Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2023 i Future Music

What a time to be alive! It’s the dawn of the new millennium, and the blistering twist on the nu skool breaks you’re pumping out is the hottest sound in the world. Andy Gardner and Lee Rous, aka the Plump DJs, were living the dream. After their early singles and remixes were assembled into the debut, A Plump Night Out, they found themselves at the forefront of dance music. Jetting off to Ibiza, soundtracking Levi’s ads, supporting Orbital on tour, and headlining the UK’s premier superclub, Fabric, like a coupla absolute superstar DJs. The nights were late and the backslapping near deafening. But, work had to be done. Time to live up to the hype, raise the bar, make a world-beating second album, with the world watching. “It’s not like…

> When you’re in a creative lull in the studio, judge whether the technology at your disposal is helping or hindering you. Having a small selection of hardware and software tools you know inside and out will help to narrow down your palette of options, but even then, you’ll probably have more options than you actually need. One way to ‘defeat the machines’ is by working out how you can use them to assist the compositional process. Strip things back and give these five creative approaches a go… 01 VARYING ARPEGGIATIONS Arpeggiators can be great tools for turning a simple chord progression into something with more rhythmic interest. By layering multiple arpeggiated instruments on top of one another, it can be possible to inspire more than just a single line,…

Many of us have been witnesses to a golden age of music technology, one in which digital music tools have come of age, developed their personalities, honed their craft, and become stone-cold masters of audio jiu-jitsu. In the last decade or two, digital tools have gone from barely passable, to completely viable, to indispensable and widely adopted. So where now for music software? We still live in a time where a lot pof plugin tools aim to emulate the workings of vintage gear: analogue circuit components, amp sims and vintage reverbs. While the technology of these are sophisticated enough to make a time-travelling ’70s mixing engineer fall to their knees, the tools would still have been familiar for the most part. This issue we’re looking in the other direction: at…

MiniLab 3 is the latest incarnation of Arturia’s 25-minikey MIDI controller keyboard. Available in black and white versions, it has the same footprint as the MkII and weighs the same, but now has a slicker overall look. It’s also made with 50% recycled plastic and a 5-year guarantee. The new overhauled top panel is now graced with eight ultra smooth continuous controllers, four sliders and a mini display with accompanying push action rotary encoder. You also get eight velocity and pressure-sensitive RGB backlit pads with a 2-bank configuration. The MiniLab 3 keyboard has an excellent positive action that’s consistent across the keys with minimal mechanical noise. The pitch bend and mod wheel are the touchsensitive slider type and these work incredibly well. It’s also great to see polyphonic aftertouch generated…

The 476P is the largest interface in the Volt series, with more channels and closer control options. In a wooden and metallic case, this model is robust but still not heavy, at 1.6kg, it’s designed for larger projects, like recording bands and groups acoustic instruments all via the same interface. With analogue tube amp simulation and onboard compression, this model offers even more features than the smaller Volt series models. It is, again, inspired by the Apollo series (UA’s set of larger, pricier interfaces), which has made the brand so revered, albeit without the onboard DSP. Four pre-amps for 3-pin/TRS jack inputs each have their own volume controls and vintage tube amp sound options; so four acoustic instruments can be recorded at once. Via four output lines, audio can be…

>For the latest edition to their wonderfully well-stocked sample library, Audiotent have whipped up a nifty set of tom drum grooves for y’all. The 107-strong selection has been carefully coaxed, captured and recorded, then run up the processing flagpole until each rhythmic loop is pumped and punchy. The emphasis here is on the low end, with all the tom lines on offer weighty and whomping. Packaged as an alternative to your bog-standard synth bottoms, this section will give a unique, playful take on your next track’s deep bass business. From urgent and panicked to emotive, dusty and pulsing, each thumping, characterful loop has been designed to give your beats a boost. Real torque. Roy Spencer audiotent.com VERDICT 8.0…

>Wistful, warm and fuzzy feelings mix with woozy bass sounds, shiny guitar twangs and rose-tinted nostalgia, on this set of lo-fi indie rock loops. Drawing on the glory years of DIY labels and their long anonymous cassette tape heroes, this collection hits all the right notes for producers wanting to plump their sample crates with bedroom beats, lilting vocals, and sweet melodies. Special shouts to the thick and forlorn tape-enriched pad sounds, breathy singing, and drum machine thumps, which round out the other choice offerings real nice. Roy Spencer splice.com VERDICT 7.0…

