’s needed to help them…

YOUTUBE THE TRACK Leading producers go in-depth on the sounds, ideas and techniques behind their latest releases Prospa, Intended Gosha Smith and Harvey Blumler take us into their production lair – and back to the ’80s – with a look at this First Choice-inspired track DON’T MISS: Josh Butler, Right Time Learn how Butler made the rolling beats of Right Time in Ableton Live Phildel, Glide Dog Phildel breaks down a dark, moody track from her new album Ambassadeurs, Nocturnes Mark Dobson talks us through a cut from his new album Ishmael Ensemble, The River ft. Yazz Ahmed Producer Pete Cunningham tells all DON’T MISS: In the studio with Berlin-based techno eccentric T Raumschmiere Michael Gray breaks down his remix of You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) Mike Wells,…

Tutorial Let’s get modulating! We’ll need a mixer to blend the MCO outputs, modulation sources and sequencing to make the most of the modules 01 > Let’s start by exploring the waves on the MCO. Patch the main output to your mixer/speakers and using both the wave knob and a voltage source modulate the waves. Try using the Quaid Megaslope in loop mode to take you through the wavetable transitions. 02 > Using a mixer, blend the sub, pulse and wavetable outputs. Use the sub as an anchor to pin down the tone then modulate the wave and pulse to animate more complex tones into the patch. Use a filter to further shape and animate the harmonics. 03 > Let’s create an ultra sync pulse! Use a sequencer to step…

Three musique concrète bargains Turntables From £20 1 Pretty commonplace by modern standards but just as relevant, turntables are an obvious sound source for manipulation of recordings. The more control you have over the playback, the better. Look for adjustable pitch control as a minimum, possibly with a reverse playback option. Dig through charity shops for weird records to use as source material; sound effects/unconventional recordings are much better than music recordings. Lo-fi microphones From £5 2 If you’re looking to use recordings as sound sources, you probably don’t want to limit yourself to existing material. Take a lead from the pioneers and experiment with field recordings and original sounds (recorded on tape ideally). Cheap mics are very easy to find on the second-hand market, but also consider contact microphones,…

FM KNOWLEDGE Hitting the right notes When producing electronic music, and especially with low-frequency elements, composition is king. A long, sustained, never-ending low F note may seem the way to inject a track with the maximum perception of bass, but this won’t give a speaker cone the chance to reset and strike again. Instead, focusing on gaps between bass notes – or even leaving sizable sections without any bass frequencies present – will relieve low-end pressure, giving lower occurrences more impact when they do hit. Furthermore, allowing your bass to span a range of pitches – from punishing lows to honkier midrange hits and back again – will tease the listener as they await the return of low-end power. Imagine the pounding power of a typical 808 bass firing up…

Reviews Roland MC-707 $999 The latest reincarnation of Roland’s groovebox range promises DAW-less track creation. Si Truss steps out of the box Roland’s MC range of all-in-one grooveboxes has lain dormant since the release of the MC-808 in 2007. Much like their counterparts in Akai’s MPC line, these sampler and synth-equipped sequencers fell out of favour with much of the general public as music-making software became more powerful and modern tools like Ableton Live and NI Maschine made hardware solutions look old hat. However, over a decade on there’s a new interest in ‘studio in a box’ tools that allow electronic musicians to produce and perform full tracks without a computer. With the success of their recent MPCs and Force, Akai have proved that mass-market production stations can stand up…

ROUND-UP AI-powered tools They may one day take our jobs, but for now let’s welcome our new robot overlords with an appraisal of their DSP and machine-learned talents Algonaut Atlas $99 This AI-powered, browser-led sampler is a boon for those looking to find their own drum samples in a flash, splaying its in-built library (and your folders) on a ‘map’ display, with ‘landmasses’ representing types of hit (kick, snare, hi-hats and the rest). You get a 4x4 pad grid, swappable for 1x8, 2x8, 8x8 and Launchpad configurations, and there are basic sample editing functions per pad. Just enough for most quick drum sketches. There are handy MIDI files included for playing your kits, too. Load your own sample folder into Atlas and have it detect what’s going on from there.…

