Table of contents for June 2019 in Future Music

WELCOME Slice and dice Ever since the first modern samplers brought audio manipulation within the reach of everyday producers, the process has remained a cornerstone of dance music production. From the funk record-slicing of ’90s hip-hop to the breakbeat layering of classic jungle, sampling has consistently remained at the heart of electronic production. While the concept remains the same, the technology has come on a long way from the early days. What our DAWs (or even mobile apps) can do now was pretty much unthinkable for producers 20 years ago. Still, many classic techniques remain, many of which were developed out of necessity thanks to the limitations of early samplers. Join us on page 30 as we dig into the history, foundations and modern possibilities, and help you craft better…

CLASSIC ALBUM Maribou State Portraits Counter Records, 2015 Words by Roy Spencer For their debut full-length release the British electronic duo of Chris Davids and Liam Ivory, aka Maribou State, crafted a stunning soup of ethereal beats for their choice cast of guest vocalists. Flitting effortlessly between house, 2-step, and deeply groovy downtempo dance music, each of these wonderfully sculpted songs, drenched in reverb and vinyl crackle, came off like vintage soul, skewed through the prism of some quite masterful Ableton programming. The resulting sound was achingly beautiful, and pretty epic in scope. You’d never have guessed it was made in a shed. “It was The Shack In The Back,” says Liam. “A tiny thing behind my parents’ house. It wasn’t soundproofed, but that meant that it had really good…

ALBUM REVIEWS ALBUM OF THE MONTH Carlton Jumel Smith 1634 Lexington Avenue Timmion Records 59-year-old singer, songwriter, producer and actor, Carlton Jumel Smith’s debut album for Timmion Records is an energetic, uplifting and joyous celebration of a lifetime of soul. Ever since seeing James Brown at his infamous Apollo Theatre show in 1968 as an eight-year-old, Smith has been a sincere devotee to soul and funk, travelling the world performing, making music and even starring as James Brown in the 1999 film, Liberty Heights. After hooking up with the ever-on-point Finnish label, Timmion, Smith now finally unleashes his dazzling and highly expressive debut LP. Named after the address in the lively Puerto Rican neighbourhood of El Barrio in Spanish Harlem where he grew up, the record is brimming with life-affirming…

Custom kick layering Designing the all-important bass drum from scratch will help set you apart from the competition. Here’s how it’s done… Where drum samples are concerned, the bass drum is the lifeblood of dance music. If you produce house or techno, it’s the primary focus of the entire record, which is why top-tier producers in those genres anguish over every aspect of their kicks, from transient to tail. Kick drum design is also the area where production and sound design coexist. Sure, it’s fine to reach for ‘the perfect sample’ when you’re in a hurry to write a track but why not build your own bank of kick samples for those occasions? Not only is kick design fun, but it’ll furnish your samples folder with bespoke sounds no-one has,…

The Art of Beatmaking Breakbeat science As a brief introduction for the uninitiated, a ‘breakbeat’ can be defined as a sampled section – in most cases a bar or two, but sometimes it can be more – of a drum loop lifted from a record. The sounds of sampled drum breaks are synonymous with electronic music, from the crude workings of ’90s rave and jungle through to the retro-inspired efforts heard in modern tracks. Usually taking their name from the original record they’ve been sampled from, classic breakbeats such as the Amen, Funky Drummer and Hot Pants have become highly significant on a cultural level, due to their distinctive grooves and timbres. Many have tried (and also failed) to recreate them from scratch, which is why there’s nothing quite like…

In The Studio With Amon Tobin Extolled for his obsessive approach to sound sculpting, Amon Tobin has become one of electronic music’s few modern visionaries. Danny Turner discusses the formula behind his new album, Fear In A Handful Of Dust © Jesse Stagg Amon Tobin’s refusal to stand still is an uncanny reflection of his upbringing. Born in Brazil, he spent his formative years living in Morocco and various locations in Europe, including Brighton. It was here the Brazilian first started experimenting with tape decks and samplers, impelled by the burgeoning drum & bass scene. His debut release under the name Cujo immediately turned heads. Ninja Tune spotted his talent and signed him up in 1996, and he’s remained there ever since. The last two decades have seen Tobin become…

