Table of contents for April 2020 in Future Music

WELCOME Mixing magic Music production can be a subject riddled with vague descriptors – from terms like ‘muddiness’, ‘fizz’ or ‘bloat’ to the elusively obtuse but much sought-after qualities of ‘warmth’ and ‘mix glue’. It’s these latter two we’re tackling in this issue’s cover feature. We’re on the hunt for that sonic magic imparted by vintage desks and outboard in order to help the disparate elements of our tracks sit together. It turns out it’s more than simply a case of slapping an emulated effect onto all your busses – if you want to really ‘glue’ your mixes, an understanding of reverb, send effects, saturation and more will help you along. Head for page 28 to learn more. We hope you enjoy this issue of FM! Si Truss, Editor simon.truss@futurenet.com…

Filter | The Future Of Music Deckard’s Dream Mk2 is like a CS-80 synth for your desktop Promising to provide everything that was good about the original rack model, Black Corporation’s Deckard’s Dream Mk2 is an updated version of the Yamaha CS-80-inspired synth that’s designed to sit on your desktop. Said to come in a “thin and light tabletop format,” this new revision ships with both wooden end panels and rack ears, also offering additional control over the sustain modes and timing. Otherwise, things look pretty similar to its predecessor: you get eight voices, each with two identical parts comprising an analogue voltage-controller oscillator, low-pass and high-pass filters, noise generator, filter envelope and VCA plus ADSR envelope. There’s also a performance section that gives you additional global controls, plus support…

Soundweaver searches your sample library and designs new sounds > Boom Library’s Soundweaver is a new standalone audio application designed to speed up the sound design process. Once you’ve started a new project, you can tell Soundweaver to search your existing sample library based on the keywords of your choosing –‘whoosh’ is the example given in the intro video – and specify how many layers you’d like. Note that, because the searching is all keyword-based, Soundweaver relies on your samples being properly tagged, but assuming they are, it can pull together and align a set of suitable sounds that’ll meet your brief. You can then tweak this sound using the pitch, offset and gain controls, or switch out layers you’re not happy with. You also have the option of re-randomising…

Waves' “affordable” plugin subscription plans, starting at $6.99 a month Waves have become the latest music software developer to hop aboard the plugin subscription train, announcing the Waves Music Maker Access platform. This enables you to choose monthly or annual subscriptions to the company’s Silver, Gold and Platinum bundles, with prices starting at $6.99 per month. Whichever plan you choose, you can start with a free one month trial, with subscribers receiving unlimited updates and “premium customer service”. You can cancel and restart at any point. The $6.99 per month price applies to the Silver bundle (also available for $69.99 a year), which contains 16 plugins, while the Gold bundle gives you 42 plugins for $9.99 per month or $99.99 a year. If you want to max out you can…

CLASSIC ALBUM The Presets Apocalypso Modular Recordings, 2008 For Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes, life in The Presets was bonkers. Back-to-back tours of the world supporting The Rapture, Ladytron, and Soulwax saw them hitting the stage. Life on the road was hard. There was barely enough time to send a postcard back home to their folks in Oz, let alone make a new album. “We were working our arses off,” says Julian. “We had a very clear idea of the music we wanted to make, but the life we were living meant everything was too hectic to find time to do it.” A plan was hatched – get back to Australia, and decamp to the sleepy town of Bangalow, tucked away in New South Wales. “We set up our studio…

Albums ALBUM REVIEWS ALBUM OF THE MONTH Mentrix My Enemy, My Love House of Strength My Enemy, My Love is the wonderfully distinctive and powerful debut album from Iranian born, Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist, composer and Sufi-inspired singer Samar Rad, aka Mentrix. A heady, intoxicating clash of eastern and western cultures, the record explores Rad’s experiences of growing up in Iran before being forced to flee war to France and then moving back home as a teenager. Reflecting her relationship with the contrasting worlds that she has lived in and been pulled towards and away from, Rad fuses elements of traditional music with distinctly modern aesthetics. Drawing on traditional Persian poetry, but dealing with issues around womanhood and resilience, Rad uses traditional Iranian instruments including a tombak (goblet drum), kamancheh (bowed string…