Prologue as Solina replacement? I don’t want to take my Solina String Ensemble out live – can the Prologue emulate it? In the last few weeks, two new third-party effects have been released by Github user hammondeggs (https://github.com/hammondeggs) which emulate the Solina’s unique bucket brigade chorus/ensemble sound. ‘Buckets’ gives you full control over the LFOs in the effect (if you want to go deeper with your tweaking of the emulation), however if you just want a fixed emulation, then ‘Brigade’ will get your Prologue sounding just like a Solina! Here’s how… Go to https://github.com/hammondeggs/ buckets and download brigade.prlgunit. This is the fixed version of the ensemble effect; much like when you switch the Solina’s modulation button in/out. Load the Prologue Librarian and connect via USB to your Prologue. Make sure your…

Essential Tools For Music Making DRUM MACHINES & SAMPLERS Roland MC-707 $999 Full 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. Elektron Model: Samples £410 Full Review: FM346 Model:Samples is immediate and affordable, but still retains much of Elektron’s deep and creative sequencing tools. If you can cope without the more advanced tools, this is a good buy. Elektron Digitakt £659 Review: FM320 With deep sequencing and a powerful sound engine, Digitakt is the ‘affordable’ Elektron groovebox we’ve been dreaming of. Elektron Analog RYTM £1,499 Review: FM331 Though the MK1 remains a great box, there are plenty of reasons to upgrade to the MKII – user sampling,…

Spitfire team up with the BBC Symphony Orchestra for their “most ambitious project” yet Sampling specialists Spitfire Audio have announced the arrival of their “most ambitious project to date”: a library that captures the world-famous BBC Symphony Orchestra. Created in collaboration with BBC Studios, this required 84 sessions and 200 hours to record. It features 99 players and 55 instruments. Users will be able to take advantage of 418 playing techniques that span strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion. What’s more, there are 20 signals – 11 mic positions, five spills, two atmos and two mixes – for getting total control. Spitfire are calling this a “definitive orchestra, made accessible through cutting-edge technology” and it’s being launched with a keynote that’s being livestreamed on YouTube. Pre-orders are now being taken, with…

Korg MS-20 designer to lead Behringer synth research centre Behringer have hired Hiroaki Nishijima, designer of the original Korg MS-20, to lead their new synth development centre in Japan. Their vision is to build a large research and development centre in Tokyo where talented engineers will focus on creating flagship synths, samplers and other innovations. “I reached out to Uli Behringer because I wanted to be part of his mission and help Behringer design world-class musical instruments," says Hiroaki Nishijima. “This is my dream, too. These days, it’s difficult for current Japanese companies to create the types of synths that I used to develop.” The news that Behringer wants to sign up Japan’s top synth design talent may raise eyebrows at Korg and Roland, with Uli Behringer talking bullishly about…

Talking Shop “I spent all my money on a Korg Trinity workstation and couldn’t pay my rent” Robag Wruhme Robag Wruhme Hailing from the East German town of Jena, Robag Wruhme first made his name as one half of the Wighnomy Brothers alongside DJ partner Sören Bodner. In the decade or so since that partnership ended, Wruhme has been capturing the imagination of dancefloors with his distinctive take on the house sound; a minimal style that’s still packed with emotion, humour and eccentricity. This summer, he returned with his first full-length album in eight years, Venq Tolep, which found a fitting home on DJ Koze and Marcus Fink’s Pampa label. FM caught up with him to talk studios, starting points and buying batteries for his mouse... When did you start…

In the studio with The Qemists Leon: “Back then we were using underpowered PCs, with about 4GB of RAM. We were half sample/half sound design-based. Softsynths were just getting good enough to do sound design.” Dan: “A lot of the bass sounds and Reeces were on Kontakt. That was the only thing we had to make all those different sounds.” Leon: “We would sample, distort, resample, and layer, constantly. Then we had plugins like the Korg Legacy Cell. We used Trilogy a lot for live bass. We also had Z3TA, which was a trance synth, almost, but it was used unprocessed on the album a lot.” Dan: “We had a TC Powercore, too. That had a huge effect on the sound of Join The Q.” Leon: “We had a Focusrite…