Orchestral articulations in an electronic context Orchestrally-derived textures aren’t exclusively the domain of one genre or the other. Here we work those sounds into a chart-friendly dance track An interesting way to pursue newness is to abandon the ‘expected’ instrumentation of a particular musical device and swap it for something else. Below, we’re swapping a conventional pad for a couple of more interesting, orchestra-derived timbres. The first of these is from Spitifre Audio’s LCO Textures library, which turns the unique musical performances of the London Contemporary Orchestra into a series of zoned loops, combining strings, winds and even voices. Each loop can be panned, assigned to internal effects and volume-balanced individually, with the contrasting movement from one zone to the next providing an ever-evolving, ever-fluctuating texture. We’re also swapping a…

MODULAR MONTHLY System-500 Does Roland’s Eurorack offering give you a flavour of classic Roland modular systems? Most people reading this will be familiar with some of Roland’s synthesiser products. Two key parts of Roland’s history that the new Eurorack System-500 builds on are the System 100m and the System 700. Both of those modular synths provide the backbone for the new Eurorack modules. Visually the System-500 looks like a darker-panelled half size version of the System 100m and the circuits from both the 100m and the 700 provide the basis for the new modules. We’ve been lucky to have a lot of experience with System 100m so we were keen to dive in. The first thing, of course, is the size difference: Eurorack is based on modules that are 3U…

QUICK TIPS 1 When high- or low-pass-filtering a signal, experiment with different slope settings in the mix. Depending on the sound you’re going for, ubersteep slopes applied across multiple mix elements can sound unnatural, so go easy. 2 As any EQ should serve the mix as a whole, get out of the habit of making EQ adjustments with the element soloed. After all, you actually want to hear how your track’s frequency balance is coming together as a collective whole. 3 Depending on the EQ you use, the more active bands you dial in, the more you degrade the sound to some degree. Unless you’re purposely using an extreme curve for a creative effect, try and use the minimum amount of EQ moves possible to achieve your end result. 4…

THE ALTERNATIVES Novation Circuit £255 Circuit boasts two four-voice digital synth engines, plus sampled drums. There’s considerably less hands-on synth control though. novationmusic.com Korg Volca FM £120 The DX7-influenced Volca FM is a more esoteric instrument with less in the way of parameter control. It remains a characterful four-voice synth though. korg.com Korg Minilogue XD £565 If you want four voices and real analogue is a must, the Minilogue range is a great choice. The upgraded XD adds digital character to the mix too. korg.com…

THE ALTERNATIVES Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2 £339 Perhaps the benchmark against which many combined sampling and synthesis-based instruments are measured. Among its features is the ability to play audio content via a granular synthesis engine. spectrasonics.net Steinberg Padshop Pro £68 The basic version of Steinberg’s granular synth comes with Cubase. However, for £68 anyone can get this excellent synth (and the Pro version of it includes the ability to import your own samples). steinberg.net Arturia Buchla Easel V €199 If you’re interested in some of the less obvious aspects of analogue synthesis found in Parallels, then you might well find satisfaction with this software version of a synth that clearly inspired it. arturia.com…

Reviews | Arturia 3 Compressors You’ll Actually Use Arturia 3 Compressors You’ll Actually Use $199 Arturia turn to compressors for their next effects bundle. Si Truss feels the squeeze After years in the synth emulation game, Arturia broke into the world of plugin effects last year with two bundles of outboard emulations – covering classic filters and preamps – under their new ‘Effects You’ll Actually Use’ branding. Now they are adding a third bundle to the range, taking inspiration from vintage compressor hardware. As with the previous bundles, we get three processors, each of which is based on a classic studio effect. These are the FET-76, emulating the UREI 1176, the VCA-65, based on the dbx 165A, and TUBE-STA, which takes its cues from the Gates STA-Level. The latter is…

AUDIO INTERFACES Universal Audio Apollo x6 £1,800 Full Review: FM340 The new series is, sonically, now a match for any rival interfaces. If you’re tempted by the UAD ecosystem, this is highly recommended. Steinberg AXR4 £2,200 Full Review: FM342 Stunning audio quality with ultra high-resolution recording rates and gorgeous preamps designed with Neve’s involvement. Apogee Element 46 | £859 Review FM318 If you’re happy with your studio interface being controlled via software, Apogee’s Element range offers great quality and features. Audient iD4 | £120 Review FM312 This compact interface delivers audio quality and stripped-back functionality for a thoroughly reasonable price. A great budget interface. Arturia AudioFuse £519 Full Review: FM321 A nicely designed, highly configurable interface ready to have almost any sound source thrown at it. Its price is the…

