Future Musicの June 2020 の目次

WELCOME Staying On Track This issue of Future Music hasn’t been particularly easy to put together. It’s only when you’re told to stay at home that you suddenly realise how much of what you do involves going out and spending time around other people – from filming with artists and producers in their studios to coordinating gear photoshoots or simply working together in an office as a team. Admittedly, it’s not like we’re on a par with the incredible people working in medical, care and essential services right now, but it’s still taken some hard work. I’d like to thank the writers, artists, photographers, PR teams and FM’s own staff members who’ve put in a lot of work to make things happen remotely this issue – often at very short…

Soundtoys set the much-loved Effect Rack plugin free (for a limited time) > Soundtoys are letting you use their Effect Rack plugin – usually only available with the superb Soundtoys 5 bundle – for free, until 30 June. This is a powerful and creative multi-effects plugin that enables you to create processing chains using 14 classic Soundtoys effects; the likes of EchoBoy and PrimalTap for delay, Decapitator and Radiator for analogue-style saturation, and Tremolator and FilterFreak for powerful rhythmic modulation and filtering. As well as being able to chain these effects, you can also customise the processing with a set of global controls. There’s a Recycle knob for creating feedback loops, for example, and a global Mix control for parallel processing. You can save favourite chains as presets.…

Sonible and Focusrite’s free Balancer plugin ‘balances your audio tracks in seconds’ > In a bid to get you to ‘stay@home and create’, Sonible and Focusrite have made their Balancer plugin free until at least 4 May. This promises to balance your audio tracks automatically in a matter of seconds. Thanks to AI technology, Balancer can ‘listen’ in to any audio material for a few seconds, then use the information that it gathers to automatically correct deficiencies in the spectral balance of the signal. To help the plugin out, you can select from different profiles, which tell Balancer what kind of instrument or voice it’s working with. Balancer features Sonible’s smart:engine, which is used to power its smart:comp, smart:EQ 2 and smart:EQ live plugins. It runs on PC and Mac…

Tracker sequencing in the hardware realm Polyend’s Tracker is a hardware sampler with a tracker-style sequencer. Here are some classic tracker tricks 01 > We program a single note on step 1 of our first track. We assign pitch C4 from instrument 01, which we’ve set up as a basic wavetable synth with fully sustained volume envelope. In tracker style, this note will sustain until we program a note off, cut or fade to silence it. 02 > Next we add more notes on steps 5, 9, 15 and 29. We now have a fully sustained, legato melody. Let’s make it more interesting. By inserting FAD steps on 11 and 21, we alter the rhythm by introducing slow volume fades after some notes. A CUT on Step 31 is a…

Throwing Snow Throwing Snow blends iOS apps and hardware Houndstooth-staple Ross Tones, aka Throwing Snow, is a producer head-and-shoulders above most out there, with an masterful ear for sound design. We caught up with him in 2018 to watch him deconstruct Simmer from his album Loma, which grew out of jam sessions combining samplers, analogue drum machines and iOS apps. 01 > To create the raw audio material for Simmer, Ross uses an Elektron Octatrak that sends a MIDI signal via a Kenton splitter to an MFB Dominion Club and a Novation Circuit. The Circuit outputs the MIDI clock to an iConnectivity audio interface for iOS that feeds it to Marcos Alonso Samplr on his iPad. 02 > “The sequences aren’t all ‘on step’,” says Ross. “Every one is…

Shadow Child Shadow Child reworks a classic house track Between his Shadow Child and Dave Spoon aliases, Simon Neale has released plenty of club-rattling house classics of his own. When we paid him a visit though, we got to see a different side of his production skills, watching him put his own stamp on a Jaydee’s ’90s classic Plastic Dreams. 01 > Simon starts with the distinctive, low-synth bell provided as a one-shot sample. He recreates the rhythm of the original version on an audio track in Logic, squashing the dynamics and warming things with Waves Kramer Tape. Delay and reverb are added via FabFilter Simplon and Logic’s Space Designer. 02 > With a Roland TR-808 sitting well within spitting distance, it would be a shame not to use…

