Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i Future Music

One of the great stuggles when it comes to learning to produce music is trying to work out exactly why it is that your tracks don’t sound as polished and professional as releases from your favourite artists. It can be easy to get downhearted and assume the problem must lie in the expensive studios and vintage gear that top producers use – things many of us can’t afford to access. In reality though, given the quality of modern plugins and home studio gear, it’s perfectly possible to capture a ‘pro sound’ at home, whatever your budget may be. All it takes is a little know-how. To help you crack that ‘pro sound’, this issue we’ve sat down with producers and engineers behind some of the world’s biggest artists, to get…

A new effects plugin from NUSofting promises to make sustained, bowed sounds from plucked, staccato ones by freezing and delaying the input signal – and it's available for free. This can turn a guitar riff into a shimmering ambient pad sound, but equally could do the same with any input signal, whether that be synths, vocals or any sample that you like; it's a great tool when it comes to creating atmospheric soundscapes. Sosir has two stages of sound processing, a 'virtual bow' that freezes segments of the input and a delay line with feedback and modulation hooked up to an LFO. Each of these stages has their own gain knob on the interface. There's also a basic reverb that can be added at the end of the signal path.…

A new free plugin from Native Instruments and Jacob Collier captures the sound of Collier’s audience choir in a software instrument. The audience choir is a regular feature of Collier’s live shows where the Grammywinning artist invites his audience to participate in the performance of his songs, conducting them “polyphonically across many different chords, keys and soundworlds”. Jacob Collier Audience Choir is built on recordings of 22 concerts in different cities around the world, from Adelaide to Zurich; as notes are played, you’ll be able to see which recordings you’re hearing on the plugin’s interface. The plugin offers four different vowel sounds (Aa, Mm, Oo, and Ee) which can be blended via the XY pad on the interface’s right-hand side. The instrument also features a chord generator, so that you’ll…

Working under the alias Loukeman, Toronto’s Luke Fenton makes fuzzy, fractured beats that sound like they’re breaking apart at the seams. Lifting vocals from pop, indie and R&B, Fenton runs his samples through pitch-shifters and saturators to gift them with ghostly textures, before setting them against glowing synth lines and crunchy analogue drums. There’s no blueprint to Fenton’s music; his latest project, Sd-2, takes in tempos spanning hip-hop to drum & bass, with a few fruitful detours into beatless ambience and guitar-led instrumentals along the way. The thread that ties the tracks together is Fenton’s talent for recontextualizing unexpected samples through his truly unique take on effects processing, which makes everything sound beautifully degraded. We caught up with Loukeman to hear more about the making of Sd-2. How did you…

Choosing the right drum sounds for a track is vital, as they greatly influence the music’s energy. They complement other elements like melody and harmony, enhancing coherence and ensuring the rhythm section supports the song’s emotion effectively. Well-chosen drum sounds also elevate production quality, making the track more engaging. Crafting Drum Racks with diverse sample variations enables quick experimentation with and customisation of sounds in Ableton Live 12. This fosters exploration of different textures, tones and rhythms. Now, it’s simpler than ever to swiftly and seamlessly generate drum racks with various sample variations in Ableton Live 12, by using the sound similarity search function within the Drum Rack and saving these sample variations to the User Library. We’ll start off by loading in an existing Drum Rack preset and sequencing…

ALBUM Launched in 2014 by British producers Facta and K-LONE, Wisdom Teeth is one of the UK’s most innovative electronic imprints. The label’s remit is far-reaching, with recent releases such as Salamanda’s In Parallel and Tristan Arp’s Sculpturegardening edging further from the dancefloor and into the dreamworld. Club Moss is a compilation release that invites 14 artists from the extended WT family to apply their talents to tempos between 150- 170bpm. Yushh and LUXE deliver amped-up spins on ambient techno, Airhead takes us on a lysergic flight through a reverb-drenched stratosphere, and RAMZi ignores the brief altogether, but our favourite of the set, Maya Q’s Starburst, cleaves closest to an established template, pairing soul-stirring vocal cuts with featherlight breaks. Matt Mullen VERDICT 7.5…

Native Instruments sells a lot of stuff. In addition to a huge history of developing its own plugin instruments and effects, it also sells those of its partners, Plugin Alliance and iZotope, as well as facilitating licensing and downloads for Kontakt and Reaktor developers. The company’s Komplete package has always been huge, but we didn’t think it would get quite this big! But that’s just the software side of the company’s offering – the hardware is where this all gets brought together. NI’s hardware offering is led by the Maschine groovebox controller, Traktor DJ controller, and this, the Kontrol keyboard line-up. The idea is that you can use hardware to control NI-made and NI-supported software, preferably without ever having to touch your computer (although it’s not exactly mission accomplished yet).…