ARCHIVE FM’s Sample Archive gives you over 10GB of carefuly-curated, royalty free sounds to use in your music. Here’s what’s inside... AMBIENT SOUNDS PT.1 ’90s Ambient (562 samples)Ambient Dawn (490 samples) AMBIENT SOUNDS PT.2 Majestic Bells & Mallets (444 samples)Spring Reverb & Tape Delay (533 samples) ATMOSPHERES & BACKGROUNDS Atmospheric Beds (369 samples)Noise, Crackle & Hiss (512 samples)Sounds of the City (371 samples) CLASSIC SYNTHS PT.1 Analogue Polys (625 samples)SH Collection (500 samples) CLASSIC SYNTHS PT.2 Analogue Poly Chord Hits (342 samples)Classic Synths: ’80s, ’90s, ’00s (678 samples)Hardware Arps (511 samples) CREATIVE DRUMS Cyborg Beats (514 samples)Lo-Fi Sampling (555 samples)Obscure Drum Machines (517 samples)Overloaded Beats (889 samples) ESSENTIAL DRUMS 808 and 909 (39 samples)Ultimate Cymbals (503 samples)Ultimate Kick Bundle (505 samples)Ultimate Snares & Claps (676 samples)Vintage Drum Machine Hits (548…

Omnisphere hits version 2.6, adding more hardware control and a beefed-up arp The freshly-minted Omnisphere 2.6 sees Spectrasonics building on the hardware synth integration that landed in version 2.5. There’s also a revamped arpeggiator, along with some new sounds. To recap, Omnisphere 2.5’s hardware synth integration enables you to use a range of classic synths to control Omnisphere. A selection of new profiles has been added in version 2.6, including the likes of the Juno-106, Prophet-08, MicroKorg and Nord Lead range, bringing the total to more than 60. The arpeggiator, meanwhile, gets new creative tools, a new preset library and more. You can also capture the MIDI data of the arpeggiator’s current state and drag it into your DAW so that it can be tweaked to perfection. Finally, those new…

Matmos “We like sampling objects: cacti, oatmeal, latex, chocolate pudding, you name it…” Matmos Formed in San Francisco and now based in Baltimore, electronic duo Matmos – aka Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt – have become known for their high-concept albums that see them building sonic experiments around a central theme. Their latest, the excellent Plastic Anniversary, sees the pair creating rich soundscapes purely from recordings of plastic material. We caught up with Drew Daniel to find out more... When did you start making music? “When I was 16 I was heavily into William S Burroughs, and specifically the ‘cut-up’ novels likeThe Soft MachineandThe Ticket That Exploded. Following his instructions about making field recordings, I started to collect cheap tape recorders and do primitive experiments in tape collage using the…

LIKE IT? TRY THESE… Simon & Garfunkel Bridge Over Troubled Water A mandatory LP in every parent’s record collection, and a slightly surprising influence on Maribou State tracks like Raincoats. ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: Cecilia, The Boxer, Bridge Over Troubled Water Jono McCleery Darkest Light The album that turned Liam and Chris onto the folk rocker’s amazing voice, resulting in his guest spot on their own debut. ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: Darkest Light, Alive Again, Stream Maribou State Feat. Holly Walker Tongue EP The start of a beautiful working relationship. Hear the boys’ first collabo with their go-to, super slinky, soul songstress. ADD THESE TO YOUR PLAYLIST: Tongue, Larks Rise, Tongue (Drew Hill Remix) Maribou State ‎ Kingdoms In Colour For their epic 2018 release, MS dug deep…

Feature The Art of Beatmaking CHOP, LAYER AND EDIT YOUR WAY TO BETTER SAMPLED BEATS... If the synthesiser is the primary melodic instrument of electronic music, then the sampler can be thought of as the tool that has single-handedly defined the punchy, repetitive rhythms that we now take for granted. Though recorded drums have been around since recording technology itself, it was the introduction of the affordable digital sampler that allowed everyday producers to work with sampled drum sounds without the need for expensive studios. Fast forward to today, and sampled drums are still the most common rhythmic devices in the producer’s toolbox. Using prerecorded audio means you can call up any drum sound in existence: classic one-shots from expensive machines, strikes taken from the world’s best drum kits, iconic…

