Sommaire pour May 2016 de Computer Music

“I remained a hardened joystick waggler” My very first computer experiences were not musical but, er, ‘game-ical’. I cut my teeth on the Atari 2600 and ZX Spectrum, and I remained a hardened joystick waggler throughout the 16-bit era and on into the 90s PC days. As I came to realise, though, gaming does have some parallels with music. For example, for me, chaining riffs, runs and rudiments on a musical instrument has always felt a bit like mastering the complex combos of a fighting game. And how about puzzlers? Back in the day, I loved the Incredible Machine series. Those games gave you a bunch of ropes, pulleys, conveyor belts and other gizmos, and by placing them just so, you could build a contraption to achieve that level’s goal.…

ARRANGE THE PERFECT TRACK Learn how to piece together your musical puzzle with these videos from our massive guide Read the full article on p34 1 Extending a progression into an arrangement 2 Changing bass notes under static chords 3 Using inverted chords and dynamics 4 Raising the chorus a whole tone 5 Modulating to a new key from M8 to outro 6 Arranger and Chord tracks in Cubase 7 Studio One’s Scratch Pads and Arranger Track 8 A tour of essential transitional techniques 9 Enhancing arrangements through automation 10 Send/return automation as an arrangement tool 11 Workshop 1: Prepping ideas for arrangement 12 Workshop 2: Arranging a full track TIP4 Adding interest with rhythmic variation TIP9 Instant arpeggios for extending sections Get all these videos on PC/Mac at…

AUDIORITY LOGO Visit Audiority’s website and get an exclusive discount on the full TS-1 plugin! INPUT Sets the input signal’s level, from -6 to +6dB GAIN A Increase or decrease your signal’s attack, from -24 to +24dB GAIN S Increase or decrease your signal’s sustain, from -24 to +24dB PRESETS Load, save and delete patches VU METER Hardware-style readout of the saturation amount OUTPUT Sets the output signal’s level, from -6 to +6dB BLEND Mix the dry signal (left) with the processed signal (right) A transient is a crucial component in any note or hit with a pronounced attack, being the short, loud, noise-like ‘spike’ at the start of it. Striking the correct balance between transient detail and sustain (or ‘body’) will give your sounds professional punch, impact and power,…

“SPAN is a very popular plugin – in the last month alone, it was downloaded by 10,000 people” cm You’ve been making plugins for a long time now, and the earliest ones are still available. What did you learn when creating these early products that led to the design and functional philosophies you have today? AV “Certainly, I did learn a lot during these years. This includes various approaches to digital signal processing, general computer programming, and, of course, online marketing, search engine optimisation and product design. What I also learned is that it’s difficult to please all users. “Moreover, I have to maintain an achieved level of quality – this includes functional and visual quality so that any next version does not disappoint the existing users. An improvement in…

The popularity of hardware-aping processors shows no sign of abating, and HoRNet’s new console emulation plugin contributes further to the genre. AnalogStage (VST/AU/AAX), though, doesn’t emulate a specific classic processor but rather gives a choice of op amp, transistor or tube saturations, each adding its own character when driven using the Gain control. You can switch in saturation and hiss, and you even get an Age slider “that can make your virtual console older [by] simulating the effect of drying condensers”. It’s all yours for €18. URL www.hornetplugins.com…

A SPARK OF INNOVATION While we wait for Native Instruments to make their Maschine controller hardware compatible with iMaschine, Arturia has stolen a march on them by ensuring that their new Spark 2 iOS app supports the Spark LE hardware. LORDE SAVES US Everyone seemed almost too eager to predict a calamitous David Bowie tribute at this year’s Brit Awards, so hats off to Lorde for putting in a performance that felt sincere and tasteful. As for Lady Gaga’s Bowie tribute at the Grammys, though… A LINK TO THE PAST Call us old-fashioned, but we still prefer jamming with other people in the same room to collaborating over the internet, and Ableton Link is proving to be a great enabler of this. The syncing technology is already supported in a…