Composer, producer, synthesist, Warp Records signee and touring member of Oneohtrix Point Never’s live band, Kelly Moran is many things, but first and foremost, she is a pianist. Imaginatively exploring the sonic potential of her chosen instrument through technological transformation, Moran’s previous work has made use of prepared piano, extended techniques and electronics to take her prodigious instrumental talent to new worlds. Moran’s latest project, Moves in the Field, shifts the focus of her experimentation from the timbre of the piano to how it’s played. Working with the Yamaha Disklavier, a MIDI-equipped grand piano capable of playing itself, Moran improvised, recorded and programmed a series of duets for herself and the instrument, joining forces with the Disklavier to achieve pianistic feats inaccessible to a human player. Merging her own performances…

THE PROS & CONS + Easy-to-use interface Effective and flattering, particularly on bus and master channels Can be both clean and characterful - Expensive Can be a little opaque about what exactly is going on under the hood Oeksound’s ‘dynamic resonance suppressor’ Soothe has become something of a must-have for mix engineers, and has earned its creator a deserved reputation as one of the most interesting developers in the audio plugin realm, despite having just a handful of products to its name. With Bloom, Oeksound is aiming to further bolster that reputation. Described as an “adaptive tone shaper”, Bloom is another dynamic plugin that responds to the frequencies of incoming audio and applies varying forms of processing depending on its analysis. Here, that involves a combination of dynamic EQ and…

DAACI is an Abbey Roadbacked startup developing AI-powered tools for musicians, composers and producers. We spoke to the DAACI team last year about the generative ‘meta-composition’ software they’re developing that promises to “compose, arrange, orchestrate and produce music” using AI. While that’s still in development, this month DAACI has unveiled a new product and launched an Open Beta Community, inviting users to offer feedback and contribute to their development process. Natural Drums is an “assistive AI co-pilot” for generating drum grooves in real time. Dial in a drum pattern using its sequencer and the plugin will improvise on your rhythmic idea, creating variations and fills that can be tweaked using various controls. Natural Drums itself doesn’t generate any sound, but is instead a MIDI plugin that sends out MIDI data…

Released in 1991, the Kurzweil K2000 was a 24-voice ‘VAST’ synth/ sampler that, at the time, boasted some pretty powerful features. Now it’s returning – sort of – in the 21st century form of the new K2061 and K2088. “We asked ourselves, what if we could rebuild the legendary K2000 VAST synthesiser, but using today’s technology?” says Kurzweil, and the new K20 series is the answer. This was first spotted at NAMM in prototype form, but it has now been announced as 'official' on the Kurzweil website. You can choose from 61- and 88-note keyboard options, both of which support aftertouch, and the VAST tone generation system, which enables you to process multisamples, noise and waveforms with a wide variety of synth techniques, is back in play. The same can…

Last year, we reported on the release of Pittsburgh Modular Taiga, a new semi-modular analogue synth that promised to "push the boundaries of analogue synthesis". In its original format, Taiga is a desktop synth that can be operated standalone in a wooden enclosure or form part of a Eurorack setup as a 60hp module. This week, Pittsburgh Modular has announced the Taiga Keyboard, a keyboard-equipped version of the synth that also features something we don't see in a great deal of hardware synths: a modular expansion bay. The expansion bay offers 24hp of powered Eurorack space, meaning you can expand the synth with any modules of your choosing, augmenting its capabilities with anything from additional oscillators and filters to sequencers, effects or even a sampler. Pittsburgh says this means Taiga…

Following formative years as a percussionist and stints in math-rock and evangelical worship bands, Canadian-American musician Claire Rousay has made a name for herself in recent years by pushing at the edges of ambient music. Previous albums have seen Rousay blending the genre’s staple field recordings and drones with touches of alt-country, pop and a notable emotive streak. On Sentiment, described as an ‘emo ambient’ record, these genre experiments come to the forefront. Largely focused on Rousay’s heavily processed vocals and delicately plucked acoustic guitars, Sentiment is more of a narrativedriven album than Rousay’s previous works, acting largely as a meditation on nostalgia and loneliness. While the songs themselves are described as ‘pop’ by their creator, this is still very much a deconstructed and fractured take on a pop record.…