Netsky Netsky show us how to build a huge DnB drop Since debuting in 2009 Belgian drum & bass producer Boris Daenen has grown from his roots in the realm of underground, liquid DnB to have hits that span the realms of club music and radio-friendly pop alike. We visited him in his Antwerp studio to watch him breakdown Rio, complete with its huge, hip-hop inspired build-up and drop. 01 > Rio’s intro features a half-time, hip-hop beat, which Boris began by selecting a kick sample. “It’s a dirty kick, it’s not very clean… which is what I wanted; it’s hip-hop, it shouldn’t be too clean!” The kick and snare heavily sidechain the bassline in order to get a loud, pumping sound. 02 > The hat sample is a…

In The Studio With Hodge With his debut LP, Shadows In Blue, Jacob Martin cements his reputation as one of the UK’s most innovative producers. Si Truss catches up with him to talk synths, sci-fi and the challenges of writing an album © Khris Cowley for Here & Now Over the past decade, Bristol-based musician Jacob Martin – aka Hodge – has carved out a space for himself at the forefront of the UK’s underground club circuit. Having also worked as one half of house duo Outboxx, Martin’s solo project productions have always seen him gravitate towards the more eclectic and experimental end of techno, blending the genre’s bass-heavy rhythms with elements of jungle, dubstep, ambient and more. With years of relentless touring and a string of releases for the…

Reviews TESTBENCH VoosteQ Material Comp We’ve seen compressors that let you dial in a custom response with a choice of emulated circuitry, but how about one that lets you mix and match four types of processing flavour from different stages of the process? That’s exactly what you get in VoosteQ’s Material Comp plugin (VST/AU/AAX). In a similar bent to DMG Audio’s EQuilibrium, which lets you mix and match different flavours of EQ bands, Material Comp has you selecting processing types for the compression algorithm, the distortion of the preamp, the character of the emulated analogue circuitry, and even the type of glue imbued by its processing. Material Comp is available from voosteq.com for $149. Compression functions Everything’s pretty simple when we first load Material Comp. It looks a lot like a…

ROUND-UP Free drum kits There are many options in the world of paid-for drum ROMplers, but how do the free ones compare to the pricier tubs? Spitfire Audio LABS Drums When a drum kit comes from sampling kings Spitfire Audio, you know it’s going to be good. Simplicity is the name of the game here – you won’t get access to a huge swathe of controls like in the company’s commercial instruments, just volume, velocity sensitivity and reverb (each set from 0% to 100%) – but the quality is very much on display. The LABS drum kit contains a good range of samples: all the basic drum kit elements and articulations you’d expect, mapped to the standard GM key map, with some double hits thrown in for good measure. The…

GEAR GUIDE DRUM MACHINES & SAMPLERS Polyend Tracker £449 Full Review: FM357 Less esoteric than it first appears, this is a sleek, well-designed hardware sampler that’s both fun and inspiring. Worth a look whether you’re experienced with trackers or not. Elektron Model: Cycles $299 Full Review: FM356 More than just a cut-down version of the Digitone, this is a fun and personality-packed FM groovebox, driven by a fantastic sequencer with lots of creative tools. Elektron Digitakt £659 Review: FM320 With deep sequencing and a powerful sound engine, Digitakt is the ‘affordable’ Elektron groovebox we’ve been dreaming of. Elektron Analog RYTM £1,499 Review: FM331 Though the MK1 remains a great box, there are plenty of reasons to upgrade to the MKII – user sampling, individual outs, and the QPER feature are…

Gear Guide HIGH-END SYNTHS Novation Summit £1,899 Full Review: FM350 Though the Peak is still great, Summit is even greater. A powerhouse polysynth, perfect for classic tone emulation as well as next-level, out-there sound design. Waldorf Quantum £3,500 Full Review: FM336 A stunning piece of hybrid synth design – setting a new benchmark for features, interface and sonics. It’s expensive, but a great investment that you’ll find inspiring for many years. Korg Prologue from £1,299 Review: FM332 Despite a few surprising omissions, this sounds inspiring. A unique character, plus the analogue voices layered with VPM sounds and effects sound magical! Sequential Prophet X £3,359 Review: FM336 The Prophet X is a fresh and inspiring hybrid synth that encourages you to explore sound making in new ways. The results sound unique…