Kick. Snare. Clap! BUILDING A BASS DRUM WITH SERUM It’s easy to craft a bass drum tailored to any situation. Let’s make one using Xfer’s softsynth staple 01 > Starting with Serum’s default preset, head to its first oscillator (Osc A) and call up a sine wave. Set its Random Phase to 0%, so the wave’s phase resets every time, then shift its Phase to 60 degrees. This starts the sine from midway through the waveform, giving us an initial click. 02 > Serum’s Envelope 1 is hardwired to amplitude. Unlike a booming 808 kick, a punchy, house-esque bass drum is typically tight and short, so pull Sustain to minimum before setting Decay to a tight value of around 520ms. An Attack value of 0.2ms brings out that click a…

‘Feel’ Understanding ‘rubato’ Rubato describes ‘pulling’ a performance in and out of time, to provide a more emotional, sympathetic effect 01 > We’ve recorded three parts in this track. A main piano figure playing running 1/8th notes and an accompanying strings part, split into higher/lower instruments. Here’s the piano performance with strict quantising. Most emotion is lost to metronomic timing. 02 > Here’s the piano as it was recorded live. It’s so tempting to quantise a part when you hear it playing like this, as some notes are early and some are so obviously late. However, it’s in that ebb and flow that musicality lies. 03 > So let’s look to capitalise on the musicality of the phrase while eradicating the bits of timing which are sufficiently ‘out’ as to…

The element of surprise Let’s look at a trio of simple structural devices you can deploy in your arrangements when working with bass. It’s time to switch things up… Electronic music is inherently predictable. The expectation of certain things to happen at certain times is what makes dance tunes so effective on the dancefloor. However, it’s the subversion of this predictability that can elevate an average tune from good to great, and this is particularly relevant when it comes to bass production. One thing to bear in mind, though: try too many unusual tricks throughout a track and it’ll sound too gimmicky. Instead, stick to one or two particular ‘themes’, and your creative endeavours will have more purpose and impact. With that in mind, here are three small but effective…

ROUND THE BACK Along the rear panel, the MC-707 has two stereo pairs of jack outputs, one acting as a main out and one an assignable output. These are joined by a headphone output, a pair of external input jacks (with a mono input switchable between mic and line), and two more jack pairs acting as send and return connections for an external effect loop. On the MIDI front, the 707 has an input and two outputs. The MIDI routed to these outputs can be configured in the device’s settings, so that the 707’s tracks can be set up to sequence a variety of hardware devices across multiple MIDI channels. Next to these sits an SD card slot, pre-installed with a card acting as the device’s memory. This can be…

SOUNDS & SAMPLES EastWest – Pop Brass $533 *or included in ComposerCloud from $19.99/month > EastWest/Quantum Leap have one big advantage for creating track-ready, sample-based instrument libraries – they own one of the world’s top recording studios! EastWest Studios has a long and illustrious history, with Frank Sinatra, Elvis and Michael Jackson all making use of the space. In fact, MJ engineer Bruce Swedien has called their Studio 1, “the best brass recording room in the world”. Therefore, when you hear that EW is working on a Pop Brass library, and that engineer Moogie Canazio (with 35 Grammy nominations to his name) is also involved, then expectations are high. Pop Brass weighs in with a hefty 23GB download size and features a wide range of four-piece ensemble-based samples. Multiple mic…

GEAR GUIDE DAWS Tracktion Waveform 10 from $199 Full Review: FM345 Waveform is now friendlier, contains more creative tools and brings workflow improvements you’ll have missed from other DAWs. Bitwig Studio 3 $399 Full Review: FM348 A powerful, inspiring update that further cements Bitwig Studio’s stake as the creative producer’s DAW of choice. Steinberg Cubase Pro 10 £480 Review FM340 Despite some niggles, this is a solid update to an excellent DAW; the new features could potentially do away with third-party tools. Propellerhead Reason 10 €369 Review: FM327 Reason is now ready to lock and load with VST plugin support. 10 adds several new instruments and effects, helping you maximise your creativity. Ableton Live 10 €349 Review: FM329 Live 10 is a quality update to one of the best DAWs…