EP Some producers take such a radical approach to sound design that it makes the next thing you listen to – whatever it is – sound just a little dull in comparison. Dripping in detail, aya’s Lip Flip EP is a catalogue of fried and distorted electronics, coming together to produce a sense of gloom and unease fit for dark, smoky rooms and powerful speakers. Stripping out the effects-fried vocals found on her last full-length project for Hyperdub, aya invites Ugandan MC Ecko Bazz to contribute loose and limber rhymes to the raucous opener. But the smoke clears on the title track, which revives her former alter-ego LOFT for a broken techno speedrun fuelled by a neon-bright hook built from finely sliced chords. Matt Mullen VERDICT 8.0…

The phrase ‘hard to pin down’ was, very possibly, invented for Brian Eno. Never has a person involved in the production of music (and by our definition, so many worlds beyond that) had so many pigeonholes built for him and then abandoned. He’s a synth whizz, having been the flamboyant VCS3 man for ’70s art rockers Roxy Music’s first couple of albums, then taking his electronic knowledge to Berlin to help sculpt ‘the big three’ albums for Bowie in the city, most famously on the single Heroes and track Warszawa from the b-side of Low. And more recently (although not that recently) he became something of a champion – probably one of the only champions, actually – of the Yamaha DX7, and one of the few people to wrestle with…

For many modular synthesists, the case that houses their precious modules may not be the sexiest part of the rig but it is the backbone that makes everything else happen. It’s needed to house, transport and power a setup, so build quality, enough power for any given selection of modules and preferably low weight, for the travelling/gigging musician, are key. ALM Busy Circuits has developed a fantastic range of modules but also a selection of cases that caters to a whole range of uses. All of these cases share certain attributes but there are some variations, depending on the size chosen, so do check things like available power for the size you want. That said, the power produced looks suited to the HP. Power is ‘clean’ with little to no…

> Most of the reviews featured on these pages are based around soundware of various kinds, and mostly samplebased libraries hosted in Kontakt or other software. Occasionally, however, we’ve had forays into synthesiser presets and other content. This time, it’s a two-pronged approach, featuring a new (old) sampling engine that comes bundled with some interesting content. In the early days of sampling hardware, ‘samples’ only became distinct creative entities once the selected piece of audio was actually recorded into a sampler. Not only that, but due to the technical limitations and compromises of the time, the process itself imparted a particular quality on the sampled audio – it was imperfect in ways that varied between units and how the whole process was set up and implemented. This brings us to…

Ableton Live 12 From £259 While some of the new features are better implemented than others, Live 12 is a generous update, stuffed to the brim with new ideas and real potential. Image-Line FL Studio From £85 The latest version of FL Studio 21 adds exciting features, including in-DAW stem separation and Cloud-based libraries. Both are likely to become standard in other DAWs in the future. Steinberg Cubase 12 £497 Review: FM382 Version 12 is a solid and dependable update to Cubase, and offers some excellent new features and small, but important, updates to others. Tracktion Waveform Pro from $119 Review: FM345 Waveform is now friendlier, contains more creative tools and brings workflow ideas you’ll have missed from other DAWs. Apple Logic Pro $199 Review: FM361 Still no Logic 11,…

If creating the perfect drum break is supposed to involve scratchy vinyl, sampling and careful editing, someone forgot to mention it to Excite Audio, because its new Bloom Drum Breaks plugin lets you create that essential rhythmic razzle dazzle in next to no time. This maps loops, fills and one-shots to your MIDI keyboard, so you can switch between and tweak them at will. There are also four macro controls for dialling in digital, lo-fi, slap verb and phaser effects, while the edit page enables you to fine-tune samples, manipulate beats and get in-depth with the saturation, dynamics, noise, lo-cut and hi-cut processors. The workflow is pretty simple: set the tempo, choose a sample bank or one of the 250 presets and then fire off the loops that are assigned…

 Artificial intelligence is fast revolutionising music software; recently, Google and Adobe both announced the next steps in their experimental adventures into music AI. The latest development in this sphere is one of the most intriguing AI-based plugins we've seen in recent months. Combobulator from DataMind Audio processes incoming audio through neural networks trained on the music of artists and sound designers, resynthesising the audio using a process called "style transfer" to recreate the style of another artist using your sounds. DataMind says that this lets you play "another artist's brain like an instrument" by synthesising new audio based on a combination of the input signal and the information in the neural networks. In practice, Combobulator acts more like an effects plugin that applies a new timbre to a sound while…

AlphaTheta, the parent brand that owns Pioneer DJ, has announced the release of its first ever mixer. Euphonia is a rotary mixer, which means that it uses rotary dials to mix between channels instead of faders. Euphonia is a hybrid digital/ analogue 4-channel mixer built around a transformer circuit developed in collaboration with Rupert Neve Designs, which AlphaTheta tells us is tuned specifically for the unit, adding harmonics and culminating in a "glossy and energetic" sound. The mixer is equipped with high-quality 32-bit A/D and D/A converters and uses 96kHz/64-bit floating point processing in its DSP, which powers a number of digital effects including reverb, tape echo, and delay. External effects can be hooked up with the help of the Send/Return section. AlphaTheta is making a big deal of the…