>We’ve been vocal fans of Arturia’s multifaceted power synth Pigments since its launch, and regular free updates Arturia have only made things better. The latest is a full update to version 4, which brings a new look to the plugin as well as a raft of new features. With an instrument as massive as Pigments, it’s not always obvious what new things you can do, so let’s dive into the five elements most deserving of your attention. The new interface Version 4 gives Pigments a UI overhaul. Most obvious is the new Light theme, which swaps the traditional darker skin for a brighter white one (almost confusingly similar to NI’s Massive X, or is that just us?). The most interesting UI addition is the Play mode, which adds a new,…

Creepshow “It became the first track on the album because we were playing loads at Fabric, and would open with it, so it made sense to do that here. And it seemed to fit naturally because it has quite an explosive start to it. And then it goes a bit more heads down with its groove. But, it seemed to work really well as an opener. “I believe the main sample was from a Kool & The Gang record [Rated X]. And the reason we were allowed to use that record was because it was cleared, in the end. We approached them to sort it all out, but had to give all the publishing away for that sample.” Weighed Down “Kim Kalan on vocals. She was on our first album…

> When you sit down in front of an empty DAW, your creativity can often feel stifled by the overwhelming number of options you can choose from. A producer’s hard drive is typically stuffed full of dozens, or even hundreds, of virtual instruments, sample packs and processing plugins. And that’s not counting the myriad of hardware synths and outboard gear that are all plugged in and ready to go. The secret to overcoming this ‘decision paralysis’ is to firstly recognise that it’s a problem, then impose some kind of creative limitation designed to rewire your thinking. After all, back in the day, producers and engineers were limited by the primitive gear they had to hand, and worked around low track counts and meagre sampler channels to wring every possibility out…

Despite having divergent musical upbringings, Joan-Mael Péneau’s techno/rave background has merged seamlessly with Louisa Pillot’s New York indie-rock past to forge an enduringly successful partnership. Since the release of the duo’s debut EP Translations in 2013, the twosome have explored numerous gritty excursions into vocal-based techno rock while creating the RAAR label for their own releases and others. After ten years working together, their debut album Sustained Resistance is a perfectly timed celebration of their hard-hitting amalgamation of styles and political commentary. The LP marks a new chapter in Maelstrom & Louisahhh’s creative growth, with its driving, club-ridden aesthetic scouring the industrial/EBM terrain, amidst vocals riven with polemic outrage and post-pandemic angst. Tell us a little about your musical backgrounds. Maelstrom: “For me it was about going to illegal rave…

> Since Waves hit the scene back in 1992, they’ve earned a place at the head of the audio software table with an expansive, ever-changing line of signal processing tools. Regardless of which bag of music production tricks you wish to rummage through, Waves have no shortage of options. Mixing and mastering, noise reduction and restoration, sound design, plugins for live sound – all corners of the audio world are covered, and in exhaustive fashion. One of the areas in which Waves specialise is vocal plugins, having released a plethora of premium tools that handle tuning, de-essing, double-tracking, creative vocal effects and more. Their latest arrival at the party is Harmony, a “real-time vocal playground” that creates instantaneous harmonies and chords from solo vocals. Complex vocal harmonies can be gorgeous…

On the lead single from Dorian Concept’s new record, What We Do For Others, the lyrics are mostly inaudible, vocals warped beyond recognition into an alien choir of pitchshifted yelps and howls. The one phrase we can make out, though – just about recognisable within the freewheeling carnival of synths and drums – is the insistent imperative of the song’s title: “let it all go”. This lyric seems to serve as a guiding philosophy for the project, which saw Austrian electronic musician and synth savant Oliver Johnson wilfully abandoning the impulse to deliberate over every detail of his productions in pursuit of an elusive perfection. Instead, he chose to embrace the magic of the first take, channelling the initial outpouring of creative energy and excitement that often accompanies the birth…

First sE Electronics gave us the DM1 Dynamite, an inline preamp that resembles a red stick of, well, dynamite. Then there was the NEOM USB microphone, with its gain dial that goes to 11, and now we have the DM2 TNT that looks like another stick of high explosive, this time in fetching Cobalt blue. It may look like a joke – we particularly like the faux fuse that pokes out of the lid, and the stencilled T.N.T lettering – but sE are deadly serious about this somewhat explosive product. Like the DM1 it’s a low noise, active, inline preamp intended to address two common problems for owners of passive dynamic and ribbon microphones – insufficient gain and impedance compatibility issues. Ribbon and dynamic mics work very differently but both…

Prolific Swedish developers Klevgrand have released a real variety of plugins in recent years, although most have tended to be fairly small-scale and focused. Tools such as the Rum room emulator, Skaka percussion sampler and Fosfat ‘transient fertiliser’ have each focused on a fairly niche element of the production workflow, albeit usually in innovative and slightly kooky ways. Tomofon is by far the developers’ most substantial release to date. This is a virtual synth that blends elements of sampling and wavetable synthesis to create what Klevgrand call a ‘real audio synth’. In practice this works by taking an audio file and slicing it into small chunks, which are then mapped across various pitch zones. Each pitch on the keyboard has multiple layers, so the results are kind of like having…