Essential Tools For Music Making SEMI-MODULAR SYNTHS Korg Volca Modular £190 Full Review: FM342 A West Coast synth in a compact package. It may be slightly fiddly and a little complicated, but if you’re willing to give in to its experimental ethos, the Volca Modular is endless fun. AS Impulse Command £1,020 Full Review: FM346 Likely to be an acquired taste, with its unpredictable sequencers and filters, but if you embrace the chaos this is a truly inspirational and creative instrument. Dreadbox NYX 2 £250 The V2 update to this compact semi-modular from Greek brand Dreadbox is capable of some huge, creative sounds and packs a great modulated reverb. Pittsburgh Modular Microvolt 3900 $629 Review: FM341 A characterful semi-modular that wears its influences on its sleeve, but still has its…

| Essential Tools For Music Making AFFORDABLE SYNTHS Roland JU-06A $399 Full Review: FM349 The JU-06 was already up with the best Boutiques, and this update is a winner all-round. A must-try source of classic sounds. Arturia MicroFreak £279 Full Review: FM345 If you’re looking to go beyond regular analogue synths and expand your sonic palette with an affordable creative tool, MicroFreak should be top of your ‘must try’ list. Novation Circuit £250 Review: FM299 A broad range of sounds with a fluid and intuitive workflow all adds up to make Circuit a winner. Its sequencer is absolutely killer too. IK Multimedia UNO £210 Review: FM335 Despite some manufacturing compromises, IK’s first hardware synth is a great-sounding source of analogue basses and leads at a bargain price. Moog DFAM drum…

Essential Tools For Music Making HIGH-END SYNTHS Yamaha MODX from £1,242 Full Review: FM337 While programming can initially overwhelm, the sounds, versatility and portability are hard to argue with. The MODX combines the best of the Montage/Motif/DX engines, at a great price! Waldorf Quantum £3,500 Full Review: FM336 A stunning piece of hybrid synth design – setting a new benchmark for features, interface and sonics. It’s expensive, but a great investment that you’ll find inspiring for many years. Korg Prologue from £1,299 Review: FM332 Despite a few surprising omissions, this sounds inspiring. A unique character, plus the analogue voices layered with VPM sounds and effects sound magical! Sequential Prophet X £3,359 Review: FM336 The Prophet X is a fresh and inspiring hybrid synth that encourages you to explore sound making…

FILTER Roland unleash a stack of synths and beatmakers New grooveboxes, a flagship synth and an updated Boutique all feature in Roland’s 909 day lineup As now seems to be traditional, Roland have announced a raft of new products to roughly time with ‘909 day’ aka 9th September. In probably their most significant announcement of recent years, the lauded Japanese brand have lifted the lid on a range of new grooveboxes, a flagship synth, a new collection of workstations and an update to one of their Boutique line. On the groovebox front, the company have revived their dormant MC range with (this month’s cover star) the MC-707 and its compact counterpart the MC-101. Both feature the brand’s new ZEN-Core engine, making use of a mix of PCM samples and virtual…

The Future Of Music MIDIhub is a standalone box that could change the way you route and process your MIDI data It might look like a standard MIDI interface, but MIDIhub is far more than a standard I/O box. In fact, it’s a full-on MIDI processor and router. We should say that the device can operate as a standard 4-in/4-out MIDI interface (it also has a USB port for power and/or computer communication) but the real magic happens when you fire up the MIDIhub editor on your computer. This enables you to connect ‘pipes’ – these can be thought of as MIDI effects – that enable you to apply complex and creative processing to your MIDI data. These range from simple CC filters to an arpeggiator and a note dispatcher.…

Sub is a beefy analogue drum plugin… and it’s free Sampleson are switching their attention from vintage and digital electric pianos to your beats, releasing a free analogue drum plugin called Sub. As well as being able to produce a slew of classic drum sounds, this throws in a sub-bass oscillator for good measure. Synthesis rather than sampling is the order of the day when it comes to tone generation, which Sampleson say makes the plugin more tweakable and keeps the size down (it’s a slip of a thing at just 35MB). It’s worth pointing out that there’s no sequencer here, so you’ll have to use the one in your DAW, but you do get a mixer with pan and volume controls. If you want to download Sub, which runs…

KICK. SNARE. CLAP! Back to basics For a newcomer to electronic music production, it’s best to keep things simple: arm yourself with a collection of high-quality one-shot samples, then lay them out as audio on your DAW’s timeline, or replay the samples via a MIDI-triggered drum sampler. Many of these sounds have been created by world-class sound designers, so using prefab samples is the most logical way to go if you’re keen to lay down half-decent tracks without getting bogged down in complex drum design. In fact, this is still the chosen method for many top producers: simply pick the right drum samples from the start! However, once you move past the beginner stage, there are many reasons to explore the world of drum design, synthesis and layering. For one,…