THE SECRETS OFANALOGUE WARMTH Does bus compression provide mix glue? One of the most commonly asked questions by producers learning their trade is ‘should I put a compressor across the output mix?’. First, let’s find out what bus compression is… The mix bus is another name for the final output channel through which all individual parts of your mix pass. Any processing here affects the whole mix, rather than a single channel or a group of specific instruments. If you place a compressor on an insert across the output, that dynamics controller will respond to every bit of signal and every frequency band. So, if a section of your track features an arp and a kick drum playing in isolation, the compressor’s settings will respond to both sounds. If the…

THE SECRETS OFANALOGUE WARMTH Let’s all ride the tube If you seek warmth from the outset of the creative process, rather than looking to add it later, you’ll no doubt be tempted by any technology which promises the sound of classic analogue warmth, particularly when accompanied by vacuum tubes. The Korg Volca Nubass is a case in point – a synth designed to produce the startling, acidic basslines of yesteryear, courtesy of a vacuum tube. Again, the reason for this warmth comes from the harmonic combinations produced by tube amplifiers – when pushed hard, there’s a musicality from tube distortion which is seductive. Those of us who work in all-digital domains have to seek out ways to bring this quality to our mixes retrospectively but tubes have long been present…

STEREO BUS COMPRESSOR SHOOTOUT A dedicated stereo bus compressor can go a long way towards glueing your mix together. Let’s put three of the best up against one another In the following clips, we’re setting three UAD stereo bus compressor emulations head-to-head. Bus compressors sit across the output channel of a mix, so every sound passes through them before reaching your speakers. As every sound contributes to the compressor’s dynamic behaviour, the result sounds more cohesive than an uncompressed signal. That said, not all compressors are alike and we’ve deliberately picked three with glowing reputations in the area of bus compression. Crucially, we’re not adding anything else to the output channel – no EQ, no limiting, nothing. Also, we’ve matched levels as closely as possible. The volume of the dry,…

PRODUCER’S GUIDE AUDIO ON FILESILO Behringer Pro-1 The music megaliths have resurrected the classic analogue monosynth, adding Eurorack compatibility and a few extra patch points for sonic flexibility There’s a good chance you’ve seen a Sequential Circuits Pro One synth adorning the studio of many an FMfeatured producer. Despite many of them being plagued with clacky keys and an unreliable keybed, the Dave Smith-designed instrument found an audience among techno heads and synth poppers alike. Luckily for us, Behringer have taken the circuit of the Pro One, added a few tweaks, and released it en masse, putting that sound within reach of a multitude of musicians who would previously have been left to scour the classified ads, virtual or otherwise. How you feel about such a move is going to…

The sequencer and arp While not feature- laden, the Pro-1 does > feature an arp and sequencer, as on the original. The arp has two modes (up, and up/down) and no way to control how many octaves it’s cycling between. The sequencer is equally primitive; two sequence storage slots, which retain note info after powering down. Add rest and tie info by flicking the sequencer switch briefly into play mode and then back into record mode, though it’s tricky to get right. The sequencer and arp are both automatically clocked to LFO speed; but there’s an LFO CV input jack, so they can be clocked externally as well. One key addition is the ability for each osc to play its own note, not possible on Pro Ones of yore. Do…

ROUND-UP Hidden treasures We survey the unsung heroes of the world’s top plugin bundles, some of which might even be on your hard drive already… MeldaProduction MSpectralDynamics This intensely powerful processor is not quite like anything you’ve ever used before, the idea being a sort of multiband-compressor-meets-dynamic-EQ-meets-regular-EQ-but-for-dynamics device. These sorts of processes already exist in a few forms in other plugins, but in MSpectralDynamics’ Edit window, the controls go deep. You can tailor the response of the processor’s compression/gate threshold, attack and release across the frequency range by drawing in a response across the spectrum. Like an EQ, you’re detailing the response across the frequency range, but the actual effect isn’t gain – it’s reaction to dynamics at anywhere a frequency’s level crosses the threshold. MSpectralDynamics is tough to get…