ARTIST The Beatles TRACK Back In The USSR This side-one opener from The Beatles’ 1968 ‘White Album’ possesses a fairly straightforward classic rock/ pop structure, albeit with one or two tweaks. 0:00 INTRO The song begins with the sound effect of a jet plane coming in to land, followed by a four-bar intro on an E7 chord that neatly anticipates the A chord on the downbeat of the verse. 0:15 VERSE 1 The song gets into its stride as Paul begins to narrate the back story, about how he flew in from Miami Beach and didn’t get to bed last night. The verse section lasts eight bars, made up of two repeats of the A - D - C - D chord progression. 0:28 CHORUS 1 The chorus is slightly…

The amateur producer may think that the process of arrangement only involves putting the correct events at the right place from left to right on the timeline. This does form the bare bones of a song’s structure, but the pros go deeper into the process and fine-tune balances, levels and segues with careful automation. Drawing in automatic parameter curves on your DAW’s timeline is the modern day equivalent of old-school producers moving mixing desk parameters on the fly – a process known as ‘riding the faders’. Producers of rough ’n’ ready electronic genres such as techno have also long since been known to record live ‘jams’, fading new parts in and out in real time for a spontaneous, flowing track structure. Although this process may cross over into the realms…

“My thoughts for the EP were: where are the sounds coming from? What’s giving the sound its quality?” Selected kit list HARDWARE Apple MacBookAllen & Heath GS1EVE Audio SC207Emagic Unitor 8Fatar Studio 49Ensoniq MirageYamaha TX7Kawai K1rOberheim Matrix 1000MAM MB33 RetroDigitech GSP5JHS Digitec DelayAlesis 3630LA Lite CX2Lexicon AlexElectrix ProFilter Factory SOFTWARE Apple Logic Pro 9Ben Burchett AkaizerDMG Audio pluginsSoftube pluginsSoundtoys plugins With its expletive-packed samples and authentic rave vibes, Borai’s Anybody from London is a track one cannot simply ignore. Computer Music caught up with Borai – aka Boris English – in his Bristol studio, to see his production techniques first hand, and to hear more from this old-school devotee. “I’ve studied production for about 17 years, and I was influenced by DnB,…

If you’re using EZdrummer, a scripted Kontakt library or any other drums-orientated sample playback instrument, your vintage kit probably includes analogue-style effects and tools with which to further ‘age’ the sound of its already old-fashioned tubs. If, on the other hand, you’re just using the clean, modern-sounding stock drum kit included with your DAW, you’ll need to put in a bit of extra work to send it back in time. First, there’s the sound of the drums themselves. Depending on what era and production style you’re trying to evoke, you may want them quite dull and ‘thuddy’ – as opposed to open and ‘ringy’ – which is easily achieved by shortening amplitude envelopes in your sampler and applying low-pass filtering or EQ. Along similar lines, the expansive stereo soundstage is…

Owen Palmer As an in-demand dance music engineer, Owen’s worked with a slew of outstanding underground artists behind the scenes from his London studio. After years of meticulously studying what makes a great production tick, he’s promised to share his most coveted techniques each month exclusively in . You can sign up for Owen’s free email course on making mixdowns easy at… www.owenthegeek.com/cm Most of us want our mixes to sound bright, but achieving that refined, open, crystal-clear top end can be a daunting task. Having thoroughly tested every conceivable approach to handling treble frequencies – and having failed in every conceivable way in my pursuits – I have one simple philosophy to share with you: loosely speaking, less is more. While there can be a…

Sitting immediately before the Resampler, the Approximative filter is an adjustable filter for removing some or all harmonic content above the Nyquist frequency (half of the Resampler’s frequency). This filtering process is used to prevent aliasing, and by allowing control over the cutoff, Decimort 2 can tailor the aliasing reduction amount and thus reproduce different hardware systems more accurately than its predecessor. Or you might simply tailor it for a desired effect when mixing. The audible result of this control is to soften the harshness and crunch introduced to high frequencies when down-sampling. Of course, sometimes you might want that harshness, but many high-end 80s samplers used such filtering to achieve a much warmer analogue-style sound. Indeed, calling up the (E-mu) Emulator preset demonstrates exactly this kind of high-end softening…