KICK. SNARE. CLAP! Drum tuning Beats are relatively inharmonic compared to other instruments. An obvious exception is the tonal bass drum from Roland’s TR-808 drum machine, which has found its home as the dual kick/bass sound in hip-hop and trap. Its sub-rattling tail is usually tuned to the track’s root key, and is often pitched up and down to provide the low-end bass note as well as the groove’s primary punch. Despite this perceived absence of pitch, pay close attention to a drum hit’s tuning in relation to your song’s other elements – the body of a kick or snare, for example, will still have some kind of ‘tone’ that should be transposed to best fit everything else. Many producers like to precisely tune the bass drum to the track’s…

KICK. SNARE. CLAP! SYNTHESISE A CLASSIC DRUM MACHINE CLAP Create the distinctive synthetic handclap sound from the likes of the Roland TR-808 and Boss HC-2 01 > You can recreate a synthetic handclap using any synthesiser that features a flexible multi-breakpoint envelope and a basic noise generator. Here, using NI’s Massive X, we hook up a Performer modulator to control the amplitude of a white noise oscillator. 02 > When synthesising one-shot drum sounds, you want your modulator signals to reset with each new note, rather than loop over and over. Therefore, here in Massive X, we flip our Performer modulator to One-Shot and Key retrigger modes. 03 > The TR-808’s envelope generator uses a quartet of peaks to rapidly modulate noise amplitude, broadly emulating the effect of several people…

Kick. Snare. Clap! DESIGNING MULTILAYERED DNB SNARES In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to craft a power-packed snare using Xfer’s Serum synth 01 > The world’s best drum & bass producers are known for synthesising hard-hitting beats from scratch, so let’s build a punchy snare drum using the principles explored in our kick-building tutorial. Note that, once again, all of our modulation will be unipolar. Fire up Serum in your DAW. 02 > This time, set up two sine wave oscillators in Osc A and B, one tuned an octave below the first. As we did before, set Random Phase to 0%, then use a one-shot modulation ‘spike’ signal to tightly curve the sines’ pitch from high to low. 03 > These sine layers are going to form the…

Creating a glossy multitracked vocal Grant uses multiple layered vocal tracks in Ableton Live and a slew of processing and effects to get the most from Valentina’s vocals 01 > “We recorded the vocal three separate times,” begins Grant. “I panned one of the takes all the way to the right, one of the takes all the way to the left, kept one in the centre, pitched a duplicate down an octave, and used a vocoder with a MIDI carrier to add a polyphonic vocoder feel to another copy.” 02 > “I have few plugins on the vocal group,” Grant reveals. “I’ve used a Waves API 2500 Compressor to compress it a little bit and glue the vocals together, then I’ve added some EQ with Waves CLA Vocals. FabFilter Pro-MB…

Rushing or dragging? It’s all in the backbeat In this walk-through we’ll explore a simple device to shift the ‘feel’ of a groove from ‘fast’ to ‘slow’ without actually altering tempo It’s always fascinating to discover how even the subtlest shifts in a rhythmic groove can change its feel. Subtly delaying the arrival of a kick drum on the down-beat of a bar can provide a subtle shift which makes a groove ‘relax’, whereas we’ve all heard the difference between ‘straight’ and ‘slightly swung’ hi-hats. In real terms, those swung hats only have to be a fraction ‘late’ to completely change our perception of the groove. So it also proves with the backbeat of a rhythm, as we’re exploring through the following steps. We’re focusing on the snare sound, keeping…

‘Feel’ MIDI controllers Let’s use MIDI controllers to add more pathos to a sad string piece. We’ve seen how leaving melody lines ‘unquantised’ enhances feel, but MIDI controllers and velocity assignments can help too… 01 > Start with a simple, sad piece for three instruments. The first is a cello solo from the LA Scoring Strings library; the others are two Flautando string ensemble patches for high and low strings from Spitfire Audio’s Tundra library. We’ve added reverb to the cello. 02 > We want to add to the feeling of pathos. We ensure the Spitfire Audio strings don’t ‘lag’ behind the cello, using MIDI delay to bring these forward in time. There’s a 1/4 note rest in the cello at the end of bar five which we introduce to…

