Inhaltsverzeichnis für October 2018 in Computer Music

Mastering The Mix Reference Load up to nine reference tracks, then compare their frequency balance, dynamics and width to the audio in your DAW www.masteringthemix.com DMG Audio Limitless Far more than your average limiter, DMG’s pro-grade dynamics processor treats transients and dynamics separately for the ultimate in transparent peak limiting www .dmgaudio.com Universal Audio UAD Manley Massive Passive With a crisp, clear sound, this Pultec-inspired EQ is an awesome tone-shaper and sweetener for the master bus www.uaudio.com iZotope RX 6 Need to remove spill, pops, clicks or glitches from stereo mixes? iZotope have your back with their cutting-edge spectral editing and noise removal suite www.izotope.com SKnote SDC The Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor’s dual-stage design is mastering royalty, and this software emulation is a great cost-effective option www.sknoteaudio.com Sonnox Inflator…

Bit depth represents dynamic range, with each bit adding another 6dB. A 16-bit file with peaks close to full scale (0dB) will have all 16 bits active. But if you turn it down by 6dB, the loudest bit won’t be used, and you’ll be left with only 15 bits of actual information. By the time your signal drops to around 80dB below full scale, there are only a couple of bits of resolution left: 2-bit audio sounds pretty crunchy and distorted! Adding a touch of noise before you truncate (ie, throw away the least significant bits) randomises the resulting errors, so they’re not related to the audio signal. In practical terms, this means that reverb tails disappear smoothly into the noise floor instead of turning into crunchy distortion. The noise…

“I’d probably add a guitar now, because I like the sound of guitars,” Mark pronounces boldly. He grabs his Ibanez axe and plugs it directly into his Focusrite Clarett 8Pre, with Native Instruments Guitar Rig inserted in Logic. “I made a sound that’s basically ripping off The XX. It’s just loads of reverb and a thing called The Gratifier, which adds a bit of distortion,” he notes. The lamented Camel Audio CamelCrusher is added after Guitar Rig: “I find CamelCrusher has a real nice sound, especially with a reverb. It gives your stereo field loads of crispiness, especially in the build-ups; it just fills it out a lot,” Mark adds. He records a one-note riff onto the audio track. To give the part a slightly different feel, he puts Logic’s…

cm: How did you get noticed? MW: “I was getting a little bit handy at Logic, and I was able to make things sound quite good. I was EQing everything way too much back then – I thought that you had to take every resonant frequency out, so I was making a really clean sound. I met a couple of producers in my local area who wanted some help. They did The Herbaliser, a hip-hop crew, and they were producing for other people. I got involved in doing some work for them and found a studio next to theirs, which I moved into.” cm: Yes, your studio is next door to that of previous Producer Masterclass subject Jonathan Stanley AKA Cyantific. MW: “Cyantific was the best…

Musicians, composers and inventors have been looking for ways to automate the process of playback for as long as drummers have been showing up late for practice. Well, maybe not that long, but at least as far back as the 13th century, when mathematician and scholar Al-Jazari crafted a group of music-playing automatons in a boat to entertain guests at a lake party. Of course, like the player pianos that would become popular some seven centuries later, Al-Jazari’s antique androids were a costly novelty, rather than a serious attempt to create a new form of musical instrument. In the mid 20th century, inventors like Raymond Scott, Robert Moog and Donald Buchla would draw upon advances in electronics to do exactly that. Those early analogue designs would fuel entire genres of…

Paul gives us a few low-end tips. “When we’re actually ‘writing’ songs, we tend to work fast. Get the idea down quickly… try and build an outline of the basic song. Unfortunately, analogue synths aren’t built for speed, so I tend to use software tools in these early stages. Massive is my go-to sketch pad. You can find most of the sounds you need, and the quality is always pretty decent. In fact, the basslines are often so good they end up in the finished song. “I seem to be using a lot of square-wave basslines at the moment, but things do tend to shift between saw and square. It’s all down to your personal preference. I always work with a 4-pole low-pass filter and, to be honest, that will…