Key to Peak Rider’s behaviour is its selection of operating modes. There are four of them, each with a particular processing style. Exact mode compresses/expands the input signal to precisely match the dynamic shape of the trigger signal, while NoBoost only compresses the input signal when it’s louder than the trigger. Duck is the most flexible of the four modes, with the amount of compression or expansion applied set using the Gain controls for each band. Applying negative Gain in Duck Mode achieves the classic ducking effect, while positive Gain values expand (boost the level of) the signal. Rounding things off is Limit mode. When active, the Range dial works as an Input gain control, with the input post gain limited at 0dBFS. After this, the signal is expanded by…

Step 1 On your PC or Mac, go to vault.computermusic.co.uk, then either register for a new Vault account, or log in if you already have one. Step 2 Click ‘add a magazine’ in the top bar, select the issue you want to add to your Vault (eg, this issue is 229), and answer a few simple security questions. Step 3 Go to ‘my vault’ to see all your mags – click a cover and use the links to download! You can download as much or as little as you like.…

Our fantastic software, samples, videos and tutorial files are now available to download! To get access to this content, go to vault.computermusic.co.uk on your PC or Mac’s web browser. You’ll be asked to register and answer a few simple questions to prove that you’ve got the mag. You’ll then be given access to our content! You can sign in any time to register new issues and download moredent content. For more info, see our Vault FAQ: bit.ly/cmvaultfaq * Please note that the Producer Masterclass video is not available as a download via our Vault, though Apple Newsstand users can watch the video via built-in internet streaming.…

917 EXCLUSIVE SAMPLES 150 drum loops and hits15 multisampled instruments121 impacts and stings95 soundbeds and FX46 bass, synth and rhythmic loops27 drama and discordant loops48 piano, guitar and string loops 5 vox loops Where would all those classic cinematic moments be without the soundtracks that set their mood? Lost forever, we reckon. Fortunately, for every genius screenwriter or director, there’s a talented musician to pen the perfect soundtrack. In a tribute to the tension and suspense of the silver screen, this month’s pack brings it straight to your DAW, with 917 WAV samples to use as you see fit. For an exclusive commentary on this mega pack, we tracked down the creators to find out how it was strung together. Cyclick Robbie Stamp hasn’t been to the cinema since his…

Transient processing is an essential weapon in the modern producer’s armoury, and here’s another tantalising option for you to try: Audio Assault’s Transfreak (VST/AU/AAX). Alongside the usual Attack and Sustain knobs, the plugin gives you a bunch of frequency-targeting tools – specifically, two parametric EQ bands, plus high and low filters – to apply to either the attack or sustain stages. The plugin includes sidechain capability (again with low and high filters on hand), and options for Clean attack or to Clip the sustain portion. Transfreak is out now for $40. URL www.audioassault.com…

This VST/AU/AAX compressor aims to sate your desires for creative and colourful dynamics control rather than precision level-taming, with its numberless parameters and simple metering encouraging you to use your ears rather than your eyes. Bounce offers the usual Threshold, Ratio, Attack and Release compression controls, plus a Knee switch (hard and soft), Range and Range-Q, Feedback and Dry/Wet controls. There’s also Input gain, Makeup gain, and a Peak/RMS switch giving a choice of two detection styles. Bounce is available now for $99. URL www.beatskillz.com…

“We chatted to Judge Jules about the state of DJing” We were dealing with some serious CPU power issues in 99 (May 2006) as we asked if you should buy a – wait for it – dual-core computer. We also pointed you in the direction of a new website by the name of ‘YouTube’, noting that this “video-sharing portal” contained “some fantastic and rare archive music footage”. These days, of course, it’s the kids’ music listening platform of choice, and seemingly contains practically everything ever recorded. On our letters pages, one reader wondered if Apple would ever get rid of Logic’s XSKey USB copy protection dongle (they did), and we saddled up our intergalactic horse and showed you how to sound like everyone’s favourite/most hated Space Cowboy, Jamiroquai. Our cover…