>With a title like that, you’d expect End Of Days wails. But this sugarysweet selection of trappy pop acapellas couldn’t be further from that, with the five lyrical construction kits here feeling like they’re filled with cheery, radio-friendly bubble gum sing-songing, in which butter wouldn’t melt. However, give it a minute to clock the darker sub-text at play; all the zombies, murder, and the apocalyptic themes that run deep, making for an innocent looking, but sinister selection of vocals, perfect for soundtracking our long overdue Armageddon. Roy Spencer loopmasters.com VERDICT 7.0…

On her new release for Texan imprint Western Vinyl, Hollie Kenniff explores the complex relationships between memory and place through expansive, emotive ambient music. Titled We All Have Places That We Miss, the record deftly captures the bittersweet tang of nostalgia through gorgeously layered instrumentals that envelop synths, piano and guitar in a carefully chosen palette of effects and sonic processing, resulting in a quietly moving tapestry of sound that soothes and uplifts in equal measure. Working within a genre that’s traditionally been somewhat male-dominated, Kenniff draws inspiration from fellow female artists within the burgeoning ambient experimental scene, including Rachika Nayar, Ann Annie and Madeleine Cocolas, among others. “A lot of ambient music that’s been made up until recently has mostly been by men,” she tells us. “Hopefully, with more…

When you’re inspired, the creation of electronic music can feel effortless. Every sample you select is the perfect one, falling into place on your DAW’s timeline like magic. Firing up and triggering a synth instantly inspires a bassline or hook. MIDI notes and audio build up to create a composition you never could’ve planned. Once those creative juices are fully flowing, it feels like the music is writing itself. If you’ve experienced this zen-like state, you’ve probably been through the complete opposite, too: those times when a blank screen remains overwhelmingly empty, and every technique is doomed to fail. The harder you push against this creative drought, the more stress builds up. If you do push past this ‘writer’s block’ somehow, you can end up with a track that has…

> Opening up the blank canvas of your DAW can be an intimidating prospect for all of us, not just those at the beginning of their journey into music production. The question of where exactly to start when you’re building a track is one that’s puzzled artists of all stripes, from bedroom beatmakers to hit producers, and each one has different methods for taking that first leap into the creative abyss. We’ve spoken to more than a few accomplished music makers over the years, asking each artist how they typically embark on the creative process and get started on a track. Here’s what they had to say… 14 TOM VR I will often just pick a random project that I ditched months back and export it, drag it into a…

39 FAHRLAND “Everything I do music is trial and error, watching others, thinking outside the box and staying true to your feelings. Sounds easy, but it’s an everyday challenge. Sometimes it’s difficult to find a musical detail worth making a song out of. It may be random jamming on new gear, or just the radio. It’s not always the ‘how’, but also the ‘why?’.” 40 HYPOXIA “For my Hypoxia material, those compositions begin with selecting one instrument from my collection, taking it out of the studio and isolating myself with that instrument, trying to create something compelling within that instrument’s limitations.” 41 LAPALUX “Thinking of music a visual sense can really help break away from times where you feel uninspired. I like to try and write music to…

Some artists spend their career restlessly experimenting with all kinds of equipment, instruments and gear, taking stylistic detours into new approaches and techniques with every album released. Others discover an affinity for one or two pieces of kit early on, forging an ongoing creative partnership with their tools that goes a long way towards defining their sonic fingerprint. Derwin Dicker, better known as Gold Panda, can firmly be placed in the latter category. Dicker’s worked with the Akai MPC and a turntable pretty much since his first release, Quitter’s Raga, came out in 2009, chopping up, arranging and manipulating samples into music that sits somewhere in between the fidgety pulse of dance music, the sample-happy, DIY ethos of hip-hop and the glitchy abstraction of minimal electronica. Other instruments and machines…

1 Strum is a neat little multiband delay which grants you deep control over up to 15 bands of your audio signal. You can set the number of bands using the Bands dial; higher values will sound smoother but be more CPU intensive. 2 Adjust the delay time according to frequency by dragging the red node, and set the max time using the delay dial. In Free mode delay time is measured in milliseconds. In sync mode, the dial sets the maximum number of delay repeats. 3 Click the blue feedback button to adjust your signal’s feedback level according to its frequency using the blue node. You can toggle low- and high-shelf factor bands and adjust the frequency, amplitude and bandwidth with the parameters to the right. 4 Add modulation…