Buffing breakbeats Working with original breakbeat samples is part art, part science; many producers have dedicated years to the craft Part of the difficulty is due to their rough, unwieldy timbre – most have been ripped from old ’70s records, often from crackly vinyl, and somewhat lacking in heft compared to modern drum loops. If you want to use a classic break, try and obtain the cleanest, highest-quality sample you can. The internet is awash with lo-res mp3 versions, so make the effort and hunt down the original track in WAV quality for the best results. This may mean digging around online for a CD copy if you can’t find the file online. Once you have a great-quality rip of your chosen break, and you’ve sequenced it effectively using our…

The Art of Beatmaking Processing ideas for sampled beats As it’s tricky to alter sampled drums at source, familiarising yourself with processing techniques is essential. Here are six approaches to consider… 01 As each drum pattern note will be identical when using samples, use clever tricks to add movement over time. Send your drum signal to a reverb aux, then place a gentle, random, slow-moving tremolo pre-reverb on the aux. Subtle volume modulation causes the drum signal to hit the reverb differently each time, giving that virtual ambience a feeling of drift and movement. 02 If you’re using upfront drum sounds from modern sample packs, they’ll probably be processed to extremes already. This is fine if you want something ready-made to slot into a track, but can be a little…

THE TRACK Ishmael Ensemble The River ft. Yazz Ahmed Severn Songs © Joe Branston Originally a solo electronic artist, Bristol-based saxophonist and producer Pete Cunningham formed the Ishmael Ensemble a few years ago to flesh out his live performances. The outfit have come on a long way since then, growing to encompass a cut-and-paste form of composition that melds live recordings, modular synths and tape manipulation, alongside their semi-improvisational live shows. This month sees the Ensemble release their debut album, A State Of Flow, created by an assortment of musicians and collaborators, filtered through the lens of Cunningham’s deft production. FM caught up with him in his Bristol studio to find out about the creation of album centrepiece The River, which combines live horns and field recordings with cut-up drums…

PRODUCER’S GUIDE The orchestra remixed It’s not an uncommon perception that orchestral players are a musically conventional bunch. Whilst we all know that they’re among the most technically gifted musicians on the planet and absolute masters of their chosen instruments, it’s tempting to see them as rather a staid lot. Maybe that says more about prejudice against classical music (the repertoire we readily players) themselves, but maybe it’s also because orchestral members aren’t usually composers; they rely on a musical score to tell them which notes to play and aren’t famous for their improvisatory skills. But maybe it’s time to rethink this stereotype. Pay proper attention and you’ll find, instead, that orchestral players are capable of making some of the most shocking, haunting, ethereal, visceral and transformative sounds you’ll ever…

QUICK TIPS 1 Widen the gene pool of your listening. It’s amazing how inspiring it is to have your mind blown by music that you’ve never heard before, looking for new places from which to mine fresh approaches to your productions. Find out if an orchestra is playing locally to you and go and hear them. 2 Don’t be afraid to resample – find the bits of a texture you like, add effects, bounce it and start again, making your own sample instruments from your own selections. 3 Record your own textures. The great thing about some of the scrubbed, poked or prodded articulations cropping up in today’s sample libraries is that you don’t need a degree to perform. Grab old instruments, set up mikes and improvise one note at…

FMCHOICE Six workhorse parametric EQ plugins Your DAW’s stock EQ Every DAW comes with a high-quality parametric equaliser, and this may be all you need for basic frequency-shaping tasks – third-party options just add more features. FabFilter Pro-Q 3 | £134 Probably the most popular parametric EQ plugin (now with dynamic EQ features), FabFilter’s go-to mixing tool serves the perfect combination of features, ease of use and GUI design. DMG Audio EQuilibrium | £175 Dave Gamble’s insanely powerful plugin is an EQ for audio nerds. Almost every section can be customised to fit your needs, making it a true workhorse option. Tokyo Dawn Records VOS SlickEQ | free Arguably the best free tone-shaper, offering four bands of EQ, auto-gain compensation, four saturation models and even mid-side operation. Eiosis AirEQ |…