PreSonus “With today’s 32-/64-bit floating-point mix engines, there’s no reason to fear a degradation in sound quality when summing even a large number of channels. Our research shows that the summing itself has no audible or measurable effect on the sound; it’s the analogue signal path that shapes the sound. If the aim is to add colour to a mix, using an external analogue summing device or a digitally modelled representation, such as Studio One’s Console Shaper, can achieve the desired effect.” – Arnd Kaiser Kush Audio “I have no idea which is ‘better’, I just know they’re different… but not for the reasons most people think. Analogue summing boxes are generally designed to produce colouration on the input and output stages – the circuits that surround the part that…

01 DEVELOPMENT PREP It might sound obvious, but the most foolproof way to ensure you’ll be able to develop and progress an arrangement is by creating your track elements with this in mind from the start. For instance, when programming a synth or bass part at the initial loop stage, have a play with various parameters while bearing in mind how these tweaks can be incorporated into an arrangement. Perhaps dramatically opening the filter cutoff at the end of eight bars will provide a much-needed change, or reducing a bass synth’s filter envelope amount will pull down the part’s ‘twang’ and cool things down mid-track. If you’re using a synth with macros, such as Massive or Serum, then you can go one further and prepare custom knob assignments designed to…

After working your way through the last few pages of tips and tutorials, you’re probably itching to open your DAW and put these techniques to work, getting yourself out of Loopland and turning your ideas into whole tracks. With that in mind, we’re going to take our new-found skills and develop an eight-bar loop for a house track, turning it into a fully fledged arrangement. You can, certainly, jump right in and use the previous pages as a guide, but if you need a little more context, here we’ll show you a few of the principles in action using our demo track. In the first of our arrangement workshop walkthroughs, we’ll start off with a typical ‘sketch’ project: a cluttered, disorganised mess of ideas that would be a hassle to…

Dave Clews In a studio career spanning almost 25 years, Dave has engineered, programmed and played keyboards on records for a string of artists including George Michael, Kylie Minogue, Tina Turner and Estelle. These days, in between writing articles for and other magazines, he collaborates on occasional songs and videos with singer/songwriter Lucy Hirst, aka Polkadothaze. www.daveclews.com When it comes to dealing with the subject of harmony, up until this Easy Guide , we’ve been dealing mainly with diatonic harmony – namely, supporting a melody with chords that only contain notes taken from the scale you’re working with. This can be somewhat limiting in the real world, however. With only seven diatonic chords available in each key, you begin to run out of options pretty fast. So…

AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE Dolo Jones Q What are your thoughts on automatic algorithm-based online mastering tools such as LANDR? Can you see a future where a mastering engineer isn’t needed at all, or will the human touch always deliver a more sympathetic take? A I think it’s cool that LANDR exists for those people who want to use it, but I also think the idea of mastering without a human being involved is gravely misguided. I already question whether or not mastering engineers are needed at all, but that’s because I think most of them are incompetent or behind the times. Producers need to step up to the challenge of making their mixes sound how they want them, instead of relying on the next guy in the chain. OP…

One of Fix Flanger’s best features is its VSO (Variable Speed Oscillator) mode. This emulates tape flanging using master and slave tape machines, with the big VSO knob determining the relative speed of the slave machine, from Slower on the left to Faster on the right, with the final section of the Slower travel actually delivering a machine Halt effect. How this behaves is dependent on the Servo setting, and bearing in mind that you can also blend in the Auto Sweep effect, things can get pretty complex. A simpler option is to only use Manual Sweep, and chase the zero pass through point (the central Null point on the Flange meter), just as you would with real tape machines. As well as that, dialling in 100% Delay with the…

EMT’s 140 plate established them as the top dogs in artificial reverb. Their efforts to produce a more compact device led to the 240 portable ‘gold’ plate, followed in 1976 by the 250 digital reverb. With its large, pod-like floor-standing design and paddle controls, the ludicrously expensive 250 was hardly compact. The delay, phasing, chorus, echo and special ten-second ‘Space’ reverb options also meant it was overpowered for many users, so the decision to extract the reverb into a simpler unit of its own (the 244) was a good one. The 244 was closely followed by the more flexible 245, and then the more ambitious 246. Development of the 250 also continued with the further-enhanced 251 model, which included the 250 algorithm and the ‘better’ 251 algorithm, as well as…