GEAR GUIDE MIDI KEYBOARDS Novation SL MkIII from £540 Full Review: FM338 Well-designed and versatile. For those who work with both hardware and software, this may be the best studio centrepiece on the market. NI Komplete Kontrol S-Series Mk2 £499 Full Review: FM324 Komplete Kontrol MkII brings a whole sonic universe under your fingertips like never before, with much deeper DAW integration too. Akai Advance 49 £399 Review FM293 Combined with Akai’s VIP software, the Advance controllers remove the disconnect between controller and DAW. NI Komplete Kontrol A-Series | from £119 Review FM338 A quality controller combined with a well-rounded software bundle. Arturia MicroLab £69 Review: FM355 This may not tick all the boxes for a studio controller keyboard, but as a super portable travelling device it hits the mark.…

Gear Guide SOFTSYNTHS Kilohearts Phase Plant from €169 Full Review: FM350 Phase Plant’s modular architecture is an incredible resource for conjuring real and otherworldly sounds. A powerful, flexible synth in every way! 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 the ‘synth every producer must own’ list. Audiaire Zone £99…

Gear Guide AUDIO INTERFACES Full Review: FM354 All in all, this is an excellent interface with some thoughtful touches. The included software makes it good value too. Antelope Audio Discrete 8 £1,279 Full Review: FM351 An impressive platform: audio conversion is precise and the I/O configuration is deep. The future looks bright for Discrete 8. Arturia AudioFuse 8Pre £1,800 Universal Audio Apollo x6 £1800 Review: FM340 Now a match for any rival interfaces. If you’re tempted by the UAD ecosystem, this is highly recommended. RME Fireface UFX+ £2,418 Review: FM330 Multiple analogue and digital sources in one incredibly flexible device. Plus it’s a bargain. Universal Audio Apollo x4 £1,500 Review: FM355 With a seductive feature set, and, at a lower price than its bigger brothers, the Apollo x4 will prove…

Klevgrand Krets is a free modular environment > Klevgrand are known for knocking out audio effects at a pretty swift rate, and now they are giving you the chance to create your own by releasing a free modular environment known as Krets. Before you get too excited, we should point out that it is at the early alpha stage of development, so is far from the finished article. Apparently, Krets was originally designed to be used internally by Klevgrand for prototyping plugins and testing DSP ideas, but they have now decided to release it to the wider world with the aim of turning it into an official product. Krets deals in low-level audio DSP processing, which means that there aren’t really any ready-made effects. The modules you can use are…

Filter | The Future Of Music Brighton Music Conference returns, with talks from Fatboy Slim, Carl Cox, Derrick May… and Future Music Brighton Music Conference, the UK’s largest electronic music-making and networking event, returns to Brighton’s British Airways i360 venue this April 22 to 25. The event will host over 65 talks, seminars and workshops, including contributions from Orbital, Fatboy Slim, Carl Cox, Derrick May, My Nu Leng, Judge Jules, Flava D, Danny Howard, Timo Maas, Darius Syrossian and many more. This year’s edition will also see the return of BMC’s Label Lounge, taking place on Friday 24 at the The Tempest Inn nearby, where a host of major electronic music labels will be accepting demos and taking part in one-to-one A&R feedback sessions. Following last year’s event,…

Niklas Paschburg “The Polyend Perc is my ‘robot arm’. It brought me new live possibilities” Niklas Paschburg © Natalia Luzenko It’s fair to say that Hamburg-based performer Niklas Paschburg has so far drawn maritime influence for his neo classical-strained ambient releases, from the stormy seas of 2018’s Oceanic to the icy climes of new release Svalbard. It was in the latter Norwegian archipelago that the Ólafur Arnalds-influenced artist holed up with just a piano and his thoughts to compose his newest work, before relaying the whole thing to Brighton’s Andy Barlow (formerly of Lamb and the producer behind hits for U2 and Willie Nelson) for recording and mixing. But is his studio environment equally tempestuous? We found out… When did you start making music? “I started to play the piano…

In the studio with The Presets Julian: “The main sessions started on the farm in Bangalow. We set up our drumkit there, and then had an MPC-60 and an SP-1200, and Pro Tools. “Then we ordered a Studio Electronics Omega 8 synth from America, and it arrived at the town post office. The Omega 8 was huge when it arrived. When we pulled it out of the box and plugged it in, it pretty much went on every track, too.” Kim: “That arrived halfway through the sessions, and once we switched it on, it really changed everything we were making. We had a couple of compressors like the dbx 160SL, too, and a pair of Neve preamps.” Julian: “Then a Korg MS-20, which is kind of like our Stratocaster [laughs].…