Softube Parallels Softube Parallels $149 Bruce Aisher test drives Softube’s new plugin and discovers how it combines the old and the new in one package Softube need no introduction, present everywhere from effect and instrument plugins to controller hardware. Given that so much of their output is dedicated to emulating the sound of both modern and classic hardware, it’s interesting to see that their latest instrument is based around samples rather than pure modelling. So, unlike Heartbeat or Modular, the primary building block in Parallels is previously created audio content. This raw material comes courtesy of Johan Antoni of Stockholm synth emporium Syntotek. In fact, it was after being inspired by synths like the Korg 800DV and Oberheim Two Voice (that feature a straightforward, but flexible, dual voice architecture) that…

Reviews | NI Komplete Audio 2 £109 The humble 2x2 interface forms the basis of many compact and mobile setups. Jon Musgrave sizes up this latest unit Komplete Audio 2 is one of a pair of new compact USB 2.0 bus-powered audio interfaces from Native Instruments. Both follow a similar desktop style design to their long established Komplete Audio 6 unit. However, the new interfaces are smaller, lighter and visually slicker, and although there’s no onboard MIDI like the Audio 6, the maximum sampling rate has been increased to 192kHz. Komplete Audio 2 is a two-input, two-output design with two identical mic/line/instrument inputs. Connections are on space-saving combi XLRs with individual selector switches to select between line and instrument. 48V phantom power meanwhile is engaged globally via a single switch.…

Reviews | ValhallaDSP ValhallaDelay ValhallaDSP ValhallaDelay $50 The plugin ‘verb masters turn their hand to the world of classic delays. Si Truss is mighty impressed… Comprising straightforward interfaces and excellent sound, ValhallaDSP’s range of reverb plugins have won a lot of fans in recent years. Along with the likes of Fabfilter’s ‘Pro-’ range or Waves’ best known mixing tools, ValhallaRoom and VintageVerb have entered the realm of plugins that seem to turn up on the hard drives of pretty much every artist that FM goes to interview. And with good reason. While Valhalla have dipped their toes in the delay world before, with creative effects like Freq Echo and UberMod, ValhallaDelay is the company’s first proper workhorse delay, aimed at handling everything from bread-and-butter echoes to vintage tape emulations through…

Reviews | QU-Bit Scanned QU-Bit Scanned £325 QU-Bit are breaking new ground with their new module, the first hardware form of scanned synthesis. Phil Wise dives in Presuming it to be just another morphable wavetable oscillator, I didn’t take much notice of Scanned when it was released. In fact, it uses a form of digital synthesis never explored in hardware form before. Scanned synthesis was developed by Max Matthews, the father of computer music between 1998-99. It was intended as the next paradigm in digital oscillators – a way to interact with synthesis in a more natural way for live performance and to create new timbres rather than replicate tones from existing instruments. So how does Scanned work? Mass, Center, Stiffness and Damping control a virtual string of objects that…

Propellerhead gets its Figure back (and takes back Take too) Having been left in limbo when Allihoopa closed in January, Propellerhead have announced that they have reacquired the Figure and Take apps and plan to develop them further in the future. As you may recall, both apps were actually created by Propellerhead in the first place, but left the company when Allihoopa – the musical social platform – became a self-contained business in 2017. However, to paraphrase The Beatles, they’re now back where they once belonged – excellent news for Reason users. “These apps make great companions to Reason,” says Hanna Åstrand, product manager at Propellerhead. “They give musicians super starting points for their ideation, from creating a beat in Figure to taking a Reason track offline for vocal or…

LET THE WORLD IN “There’s a sign at the tattoo parlour where I get work done sometimes that says, ‘Imperfections add charm’. It sounds like it’s just making excuses but it’s actually not, there’s meaning to it. Things are going to go ‘off’ sometimes in the midst of a seemingly ‘perfect take’ and you should keep rolling tape and let those intrusions happen. They add humanity to the results. So much electronic music-making is a control freak exercise in making everything ‘just right’ and the result is over-quantised, airless and fussy.” Save everything “You may make something and think it is garbage, a doodle, pointless. But don’t throw it away! A context may come, later on, in the middle of an entirely different song at a different tempo in a…