Samplephonics CyclicAmbience £35 250 lengthy loops and 150 one-shots make up this joyous pot pourri of sonic bits and pieces for “experimental minimal electronica”. Once you start auditioning Cyclic Ambience’s sun-dappled guitars, smoky keyboards, off-kilter synths and bizarre basslines, you won’t be able stop til you’ve heard each and every one all the way to the end. Our favourite folder, though, is ‘Drums Percussion’, comprising 100 of the maddest, coolest glitched-out beats we’ve heard in ages. If cerebral, wilfully weird rhythms and melodies are your bag, you’ll want to fill it with this www.samplephonics.com 10/10 Zero-G Extreme Vocal Environments £55 The follow-up to Extreme Environments (8/10, 207) is another ‘textural’ scripted Kontakt instrument, this time fuelled by 100 human voice loops and 85 impulse responses, and including 150 presets. The…

Audiority TS-1 CM This envelope-shaping transient designer plugin is yours for free with this issue, p10 Samples Bring the tension of the silver screen to your productions with this blockbuster bundle of sounds, p12 Tutorial videos High-quality videos to guide you through our tutorials. Wherever you see the icon on the left, there’s a video version to watch See this issue’s entire video content on the next pages Tutorial files A folder full of audio examples, synth patches and project files to help you follow our tutorials CM Plugins Our exclusive collection of free plugins for Mac and PC. See what’s available on p14 This digital content has been thoroughly scanned and tested at all stages of production, but as with all new software, we still recommend that you run…

EASY GUIDE CHROMATIC HARMONY Step outside the usual scale and learn to harmonise any melody Read the full article on p80 DESIGNER SOUNDS LUSH ELECTRIC PIANO Bring Rhodes-style keys up to date for a modern mix scenario Read Read the the full full article article on on p pxx 82 GEEK TECHNIQUE TREBLE CONTROL Give your tunes that professional high-end sheen and sparkle Read the full article on p84 DR BEAT SHAKERS Emulate this simple but effective member of the percussion family Read Read the the full full article article on on p88 pxx…

“The story of a glorious spaceship chase, all rendered in four measly kilobytes” We’re not sure what motivates the remixers of obscure demoscene and computer game tracker music from yesteryear, as both the audience and prospective earnings are miniscule. We’re certainly glad they exist, though, and that the Remixer of the Year Awards are there to recognise them. Among categories such as best C64 and Amiga remixer, the ultimate remixer prize at the 2015 Awards went to MRT, closely followed by legends daXX and Mordi, who shared second prize. More at bit.ly/ChipRemix15. And if remaking 16-bit music is your bag, then head over to bit.ly/Legowelt909 for Legowelt’s Amiga 909 Ableton Live Rack, complete with AMIGAnizer and Flocculence macros for dialling in Amiga-style sample rate reduction and high-frequency filtering respectively. And…

“In Case of Emergency”, in the context of this plugin, refers to the audio crisis of a distorted audio file. Created by Sonic Studio and Legendary Audio, ICE’s aim is to clean up less-than-stellar sounds by eliminating distortion, remedying overloading and clipping, and reducing harshness. First, the plugin’s Monitor mode helps locate problem areas in a recording, and then the type of processing and amount to apply can be dialled in. It’s an AU/VST/AAX plugin that’s currently available only for Mac (Windows users should be supported soon, so say Sonic Studio), and it’ll set you back $289. URL www.sonicstudio.com…

Ableton Live Session View In its initial incarnation, Ableton’s Live was intended primarily as a means by which to play back loops on the fly in its Session View. Over the years though, it has grown into a full-fledged DAW with all the trimmings, including a proper Arrangement View where audio and MIDI parts may be arranged and rearranged in a linear fashion, just as they can in more conventional applications. Ableton have provided a few very cool options for building arrangements in the Arrangement View, though, and the most obvious is to simply record a Session View performance, launching audio and MIDI clips on the fly. Such a performance will then be available in the Arrangement View, accessed via the Tab key or by clicking the ‘three stripes’ button…