RETROSPECTIVE Musique concrète This sonic experimentalism, born in 1940s Paris and Cairo, left a lasting legacy on modern music © Maurice Lecardent / INA via Getty Images The term ‘concrète’ music was coined in the 1940s by Paris-based engineer, composer and sonic experimentalist Pierre Schaeffer. Defined as music created using recorded sound as source material (ie ‘concrete’ sound sources rather than musical instruments), musique concrète grew out of an experimental environment as recording equipment slowly became more commonplace. Until the 19th century, all music had been created by acoustic instruments or voices. The very first electrical and electronic instruments were invented in the late 19th/early 20th century, but it wasn’t until the ’50s that instruments like organs, electric guitars and synthesisers really began to dominate music. As such, in the…

Crush mix parts with bass DnB producers such as Noisia and DLR are experts at increasing bass perception through clever mix interactions. Here’s a simple, effective way to replicate the effect 01 > To demonstrate a quick trick for increasing the perception of low-end weight and power in a mix, we’re going to use a typical sub-bass part to trigger distortion over other track elements across this 174bpm drum & bass mix. 02 > It’s worth noting that the track’s lowest bass notes are fairly sparse – every two bars, they leave room for a higher-pitched, snarlier bass note to poke through now and then. This sparsity is essential, as you’ll find out… 03 > All of the track’s high-frequency percussion elements are packaged in a single group bus for…

Roland Boutique JU-06A Roland JU-06A $399 Roland revamp their Juno-inspired Boutique with a new arp and expanded sound palette. Si Truss investigates… Like many of Roland’s classic analogue instruments, the Juno-60 and 106 remain highly sought after, despite being, essentially, simple instruments. With just a single oscillator, filter and amp, neither Juno was exactly all-bells-and-whistles, even in its day. Yet the warm, rich sound they created has made them classics, and the Junos remain some of the most widely-used synths in electronic music even now. Roland clearly realise how highly prized these Juno sounds still are, as the Juno-106 was one of the first instruments to receive the Boutique recreation treatment back in 2016. Now that Boutique, the JU-06, is the first to get an updated version, becoming the JU-06A…

GROUP TEST Guitar synth pedals Guitarists have long lusted over the sonic capabilities of the synth, but there have always been limitations to how a fretted instrument can control electronic circuits. Let’s compare five of the latest, and see what they offer the avid synth shredder 1 Meris are well-known for their innovative, great-sounding, DSP-based effects boxes. The Enzo is no exception, with the clue in the title of “Multi-Voice Instrument Synthesiser”. The first thing you’ll notice is the astounding pitch-tracking capabilities. Throw anything at it, and it copes – and that’s before you realise it’s also capable of tracking polyphonic material. As well as working like a conventional monosynth-style pedal, it can create polyphonic and arpeggiated material from its dual-oscillator synth section. Add a bunch of filter modes, stereo…

ADVICE Which are the best guitar MIDI controllers? > Given the number of potential users, the guitar MIDI controller market has always felt surprisingly niche, but there are plenty of options out there. Having spoken to our six-string favouring buddies, one of the best current solutions is the Fishman TriplePlay connect (£199), which can install non-invasively – it attaches magnetically – on most electric and acoustic guitars. You can use it with the companion iPad app or your PC/ Mac, and it promises low-latency pitch-tracking technology. If you’re willing to dispense with your guitar (at least for a while) and embrace a more radical option, you might also consider the Joué MIDI Controller, which is now available with a Grand Fretboard module that gives you 12 frets of six silicone…

Essential Tools For Music Making SOFTSYNTHS Brainworx bx_ oberhausen $249 Full Review: FM345 A strong virtual instrument debut with solid sound and versatile options. The RRP is a bit high though, and it may well also take its toll on your CPU. Native Instruments Massive X £179 Full Review: FM348 A long time in the making, NI’s follow-up to the most successful softsynth of all time doesn’t disappoint. There are still some rough edges at launch, but it sounds exceptional. Arturia Pigments $199 Review: FM342 With a multipart synth engine, sequencer and lots of creative tools, there’s a lot going on in this latest synth powerhouse. Xfer Records Serum $189 This flexible, powerful wavetable synth has quickly risen through the ranks to knock Massive and Sylenth off the top of…