Layering drum samples The majority of beatmakers and producers not only use drum samples in some capacity, but also layer one or more on top of another in order to achieve a specific effect. It’s a technique that goes back to the advent of drum sampling itself, in fact. In the world of rock production, for example, fastidious engineers have long been known to replace the occasional badly played, close-miked kick or snare with a recording of a more suitable one, or even layer up more solid drum samples underneath the main drum recording for extra weight and power. In the hip-hop realm, meanwhile, you rarely hear a sampled breakbeat without some kind of drum machine-sourced snare or kick sample in the mix, whether for subtle supplementary attack or overt…

Creative sampler tricks for sampled beats Make the most of your sampler’s features to give your beats life, dynamics, motion and character 01 If your drum sample lacks punch, use your sampler’s pitch envelope to add more in. First, use an envelope to modulate the drum hit’s pitch response over time. Then, set up a tight attack, minimum sustain and release, and decay to taste. Now simply tweak the amount of envelope modulation and decay length to customise the front end bump’s amount and shape. 02 If you need to extend a drum hit’s length, wrap your sampler’s loop points around a section of sustain (after the attack portion). Experiment with looping types – back and forth mode usually works well – and apply slight fading to create an extended…

BREAK BEAT TIPS Fancy working with a slightly different version of a classic break? Then hunt down a second-or third-generation break that’s been recycled by another producer. Temporal and timbral differences give a different flavour once chopped and processed again. Try tuning duplicate copies of a break, then filter and recombine layers to fill out and beef up different frequency ranges. Timestretch algorithms differ among DAWs and samplers, so test them all out when warping and pitching breaks to impart different artefacts. Try Serato Sample or TAL-Sampler for this. When cutting a break into separate hits, beware of timing irregularities. For example, if you slice a drum break’s snare bang on beats 2 and 4, but the original drummer played early, you may lop off the initial transient and destroy…

The Art of Beatmaking Unique plugins for processing sampled beats If you’re a pro at programming sampled beats, you may want to wring the most out of their sonics in a mix. Generic drum-processing techniques apply no matter where they come from, of course, but understanding the limitations of sampled one-shots and loops will help you dig deep for specific plugins that can solve unique problems. Sampled drums lack the desired high-frequency content or ‘splash’. Instead of simply layering a new piece of audio into the mix, try a vocoder plugin set to generate white noise from the input signal, then mix its effect in subtly to coat the required ‘tail’ over the original sample. From here, automate settings for subtle variation. If your track’s all-important kick drum is devoid…

Producer’s Guide To The Modern Orchestra Enter the textural universe Imagine what it takes to become a player in one of the world’s professional orchestras. The world’s leading conservatoires are packed with enthusiastic, highly motivated performers who, in order to gain entry, have already surpassed the musical achievements of countless competitors. Having completed the performance grade exams to the highest standards, they’ll have pushed on through their teenage years, representing regional and national youth orchestras and then they’ll enter into three or four years of full-time study. The competition gets fiercer, the physical and mental requirements are more demanding and, all the while, the hours spent practicing an ever-more-challenging collection of musical works grows and grows. In this regard, it always feels valuable to compare life as an orchestral musician…

The Modern Orchestra Producer’s Guide To Exploring alternative violin articulations Let’s use a violin line in six different ways, using contrasting textures and articulations 01 Here, we program a string ensemble with separate parts for Violin 2, Violas and Cellos, using dedicated instrument patches from Vienna Symphonic Library’s Dimension Strings, with plenty of controller data to sculpt velocity crossfading and volume, per part. In this example, we add a high ‘regular’ Violin 1 part from the same sample library. 02 We choose something a little less conventional as our first ‘alternative’ top line. Using Spitfire Audio’s Ólafur Arnalds Chamber Evolutions library, we select the Chamber Waves programme, which allows us to use volume swells. As a result, we compose half-beat crescendo builds to each new chord change. 03 Next we…

Interview Nathan Micay Nathan Micay Nathan Micay s Blue Spring is a futuristic rave album based on the infamous Castlemorton Common event in the mid ’90s. Danny Turner discusses the role Ableton Live played behind the DJ/producer’s remarkably inventive debut Under the former pseudonym Bwana, the prodigiously talented Toronto-born Nathan Micay genre-hopped from post-dubstep to psychedelic trance and prog-house, with a collection of anthemic releases on LuckyMe and Will Saul’s Aus Music. Alongside an exhaustive DJ schedule, the restless producer has also recorded sets for the likes of Fact, Boiler Room and Resident Advisor. Now based in Berlin, Micay’s debut release under his own name, Blue Spring, was made almost entirely in Ableton Live. An infectious body of futuristic fiction, inspired by the ’90s rave era, the album is accompanied…