THE SECRETS OFANALOGUE WARMTH THE SECRETS OFANALOGUE WARMTH Vintage desks and outboard are celebrated for their ability to ‘glue’ a mix and impart ‘warmth’. But what do these vague terms really mean, and how can we recreate the effect? A good mix is so much more than the sum of its parts. And yet sometimes, no matter how carefully sourced our sounds, we just can’t get them to stick together in a way that is musically pleasing. ‘Mix glue’ is a term you’ll hear frequently and it’s self-explanatory; a ‘glued’ mix is one which holds together beautifully, where every part works in perfect harmony with every other. Exactly how this is achieved is not immediately obvious, so through the next few pages, we’re going to explore some of the ways…

THE SECRETS OFANALOGUE WARMTH Reverb: your mix glue friend The sounds we use in our tracks come from all over the place. No wonder they’ll need a shared acoustic ‘space’ to feel glued 01 > We’ve written a shamelessly ’80s influenced nostalgic track for a number of synths, including a pad, arps, sequences, an 1/8th-note bassline and a lead synth which enters in the second half. Alongside this we’ve got a dusty kick and a drum loop providing hats and snare. 02 > The only sound really glueing the mix together at the moment is the pad. Its long release time smudges the edges of each chord move, giving the illusion of reverb. Without it, you can hear that everything sounds much more ‘stark’ and less knitted together. 03 >…

THE SECRETS OFANALOGUE WARMTH Distortion and saturation in the mix Add glue and power to a mix with the ‘increased harmonic footprint’ given by saturation and distortion 01 > We start with a tense, underscore track made from five elements. The first is a modified bass sequence from Zebra 2. A second Zebra sequence provides slow, pulsing movement, whilst a third provides a pitched, background tap. We’re also using two sounds from Spitfire Audio’s Albion Neo – a low pedal string part and a Segla synth texture. 02 > We start with the bass sequence. We want some overtones to glue this sound to the rest of the mix. We add SoundToys’ Decapitator, roll out low end and set the tone balance a little towards ‘Bright’, before setting drive to…

The Track Mangling beats with Live, Logic and Elektron gear Lia uses a multi-stage process to make her thumping techno-inspired beats 01 > “The kick I made out of three kicks all on top of each other to make it thicker; that’s how I make it so chunky,” Lia reveals. The three elements are a low subby kick, a layer with a prominent hi-hat, and a subtle extra transient. 02 > “The snare is also made up of three snare sounds; every sound is made up of multiple samples put together, some of which I’ve recorded myself, and some of which are taken from sample packs. When I sample I don’t sample off records; I use sample packs or my own recordings from the studio,” continues Lia. 03 > “The…

Nailing that classic PWM bass sound 1 The sound of the original Pro One was renowned for its bass presence and throaty growl when opening up the filter, and the updated Pro-1 is no different. One sound commonly used for that is a pulse-width modulating bass sound. 2 Let’s recreate that patch on the Pro-1 and make use of both oscillators and their individual pulse widths. Start by turning on the square wave for Osc A, with the pulse width set to 5. Set the octave to 0, and make sure frequency is set to 0. 3 For Oscillator B, we’re going to make use of both the triangle and pulse width waves – set both switches to On. Just like for Osc A, set the octave to 0, the…

How to access the arpeggiator’s hidden latch button 1 The Pro-1’s arpeggiator is a stripped-down affair. There are just two modes (Up and Up/Down) and no way to increase the octave range of the arpeggio. To be fair, this was still fairly complex when the original was born, so it’s hard to complain too much. 2 However, one thing the Pro-1 could really use is a latch mode, letting you release the keys and the arpeggio continue. Luckily, there’s actually a latch mode; it’s just not mentioned anywhere, making it more of a hack than an official feature! 3 To access this, hold the notes you want to arpeggiate and select Up or Up/Down. While notes are held, flip the sequencer switch to the record setting, and voilà! Playing notes…