Break Touted as ‘the DnB producer’s DnB producer’, Break – aka Charlie Bierman – has released tracks on a plethora of labels, including Metalheadz, RAM, Critical and Shogun, as well as his own imprint, Symmetry. His latest album, Simpler Times, was released last year to rave reviews. www.symmetryrecordings.co.uk In a slight deviation from the norm, this month’s Designer Sounds isn’t about sound design from scratch, but rather making enhancements to one of the greatest voices in modern music. The electric piano is among my favourite instruments, but being as ubiquitous as it is, finding interesting treatments for it is always necessary to keep it sounding fresh. The electric piano can be employed as a solely functional instrument with minimal user input, doing little more than providing…

Ronan Macdonald Having previously served as Editor of drummer’s bible Rhythm as well as Computer Music, Ronan is clearly the right man for this particular gig. He’s been playing drums for over 30 years and making music with computers since the 90s. The shaker family of percussion instruments includes anything that qualifies as a sealed container full of beads, seeds or any other ‘rattly particles’, shaken back and forth in a repetitive motion to generate a rhythm – from the simple egg shaker to the intriguing caxixi. Indeed, you can make your own shaker by filling a Pringles tube with corn kernels! The vast majority of the time, shakers serve a supportive role rather than being employed as solo instruments, although you’d be amazed at the pyrotechnics a skilled player…

15 processors are available to the three effects modules: Low-pass, High-pass, Bandpass and Band-stop filters; Chorus, Phaser, Barber-pole Phaser; Positive and Negative Flangers; Bit-depth Reducer, Sample-rate Reducer, Analog Drive, Circuit-bent Filter, Frequency Shifter and Pitch Shifter. Every effect has just one control – Cutoff for the filters and Speed for the chorus, for example – since they only operate on individual slices and so are meant for very brief deployment. Each effect also has an Animation (modulation) section, featuring three envelope shapes (Ramp, Up/Down and Random). You can adjust the modulation amount/depth (positive or negative) and, crucially, set whether the modulation is re-triggered with each slice or plays out as the slice repeats. Cool uses for the latter mode include such things as descending filters over repeated slices, or increasing…

Valhalla Plate’s original seven stereo in/ stereo out Modes range from conventionally ‘plate-like’ emulations (Chrome, Steel, Cobalt and Brass) to denser options more reminiscent of reverb chambers (Aluminium, Copper and Unobtanium). They are, however, all steel plate algorithms at heart, despite their various metallic names. Indeed, notable by its omission is EMT’s 240 gold foil plate, as the one Costello and Gunn tested didn’t stand up against the 140s. The recent version 1.5 update introduced five more Modes, three of which (Adamantium, Titanium and Osmium) are straightforward mono in/stereo out plates. Lithium, meanwhile, provides a broader stereo image than the other Modes, and Radium emulates two parallel mono plates with the same frequency response and decay but slightly different phase responses, and thus preserves the stereo image of the input…

U-HE DIVA Urs Heckmann’s divine DIVA features a choice of vintage-emulating oscillator, filter and envelope modules that can be mixed and matched as you like. DIVA’s DCO module was actually inspired by Roland’s later Alpha Juno synth, but this plugin is equally adept at aping any one of the Junos, including the 106. www.u-he.com MZTK DCO-6 For those of you on a budget and assuming you use Windows, there is the free DCO-6, a spiffy parameter-for-parameter copy of the venerable Juno-106. Like the instrument from which it takes its name, DCO-6 provides a quick and easy answer when you need those spiky basses, swirling pads or piercing portamento lead sounds. bit.ly/MZTKDCO6 TAL-U-NO-LX Though not specifically cloned from a Juno-106, TAL-U-NO-LX was based on the 106’s immediate predecessor, the Juno-60, which…