Ableton’s 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers is now free > Having already offered a 90-day trial of their flagship Live Suite DAW bundle, Ableton are now giving away the digital edition of their excellent book, Making Music – 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers, for free. Written by Ableton’s head of documentation, Dennis DeSantis, the book offers “concrete tips for solving musical problems, making progress, and (most importantly) finishing what you start”. It’s divided into three sections that deal with beginning, progressing and finishing your projects and you don't even need to be an Ableton user to enjoy it. You can find download links on the Ableton website. Don’t forget about Ableton’s Learning Music and Learning Synths websites, either, which offer interactive introductions…

SampleScience’s Resonance is a free piano plugin inspired by Nils Frahm > German artist Nils Frahm is at the vanguard of the contemporary classical movement, and he’s also inspired a new free piano plugin, Resonance, from SampleScience. Featuring short acoustic piano attack samples and a piano’s body resonance physical model, these traits are said to make it perfect for playing “fast arpeggios and emotional riffs,” in a Frahmish style. The sound – based on 676MB of samples – promises beautiful imperfections and subtleties, while tonal tweaking comes via a multi-LFO, room reverb, HPF/LPF and amplitude range controls. There are three voice modes: polyphonic, monophonic and legato. You can download Resonance for free from the Samplescience website (a donate option is there as well). It runs on PC and Mac (though…

Audiomodern’s free Filterstep plugin can ‘shape any sound into a groove’ > Audiomodern have released their Filterstep plugin and are letting anyone download it for nothing. It’s available for PC, Mac and iOS. Described as a ‘creative motion filter’ that has the potential for all kinds of intricate rhythmic movement, Filterstep gives you control over various settings, such as the filter type, range, resonance and smoothness. You can make the sequencer run forwards, backwards or in ping-pong mode, and there are quantise and randomise options. There’s also an Infinity mode that instructs the plugin to apply different settings each time the sequence loops through. Filterstep can sync to your DAW host and there are wet/dry mix and bypass controls. You can quick-load and save presets, and the frequency of the…

In the studio with DJ Fresh “It was the first album I’d done in the box. There were only people like Tech Itch working like that, then. I wasn’t a big user of synthesis. My thing was the E-mu sampler. I played it like a guitar. Then Rob from Pendulum showed me this crazy new approach: rather than layering samples and processing them, like I was doing, he was using wavetable and subtractive processing in plugins. I was blown away, but it was terrifying. “There’s not really any outboard gear on the album, apart from instruments that were recorded in. Most of it was on Cubase and Nuendo, with lots of plugins like Spectrasonics’ Omnisphere and Stylus. “The drum samples were cut-up drum beats, obviously. I used Albino 3 and…

VIDEO ON FILESILO ACROSS THE TRACKS Polyend’s new sampler brings the cult ‘alt-DAW’ format to the hardware realm. But what actually is a tracker, and how do they work? For many, the classic late-’80s/early-’90s computer music setup would be one based around an Atari ST, but a thick wallet was needed for extra outboard gear like a MIDI keyboard, a synthesiser and possibly even an Akai sampler for good measure. However, at the very same time, an underground computer music movement was already brewing, and its only requirement to create kickass tunes was a humble Amiga – no external gear necessary. Composing music that played back purely on a home computer was once the domain of video game musicians who also happened to be skilled programmers, but all this changed…

Step, Fill and Invert with Polyend Tracker Tracker has some handy generation tools to speed up workflow and help generate ideas 01 > Following on from the previous tutorial, let’s use some of Polyend Tracker’s sequencing tools to build on our melody. First we’ll add a 4x4 kick. Tracker’s Step tool makes this quick and easy. 02 > Select track 2, step 1 and change the Step parameter at the bottom of the screen to 4. We input a note to trigger a kick sample (in our case C5 from inst 04). Tracker jumps ahead four steps to step 5, meaning we can quickly input our next kick without needing to navigate to that step. 03 > Let’s use Fill to auto-generate a closed hat pattern. Using Shift and the…