Behringer Pro-1 Programming a thick, buzzy drone with Pro-1’s external input 1 The original Pro One was quite famously used in a slathering of industrial tracks by bands like Skinny Puppy, Cabaret Voltaire and Nitzer Ebb. The thick, cutting texture of the oscillators paired with the complex modulations possible made it quite easy to create other-worldly sounds. 2 For this sound, we’re going to make use of the Pro-1’s patch points on the top of the panel. This lets us do some routing that wasn’t possible on the original. To start, let’s turn on Osc A’s square wave, with the pulse width set to around 7 and the octave switch set to 1. 3 Turn both square/triangle waves on for Osc B, with the pulse width set to 5.5. Set…

Faking a disco octave bass with the LFO 1 Want to use the Pro-1 to get that classic octave bass-jumping sound? While you can use the arpeggiator to achieve similar, you can program that sound from the front panel without the arp. We’ve chosen a mix of square and sawtooth waves. 2 Set the amp envelope so that a note will sustain – attack at 0, decay and sustain near 8, and release around 4. Your filter envelope can take a similar shape. Leave the cutoff set to nearly fully open, around 9. 3 We’ll use the LFO set to square wave to modulate the pitch by a set interval. In the Mod Matrix, ensure the LFO’s routed directly to the Filter. Now when playing a note, the pitch jumps…

RETROSPECTIVE Tech house This hybrid genre, falling somewhere between techno and house, is not without its controversies. We explore its roots © PYMCA/Universal Images Group via Getty Images As much as we might want to pigeonhole it, music can be a wonderfully imprecise art. The lines between styles, sounds and genres are often blurred and poorly defined. Nowhere is that more apparent in electronic music than in the case of the nebulous grey area of tech house. Emerging as a distinct style in the mid-to-late ’90s, tech house falls – as the name suggests – somewhere between techno and house. Exactly how that works in practice has changed since the genre first evolved, but as a rule of thumb it could be defined as the structure and rhythms of house…

DELAY, UTILITIES AND MODULATION In contrast to the Matriarch’s ‘Grandmother’ sibling, featured here is the Moog 500 series delay (in glorious stereo and clock-syncable). Moog delays are some of the finest around (their Minifooger Delay and 104-SD are mainstays in my setup) and this module doesn’t disappoint. It’s smooth, classy and textured (and can be grainy at longer time settings) and can sound like a reverb at shorter settings too. You have ping-pong and standard modes, time, feedback and spacing controls, a tap tempo for jamming with (and you can sync it to the internal clock to work in time with the sequencer and arp too) which is all very handy. Of course, it’s also patchable with six inputs in total (audio and CV) making it a great external delay…

ADVICE Clavinet patches as a replacement for guitar parts? > Using a clavinet sample can be a really nice alternative to using guitar samples which can often be lacking. As the clavinet is also a stringed instrument, it has the right texture and, like with a guitar, once you pair clav samples (or a real clav) with stompbox effects you get very close to the vibe of a real guitar. Are there any synths that sound like the Sega Mega Drive? > For a while, it seemed like Nintendo was getting all the retro console love, but with the release of the Mega Drive Mini in 2019, Sega’s 16-bit machine came back into the spotlight. And, the good news is that music software and hardware developers have been taking inspiration…

FILTER After 40 years, Moog are back with a $5,000 reboot of the 16 Channel Vocoder Luxury vocoding with a price tag to match Vocoders aren’t hard to come by in modern studios. Many synths these days come with vocoders built in, and, of course, there are countless plugins out there that’ll do the job too. But if you want the ultimate in vocoder luxury, and a price tag to match, Moog may have the answer. After 40 years, the company is resuming production of the classic Moog 16 Channel Vocoder. Introduced in 1978 – and as heard on Giorgio Moroder’s E=MC2 – this enabled musicians to create not only the famous vocoded vocal effect, but also to process synths and other instruments. The new version is cut from the…