> On the one hand, synthesis has forefronts in many areas of digital technology, but from another perspective, things can look a little unchanging. Even today’s most interesting and innovative synths operate under a basic guiding principle: take a source sound (or multiple), and then process that in a variety of ways. Really, the innovation in synths must come from one of these two areas: either in development of a better or never heard before sound generation, or in more interesting, unique or exploratory ways of sculpting or enhancing that signal. Synths like Newfangled Audio’s Generate or Physical Audio Preparation take their inspiration from real-world phenomena abstracted into a usable, programmable and, ultimately, lovable instrument. So where next for synthesis? We can’t tell you exactly, but we’re itching to find…

Many guitarists spend countless hours experimenting with pedals, amp settings and core cabinet-miking zones to produce a tone that suits. With the advent of top-flight amp/cab simulators, and dexterous effect-chain modelling in software (notably, IK’s own AmpliTube) it’s now easy to do this entirely in the box. To the ears of some holdouts, however, these software-sculpted tones might lack bite, gain and, crucially, the venue-filling results that their own hardware has already yielded. Heeding these desires, IK Multimedia have created a new hardware/software combination with the express intention of analysing the particular qualities of an external signal chain for software replication. Then, the particular tone of your pristine hardware can be called on, whether in the studio or on-stage. This new bridge between two worlds comes in the shape of…

Percussive voice modules aren’t hard to find, so why would a developer release another? Noise Engineering have answered that question with Tymp Legio, that offers some useful extra features on top of a versatile voice module. The 6hp module is well built and graphically interesting while staying clearly labelled. The layout is simple, with three large knobs for pitch, decay and Wackitude (more on that later), a toggle switch for selecting the three modes and one for Tang, a sub mode selector. The bottom half is dedicated to a full set of CV ports. These allow patching of pitch, decay and wack, alongside a trigger input. Beneath them you’ll find a stereo input and output pair. All good, although the stereo pairs are positioned top to bottom (and horizontal would…

>Some seriously heavy vocal samples up for grabs inside this quality pack of bluesinfused singing sessions.Choosefromleadwork,backingtracks, off-the-cuff adlibs, and other lyrical layers, full of stank-faced grit and soul. This 1.61GB set of royalty-free pipework is broken down into song kits, with all the acapellas captured in stunning quality. And each group or solo line is primed and ready to get chopped up, or slipped over your funkiest productions. Really outstanding and powerful performances, throughout. Raw and authentic. With flashes of the Delta greats, up to the more modern growls of Jack White and the like. They say you can’t sing the blues until your second divorce. Dang. I just hope these guys can still see their kids. Roy Spencer loopmasters.com VERDICT 9.0…

>Give your Afrobeats a sonic shot in the arm, with this lovingly assembled selection of loops and one shots from the studio files of Senegalese producer, Iss 814 alongside Samba Traoré, a gifted guitarist from Mali. The pair explore a whole host of past and present West African roots and rhythms, all of which are interwoven harmoniously with vitally modern takes on drum programming, dubby subs, and club-ready tops and synths, combining into a groovy, upbeat, poppy set of shapes and sounds to suit well-travelled tastes. Roy Spencer splice.com VERDICT 8.0…

Arturia MiniFreak €599 Full Review: FM391 | Although less of a trailblazer than the original MicroFreak, this is a stellar, versatile-sounding hybrid synth that’s a joy to get hands-on with.. ASM Hydrasynth Deluxe £1,489 Review FM383 The Deluxe is a great-sounding, flexible polysynth, ideal as a performance-led keyboard that can successfully reach a wide range tones and textures. Korg Wavestate £699 Review FM353 Wavestate walks the line perfectly between paying tribute to a ’90s classic and offering cutting-edge tools. A fantastic update to a much-loved synth line. Waldorf Quantum £3,500 Review: FM336 A stunning piece of hybrid synth design – setting a new benchmark for features, interface and sonics. It’s expensive, but a synth that you’ll find inspiring for many years. Korg Opsix £699 Review: FM365 Opsix is packed with…

Pioneer DJ DJM-V10 £2,899 A favourite of many pro DJs including the likes of Carl Cox. This is a truly top-end, performance-centric device stuffed with features and flexibility. Allen & Heath Xone:96 £1,429 A worthy follow-on from A&H’s much-loved Xone:92, the 96 is a rugged and flexible performance mixer with plenty of flexibility for modern hybrid setups. Playdifferently Model 1.4 £1,950 Designed by Richie Hawtin, the Model 1 kicked off the boom in high-end performance mixers. This update strips it back to four channels for a more compact and affordable take. Rane MP2015 £2,339 Rotary mixers aren’t for everyone, but there’s a lot to like about Rane’s current crop, which blend retro cool with some useful modern features such as a USB interface. Pioneer DJ DJM-900NXS 2 £1,659 Pioneer’s Nexus…