THE TRACK The greatest hits We pick our highlights from five years of track breakdowns As a part of every issue of Future Music since the end of 2014, we’ve accepted an invite from an artist, band or producer to join them in the studio for a deep dive into how they created one of their tracks. From the makings of heavyweight pop hits to the sonic experimentations of some of the UK’s best underground artists, we’ve spanned the length and breadth of electronic music making and beyond. Not only has this given us a look inside the studios of a host of different artists, but it’s meant we’ve gathered tips, ideas and techniques to help you make better music in almost any genre. As the coronavirus pandemic limits the…

Swindle Swindle creates a funky, club-ready guitar part UK producer Cameron Palmer is known for his eclectic take on grime and dubstep, fusing bass-heavy UK rhythms with elements of funk, jazz and latin percussion. He ran through the making of his 2016 track Connecta for us, breaking down its South American rhythms and fusion guitar licks. 01 > The guitar part is Cameron’s favourite bit of the track, but it took a fair amount of processing to get the results he desired. He applies Waves Renaissance Axx guitar compressor, specifically its Plucky preset, to punch up the first guitar track’s dynamics. 02 > Next Cameron adds Logic’s Simple Delay, then Logic Multipressor to balance the signal’s frequency content. “Recording this guitar we didn’t use an input, we mic’d an…

Matador Matador shows us how to master techno in-the-box Irish producer and DJ Matador, real name Gavin Lynch, is one of the most respected names in modern techno. He also has a studio so packed full of hardware we’re surprised there’s room to move. Despite this though, when mastering his tracks for the club, he’s all about plugins. 01 > After mixing the track, Gavin records the stems through his Neve desk and records the stems into Logic, then bounces the entire track as a 24-bit wave file. Gavin’s mastering chain begins with Logic’s built-in MultiMeter spectral analyser to get as accurate an idea of the track’s frequency content as possible. 02 > Next Gavin calls in Sonalksis SV-315 Mk2 Compressor with a fast Attack and low Ratio to…

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 Fickle Friends, Pretty Great Jack Wilson, songwriter/keyboardist from Brighton four-piece Fickle Friends, on the making of their latest single Pretty Great DON’T MISS: Lia Mice, Which Memories Will Make It? The multidisciplinary artist on techno and time travel Boston Bun, Don’t Wanna Dance Thibaud Noyer on sampling, replays and how he made his latest house hit Twin Atlantic, Barcelona Rock favourites Twin Atlantic explore the making of single Barcelona Jack Boston, The Place The DnB producer breaks down his track, featuring vocalist Vanity Jay steinberg Studio Sessions Top producers…

RETROSPECTIVE Indie dance (etc) How do you define this range of hybrid genres blending dance music with rock, funk and punk influences? © Hayley Madden/Redferns Andrew Weatherall has been celebrated in these pages on countless occasions before now. The London-based DJ, artist and producer sadly passed away in February, aged 56. Among his many contributions to music, Weatherall was a key proponent of a particular type of dance and rock crossover, a reluctant figurehead for what we might grudgingly call indie dance – a kind of ill-defined intersection of dance music, rock, punk, funk, disco and whatever else you choose to throw into the pot. As such, indie dance is a dissatisfyingly narrow classification, especially for a DJ and producer like Weatherall who not only eschewed genre tags but also…

REVIEWS Polyend Tracker £449 Polyend’s new sampler takes its cues from old school software trackers but, as Si Truss discovers, this is more than just a tribute act… Ever since Ultimate Soundtracker arrived for the Amiga almost 30 years ago, trackers – the subset of music production applications that were inspired by that original piece of software – have existed as a minor, albeit influential, alternative to mainstream music production tools. Distinctive for their vertical sequencing layout and numerical programming, trackers were originally popular as they offered a cheaper, self-contained alternative to early music software and MIDI gear. That USP diminished somewhat as conventional software became more accessible, but trackers have maintained a cult popularity, thanks in part to their often free and open source nature, and their links to…

Reviews SOUNDS & SAMPLES Spitfire Audio – Kepler Orchestra £249 Spitfire Audio have a long, impressive resumé of high-quality instruments and libraries, and are no strangers to the pages of FM Mag. Alongside their usual attention to detail, in terms of the performance and recording aspects of their orchestral libraries, Spitfire often employ a range of ways to maximise the usefulness and immediacy of many of their collections. Kepler orchestra is no exception and features a chamber orchestra recorded in the wonderful-sounding AIR Studio 1 (familiar to users of other Spitfire collections). The focus this time is on late 20th-century American systems composition style, and as a self-confessed fanboy of Steve Reich, I was looking forward to taking it for a test drive. Weighing in at a pretty hefty 38GB,…