The Future Of Music | Filter Is the Genesis Pro too good to be true? > They say that, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, but in the case of Genesis Pro, we find ourselves wondering what the catch is. Created by DJ/producer Ummet Ozcan under the Oz-Soft banner, this is a new hybrid softsynth plugin that’s going to be sold for just 1 euro. If this low price makes you worry that Genesis Pro is lacking in style and sophistication then fear not, because this looks every inch the contemporary electronic instrument. It offers subtractive, FM, phase distortion, multiwave and ROM synthesis, and comes with three oscillators that can be used independently or simultaneously. We’re told that Genesis Pro can concoct a wide variety…

The Future Of Music | Filter Arturia’s FX Collection gives you 15 plugin effects “You’ll Actually Use” > Arturia have spent the past couple of years putting together a pretty comprehensive line-up of what they cheekily refer to as plugins ‘You’ll Actually Use’. Now, for the sake of simplicity and value for money, they've put them all together in a single bundle. Offering both emulations of classic hardware and all-new designs, FX Collection covers reverbs, delays, preamps, filters and compressors. The plugins were created using what we’ve been told are “circuit-accurate modelling” techniques, in order to help capture every nuance and detail. Each plugin offers the likes of lookahead tracking, envelope followers, sidechaining and pre-post EQ for plenty of creative control, and you get presets based on the settings used…

THE SECRETS OFANALOGUE WARMTH All about harmonics What is it that sounds so sonically rounded about listening to a drum kit? The volume of a live drummer is certainly an impressive thing. But there’s something ‘complete’ about the sonics of hearing the assorted pieces of a drum kit which isn’t quite true of a solo lead guitar or bass, either of which could be just as loud. Interestingly, the moment a drummer limits herself to only playing the kick, or a kick in combination with a hi-hat pattern, a temporary ‘incompleteness’ occurs, which is only addressed when she builds back up to a full pattern once more. The same thing is true of going to hear an orchestra – the delicate start on horns or strings giving way to everyone…

THE SECRETS OFANALOGUE WARMTH Insert or auxiliary reverb Examples of both insert and auxiliary reverb treatments have been used in our walk-throughs but it’s worth shining a more focused light on this topic; it’s a crucial one in any discussion about glueing mixes together. We all know that there are two ways of adding reverberation to a sound within your mix. First, you can add your effect to the insert channel of a sound and adjust its parameters. The advantage here is a dedicated, bespoke spatial treatment entirely contoured to the ‘needs’ of that one sound. Alternatively, you can set up a reverb effect on an auxiliary track. The advantage of this approach is that many sounds can ‘feed into’ that same space, creating a single, shared acoustic from which…

THE SECRETS OF ANALOGUE WARMTH Has ‘mix glue’ always been a sticky issue? Have mixes always required ‘glueing together’? Has it always been the case that the sounds in a mix have been so ‘foreign’ to one another that they’ve required such significant intervention? The short answer to both questions is ‘no’. Here’s a slightly longer explanation… Suppose you’re lucky enough to own a classic console made by SSL, or Neve, or API. Each component of every channel of those consoles has been individually designed or sourced by the manufacturers of those desks and is consistent from one channel to the next. So, those desks are coveted because they have ‘a sound’; rather than offering a clean, slightly sterile audio experience, each console is bold enough to imprint its highly…

YOUTUBE MORE UNMISSABLE VIDEO TRAINING FROM FUTURE MUSIC Discover our line-up of exclusive YouTube goodness. Head online for all this and more! THE TRACK Leading producers go in-depth on the sounds, ideas and techniques behind their latest releases Boston Bun, Don’t Wanna Dance Thibaud Noyer invites us into the studio to talk sampling, replays and how he made his latest house hit DON’T MISS: Twin Atlantic, Barcelona Rock favourites Twin Atlantic explore the making of single Barcelona Jaded, Pancake ft. Ashnikko UK-based house and remix kings talk about their bass-heavy hit Jack Boston, The Place The DnB producer breaks down his track, featuring vocalist Vanity Jay Bensley, Hard Times Peter Bennett takes us through his sax-centric track featuring Emer Dineen steinberg Studio Sessions Top producers show you the world…

Behringer Pro-1 Get a subby kick with filter resonance 1 Unsurprisingly, the Pro-1 also excels at making meaty kick sounds, though perhaps not using the sound source you’d expect. Let’s start this patch by setting both oscs off. We’ll be using the filter’s ability to self-oscillate to create a sine wave. 2 In the filter section, turn cutoff all the way down and resonance all the way up. Be careful with your speakers as this causes a volume jump. The envelope and keyboard amount are key to making this sound like a subby kick – just a low bass. 3 Set envelope amount to 3 and keyboard amount to 2.5. Shape the filter envelope carefully too, with attack, sustain, and release all set to 0, and decay set to just…