EXPLAINER EQ and filter basics Sharpen your tone-shaping skills with our refresher course on equalisation and parametric EQ plugins The equaliser is possibly the most important tool in the audio professional’s arsenal. By boosting or attenuating specific frequencies in a signal, you can solve a broad range of problems at every step of the music-making process, from initial sound correction issues at the recording stage right through to broad sweetening when mastering at the very end. And at the creative end of the spectrum, EQ can also assist with tone-shaping for sound design, either alone or with other processes. With hundreds of processing options available in both hardware and software form, and the myriad ways you can apply them throughout every element in a mix, the art of EQ can…

A quick tour of typical filter types As filtering is such an essential mixing technique, let’s take a closer look… At the extreme lower and upper ranges of the spectrum, there’s the high-pass and low-pass filter, the former only allowing high frequencies to pass, and the latter only letting low frequencies pass through. The filter’s slope – which can range from a gradual 6dB/oct through to an ultra-extreme 96dB/oct – is essentially the steepness of this filter’s ‘drop-off’. Not all filters are created equal, which is why many EQ plugins allow you to switch between different filter types. The differences between them can be subtle – in real-world scenarios, the default option is usually fine – but an understanding is useful nonetheless, especially since it’s so easy to try out…

MOD POD Like the rest of Parallels, the modulation options include both the familiar and unconventional, with influence once again coming from the world of modular synthesis. Many parameters can be modulated, with the ability to mix the signal from two mod sources simultaneously. However, routing changes are only reflected in the next triggered note, and it is sadly not possible to modulate Mod Pod parameters. There are four modulation slots, with each being able to host one of the five modulation types. LFO is a simple but effective, tempo-syncable, low frequency oscillator with control over both rise/fall balance and shape. Speed runs from 0.1Hz to low audio rates. RND is a random modulation generator, which makes use of ‘rain’ to visualise the effect of its parameters. Although this looks…

Reviews | Joué re-Connect Joué re-Connect Bundle €477 Dan ‘JD73’ Goldman checks out this versatile multi-touch board with interchangeable modules. How does it shape up? As a studio-based or portable travelling controller, this really is superb I’m a keen follower of MPE-capable MIDI devices and have had the pleasure of reviewing products from Roli, Roger Linn, Expressive E and now Joué. Externally, the ‘naked’ Joué board is a thing of simplistic beauty with its natural wood base and edges, high quality black metal panel/surround and the all-important triple-zone ‘polyphonic sensor’ into which the current crop of nine ‘magic modules’ magnetically attach. Using RFID (radio waves), the Joué board magically senses which modules are attached and this technology also allows the modules to be swapped out on the fly and combined…

Reviews | UAD v9.8 plugins UAD 9.8 plugins from £115 Jono Buchanan reviews the new batch, including a classic preamp, a Brainworxmade amp and a touch of Auto-Tune Version 9.8 of UAD’s software is here and it brings three new emulations which offer a classic preamp, a significant upgrade to UAD’s Auto-Tune capabilities and a new amplifier model, developed with Brainworx. Notably, compatibility with the latest version of Mac’s OS – Mojave – is also now assured too. The UAD platform isn’t short of classic preamp emulations and joining the Neve 1073 and SSL E-Channel ranks (to name but two) comes a less known but justifiably coveted choice; the V76 Preamp, whose hardware was developed by the German Institute of Broadcast Technology (IRT). As with most classic preamps, its sound…

MPC Live DAW output tracking How do I track individual outputs into Logic Pro X when using the controller mode? The MPC Live can be used in ‘standalone’ mode (no computer) or in ‘controller’ mode (with a computer using MPC software). In standalone mode, you simply record out of the individual outputs into your interface but controller mode allows streaming of more outputs direct into your DAW over a single USB cable. This is more elegant than having multiple cables connected all the time and lets you stream/record individual elements within a beat, straight into your DAW channels, which can then be recorded in. Here’s a how-to! Make your beat in ‘standalone mode’ to a point where you’re happy with it, then save the project to the user-media in the…