Using Ableton Saturator Let’s pair Ableton’s basic Operator synth and Saturator effect to explore saturation in action 01 Using Operator (or any softsynth that can generate a single sine wave) create a monophonic patch with an amp envelope set to full sustain. It’s crucial to create a single-voice patch, as chords will inhibit the timbral control of the waveshaping tools in Saturator, creating chaotic distortion effects. 02 Place Ableton’s Saturator device after Operator and turn on the Soft Clip option, then lower the output volume slightly. From there, explore the first six saturation modes, which rely mainly on the Drive parameter for their waveshaping functions. The secondary parameters are useful when working with more complex signal inputs. 03 The last saturation mode is called Waveshaper, and activates additional parameters for…

FILTER Universal Audio’s free DAW LUNA lands early ...and prices for the add-ons revealed Having announced that its release was being brought forward in light of the Covid-19 crisis, Universal Audio have now unveiled LUNA, their hotly-anticipated free DAW for Mac-owning users of Thunderbolt-equipped Apollo and Arrow audio interfaces. LUNA promises super-tight integration with said interfaces – we’re assured that it enables you to record through DSP-powered UAD plugins with no discernible latency. There are also processing Extensions and dedicated Instruments, though in many cases, these will have to be paid for. To give you some details, the Neve Summing Extension provides summing circuitry from the Neve 80-Series audio mixing consoles from the ’60s and ’70s and costs £229. Studer Analog Tape, meanwhile, is a tape recorder Extension that costs…

Unlock Roland’s Zenbeats music-making app for free on iOS and Android > Another day, another free music-making app to stay at home and play with: this time, we’re talking about Roland’s Zenbeats for iOS and Android. The core app was always free, but right now, you can get the unlock in-app purchase, usually $15, for free too. Zenbeats is a cross-platform production app that promises to “make music creation easy”. It’s based on Open Labs’ Stagelight software, which Roland acquired in 2019. It features drum sounds from Roland’s TR range of drum machines, and offers sampling, instruments and effects. You can record using drum pads, keys and the note grid, and tweak sounds with touchscreen gestures. The free unlock gives you the full 23 instruments and a 500MB Sampleverse content…

Tim Exile’s Endlesss could be the free music collaboration app we all need right now > With uncannily good timing, Tim Exile has launched Endlesss, a ‘multiplayer music studio’ that lets you collaborate in a simple way. Offering built-in drums, synths, FX and more, Endlesss lets you jam by creating riffs others can build on. You can also record vocals and instruments, and Ableton Link support means you can sync other apps, DAWs and more. Inviting someone to join a jam is as easy as sending them a link. And said jams can go on for as long as you like, hence the Endlesss moniker. The core app is free, and you can add in-app purchases. A Kickstarter campaign will launch in April. Download Endlesss now for iOS on the…

| Martin Terefe “I still remember the setup – a Fostex eight-track, a small Tascam mixer, an Atari…” Martin Terefe © Julian Broad London-based Swede Martin Terefe is best known for his work behind the scenes as a producer for artists ranging from Jason Mraz and Mary J Blige to KT Tunstall and Cat Stevens. Having previously released music of his own as a part of the collective Apparatjik, alongside members of Coldplay and Mew, 2020 now sees Terefe branching out under his own name for debut album The Involuntary Gardener. FM caught up with him to find out more. When did you start making music, and how did you first get started? “As a child I lived for a few years in Caracas, Venezuela. Our neighbours’ kids had a…

ANATOMY OF A TRACKER 1 The Pattern Editor This is the guts of your song. The far-left numbered column [A] indicates time from the top down – rows usually correspond to 16th-notes, with every beat highlighted. The wider columns (just one of which is shown on the left) are your tracks, and in most trackers, these are monophonic, allowing only one note to be programmed per row per track. Notes [B] are either recorded using MIDI or the QWERTY keyboard, or manually entered using the latter, a little like filling in a spreadsheet. Noteoff commands [C] are used to signify the end of a currently sounding note. Next to the note is a number telling us which instrument [D] this note should sound. Many trackers use hexadecimal – aka hex…