Diving deeper into the Pro-1 The Pro-1 has a few more tricks up its > sleeve. Oscillator B can be disconnected from the keyboard by a switch on the front panel – this is handy for creating drones or sound effects. Flipping the lo freq switch to on lets the oscillator frequency sweep across a larger range of pitches, from below the audible range to way up into audio rate modulation. This is useful as Osc B can be used as a source in the modulation matrix and taken out of the mixer fully, adding yet another way to modulate something in the Pro-1. While many modern synths boast modulation matrices with far more options, destinations, and variables, the modulation matrix on the Pro-1 is one of its most unique…

REVIEWS Moog Matriarch £1,979 The colourful Matriarch sits at the top of Moog’s semi-modular ‘Mother’ range. Dan ‘JD73’ Goldman gets connecting… Moog are still the most well-recognised name in synthesis, some 67 years after launching. The company has gone from strength to strength since it launched the Voyager in 2002 (which is now regarded as a modern classic). Following on from the Voyager came the Little Phatty (the last synth design Bob had a direct hand in before his death), the Sub and Subsequent range, the flagship One and the ‘Mother’ range of semi-modular machines. In front of me today is the rather colourful and playful-looking Matriarch; but make no mistake, this is one serious piece of kit. Opinions are divided on the look but I love the pastel shades…

GROUPTEST Thonet & Vander BT monitors German manufacturers Thonet & Vander produce a wide range of speaker products for use in home theatre, multimedia, gaming, hi-fi and studio settings. These combine traditional speaker design with onboard amplification and EQ, often incorporating Bluetooth connectivity. We have two designs on the test bench – the nearfield Kugel and compact Kurbis BT Thonet & Vander Kugel £330 1 Kugel comes from T&V’s studio range and is a mid-sized powered nearfield that features a 6.5” aramid fibre woofer and a 1” silk dome tweeter. The speakers come as a pair, comprising a master and slave and the slave is connected via a proprietary lead (3m) with screwfit 4-pin connectors. Power and audio are connected to the master unit and the physical input options are…

JD-XA with external bass module How do I set up a split patch with Moog Sirin covering bass duties and JD-XA on EP/string? The JD-XA is a versatile machine with features that take time to ‘get’. You can set this up to work nicely and we’ve used a similar setup with our own Sirin and Minitaur. Though the XA only has four octaves (a little limiting) our advice is to split the XA down the middle and let the bottom two octaves cover bass from the Sirin and the upper two on the XA cover your EP/string layered sound. This works for most applications, though if you want more space for each sound in the split, connect an external MIDI controller to the XA. Choose an initialised patch on the…

Gear Guide AFFORDABLE SYNTHS Modal Argon 8 £579 Full Review: FM354 A very versatile sound engine, which covers lots of territory – from warm analogue to cold industrial. Another great British synth! Korg Wavestate £699 Full Review: FM353 The price might be pushing what we’d usually call ‘affordable’ but with 64 stereo voices and a multi-timbral sound engine you get a lot for your money here. And it sounds great too! 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. Arturia MicroFreak £279 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…

Gear Guide SEMI-MODULAR SYNTHS Moog Matriarch £1,979 Full Review: FM355 The Matriarch is very inspiring. It’s well built, has the classic Moog Modular sound and is complex yet intuitive. A future classic! Dreadbox Erebus 3 €499 Full Review: FM355 The Erebus V3 is a powerful, well-specified and flexible synth, capable of both conventional and more experimental tones. Korg Volca Modular £190 Review: FM342 A West Coast synth in a compact package. It may be fiddly and a little complicated, but if you’re willing to give in to its experimental ethos, the Modular is endless fun. Pittsburgh Modular Microvolt 3900 $629 Review: FM341 A characterful semi-modular that wears its influences on its sleeve, but still has its own unique style and sound. Moog DFAM drum synth £549 Review: FM333 A unique…