IN THE FIRST of our new video series, we’ve given FM contributor Leftie free rein of Future Music’s Sample Archive and challenged him to make a complete track in under an hour. In part 1, he takes inspiration from melodic, sample-focused house producers like Fred Again.. and DJ Seinfeld. To create a full arrangement, he uses Fred’s single Hannah (the sun) as reference. See how the full arrangement comes together in the accompanying video. Let’s take a look at the key sounds used in our track… 01 One thing that makes producers like Fred Again.. and DJ Seinfeld stand out is their use of found sounds and ambient textures. Our track begins by creating an ambient backdrop using some atmospheric recordings. For this, we layer up a cityscape recording, some…

Labelled ‘shoegaze’ by the British music press for their overt use of guitar pedals during live performance, Oxford-based four-piece Ride garnered significant success for their psychedelic, guitar-drenched approach to alt-rock. Although initially compared to the equally pioneering My Bloody Valentine, Ride would take a more melodic, song-driven approach as emphasised on a trio of early EPs that set the stage for their 1990 debut album, Nowhere. As the band progressed with chart-friendly albums Going Blank Again and Carnival of Light, Ride began to move above and beyond the shoegaze pack to become one of Britain’s last great rock bands until creative differences caused relationships to fracture. By the time they had released their fourth album Tarantula in 1996, co-guitarist Andy Bell had largely taken over vocal duties from Mark Gardener,…

KEY FEATURES 20-voice (10 binaural/stereo) hybrid analogue/digital synth; 2-part multi-timbral; two DDS oscillators per layer; 61-note semiweighted keyboard with velocity and polyphonic aftertouch; 8 x 8 modulation matrix plus 25 extra mod destinations and Performance Control Section; ribbon controller; MPE support; 4-pole 24dB/octave LPF, 1-pole 6dB/octave HPF; 2 x envelopes and LFOs per layer; stereo chorus and delay (with delay freeze) UDO Audio’s Super Gemini synth is designed as the perfect marriage of effectively two synths – hence the name – in one almighty design. But it’s more about how these synths co-exist, work together, and how they complement one another in an incredibly well-designed dual environment. The synth is bi-timbral and binaural – bieverything, really – so you can have 20-voice mono sounds, or 10 big stereo sounds, or…

> Just enough space to squeeze in a review of an Impact Soundworks product! Hollomatic uses the Shreddage 3.5 engine (as discussed in more detail back in the FM review of their Kontakt-based, deep-sampled Fender Telecaster). This time, Impact has turned its attention to a twangy, hollow-body electric guitar, and all the positive comments made in the previous review can be applied here. Once again, quality sampling, sophisticated scripting, detailed editing and strong effects combine to make this an excellent instrument. Bruce Aisher impactsoundworks.com VERDICT 8.9…

NEW ENTRY Full Review: FM408 | One of the best performance synths on the market. The Gemini might be up there in terms of price, but does plenty to warrant the outlay. Groove Synthesis 3rd Wave £3,279 Review: FM406 Simply one of the most powerful synths you could imagine, wrapped up in one of the easiest to use and most hands-on designs. Arturia PolyBrute £2,299 Review: FM362 Arturia’s first polysynth is packed with unique features and has bags of character. A worthy flagship for the Brute range and a top-tier poly. Waldorf Iridium Core €1941 Review: FM406 Undoubtedly one of the best-sounding and most versatile synthesisers in recent years. The compact Core will be a hit with desktop producers. Sequential Take 5 £1,229 Review: FM382 More than just a more…

Intellijel Cascadia £2,025 Full Review: FM401 A bit of a master stroke. Cascadia merges different synthesis types wonderfully and houses them in a format that works extremely well. Bastl Softpop SPII £445 Full Review: FM393 Softpop is an instrument that offers vast tonal options and great sequencing, connectivity and portability. A huge leap over its predecessor. Korg Volca Modular £190 Review: FM342 A West Coast synth in a compact package. It may be fiddly, but give in to its experimental ethos and it’s endless fun. Moog Mavis £339 Review: FM387 Mavis can’t be faulted at this price. It covers a wide range of tones, is well built and brings new options to the Moog format. Moog DFAM £549 Review: FM333 A unique percussion synth, and the perfect partner to the…