Afrodeutsche Afrodeutsche creates a techno jam in Live Henrietta Smith-Rolla has been steadily climbing the ranks of leftfield club music over the past few years (a few months after we met her, she supported Aphex Twin at his biggest UK show in years). We visited the producer in her Manchester studio to watch her talk through WASP, a synth-led techno cut designed for her live sets. 01 > Henrietta says:“I usually start by making a kick drum, and playing around with the sound of it once I’ve got something going.” Once she’s programmed a basic kick rhythm in Live’s Session view, she duplicates the clip and adds another drum sound, creating new clips and adding new sounds until she has a selection of clips. 02 > Once she’s created…

Sigala Sigala builds a perfect pop-house chorus UK producer Bruce Fielding (aka Sigala) has had a hand in some of the biggest pop records of recent years, including his Ella Eyre collab Came Here For Love, which he broke down for us back in 2017. The track is a masterclass in electronic pop songwriting so, naturally, a killer chorus is key to its success. 01 > Songcraft is of paramount importance to Bruce, and the music theory behind Came Here For Love’s chorus is more than an afterthought. “The chorus is all in the same key as the verse and some of the chords are the same, but the order is different and it starts on F#m which is the first chord of the scale,” he reveals. 02 >…

PRODUCER’S GUIDE SoundToys Effect Rack With this popular virtual-analogue effect suite free for a limited time, let’s explore some of its little-known uses While it’s only been a few years since Soundtoys 5 was introduced, the package has grown considerably and now encompasses 21 distinct processors. 14 of these effects can be found in its Effect Rack, which lets you mix and match devices and save the entire setup as a single multi-effect preset. The plugin’s sonic authenticity is a big part of why producers like Dave Pensado and Tom Holkenborg (aka Junkie XL) enthusiastically endorse it. Soundtoys plugins sound and behave like actual analogue gear, and over the years, ongoing refinements have made these plugins fairly considerate in terms of CPU usage. Effect Rack is currently free to use…

THE HARDWARE While there’s a retro influence to Tracker’s ethos, fortunately the hardware itself feels pretty modern. The device itself is compact and lightweight without feeling cramped. Most of the buttons have a ‘clicky’ feel, true to classic computer hardware, but they also feel more sturdy and responsive than an old-school keyboard. Most programming duties are done using the pad grid and bulky rotary encoder. These generally work nicely together to make inputting and editing patterns relatively speedy. The pad grid itself is a little cramped, and it’s not up to much as a playing surface – you can play and record parts ‘live’, using a variety of scale modes but it’s never the most expressive experience – but, broadly, it fulfils multiple functions well. It can get confusing using…

Waveshaping with Phase Plant Kilohearts’ Phase Plant includes several killer distortion, modulation and waveshaping tools 01 Begin by creating a group with an analogue oscillator set to a single sine wave, followed by a distortion plugin. By using a sine – a single harmonic – you can hear the precise effect of the distortion. From the minimum setting, increase the drive intensity and listen to the sine wave transformation. 02 The distortion offers six options. The first five options – overdrive, saturate, foldback, sine, and hard clip – have specific distortion properties. The last is ‘quantise’, which is digital. Most of these clip the sine, adding more odd harmonics, but Sine mode applies a sinusoidal curve, which is extremely colourful, resembling certain audio-rate modulation effects. 03 Adjusting the drive value…

Gear Guide DAWS Reason Studios Reason 11 from $69 Full Review: FM350 Having the ability to use Reason’s Rack tools as a plugin is something of a revelation, and the new effects are great. Bitwig Studio 3 $399 Full Review: FM348 A powerful, inspiring update that further cements Bitwig Studio’s stake as the creative producer’s DAW of choice. Steinberg Cubase Pro 10.5 £480 Review FM354 A solid update to a great DAW, though whether you choose to update now will depend on your own workflow and needs. Tracktion Waveform 10 from $199 Review: FM345 Waveform is now friendlier, contains more creative tools and brings workflow ideas you’ll have missed from other DAWs. Ableton Live 10 €349 Review: FM329 Live 10 is a quality update to one of the best DAWs…

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…