“These are not multisamples, so pitching them up and down also timestretches them” The debut plugin (disregarding Loopcloud’s linking module) from soundware giants Loopmasters, Bass Master (VST/AU) is a sample-powered synth dedicated solely to the creation of bass sounds for dance and electronic music. A cursory glance at the interface makes it clear that this isn’t a particularly deep instrument – there’s no mod matrix to be found, and the oscillators are decidedly light on controls – but that, we’re told, is by design, the aim being to serve up a wide range of mix-ready low-end tones via a fast, intuitive, bass-focused interface. Touching bass It almost goes without saying that Bass Master is monophonic, and with up to 10s of Portamento or Legato glide, and 1–12 semitones of pitchbend…

Danish manufacturers Lydkraft have been building pro audio equipment since the 70s, but it wasn’t until the mid-80s that the Tube-Tech brand for which they’re now primarily known came into being, with the release of a pair of vintage EQ clones and a compressor inspired by another classic box. In 1991, the three were updated to house the transformers and tubes on printed circuit boards, and they’ve remained true to that design ever since, as the PE 1C, ME 1B and CL 1B. The PE 1C and ME 1B are essentially remakes of Pultec’s revered EQP- 1A and MEQ-5 passive tube EQs. The PE 1C is all but indistinguishable from the American original, while the ME 1B broadens the MEQ-5’s three frequency bands for an even smoother response. The CL…

“The main controls are only accessible on the controller. It essentially is the GUI” Released in 1985 and discontinued 20 years later, TC Electronic’s TC2290 stereo delay rack unit stands as one of the greatest digital delay effects ever made. A staple in countless recording studios of the time, as well as the effects racks of wealthy guitarists the world over (it cost around five grand), it still fetches high prices on the secondhand market today. With the TC2290-DT plugin (VST/AU/AAX), TC have painstakingly recreated and modelled both the digital and analogue components of their classic rackmount, and taken the unusual step of teaming it up with a dedicated USB hardware controller. This is a small (109x135x43mm), solidly-built slab of metal and plastic that packs (almost) all the controls and…

Fuse Audio Labs VCL-373 $59 Web www.fuseaudiolabs.de Format PC/Mac, VST/AU/AAX Fuse Audio Labs are making quite a name for themselves with their joyously affordable emulations of more left-field vintage studio gear. Their latest is a software take on the Telefunken U373, a 60s broadcast compressor/limiter that also became a fixture in many mastering studios of the day, and marked the important transition point in compressor design from diode-bridge gain reduction circuits to transistors. Modelling every component of the U373 – transformers, compression circuit and amplifier – VCL-373 operates in either Limiter or Compressor mode, although the limiter is also active in the latter, post compressor. The compressor and limiter circuits each have their own gain reduction meters (not on the original), so it’s easy to see what’s going on with…

Lexicon Vortex 30 years ago, Lexicon was the name in reverb. Their advanced algorithms were the envy of all, and the boxes that produced them were pricey, overdesigned affairs aimed at pro studios. However, by the early 90s they’d begun trundling out a handful of stripped-down, cut-price effects aimed at the burgeoning home and project studio market. Predictably, these cheaper boxes were of the bread and butter variety, offering reverb or familiar pitch- and time-based effects. These products were clearly designed to get the ‘Lexicon sound’ into the hands of bedroom producers who couldn’t afford gear from the big boys. They suffered from less-than-stellar sample rates and a lack of hands-on control, but they were serviceable and successful. However, in 1993, the company’s budget line took a hard left turn.…

NEXT-LEVEL MASTERING  Unlock cutting-edge techniques with our six-part video course Read the full article on p22 1 Setting up a mastering session 2 Mastering EQ: minimum vs linear phase and M/S 3 Fixing premaster issues with dynamics processing 4 Saturating the master bus 5 Final master limiting and outputting for formats 6 Dithering explained VIOLET CM How to use your new valve-flavoured multiband compressor from DSP gurus Acustica Audio Read the full article on p54 STUDIO ONE 4 Fire up our videos and familiarise yourself with the PreSonus DAW’s latest features Read the full article on p65 1 Getting started with Studio One 4’s Chord Track 2 Using Studio One 4’s new Patterns cm/experts Our resident music production gurus walk you through their specialist field every month Easy Guide: Chromatic…

HY-Plugins HY-Slicer Free HY-Plugins are back, with a pared-down free version of a new plugin that’ll get your beats a-bopping HY-Slicer is HY-Plugins’ brand-spanking new beat slicer, the full version of which offers effects chaining, groove editing and more. As ever, the developer offers a free cut-down variant with enough features remaining to make it an interesting and effective beatmaking tool in its own right. As the name suggests, beat slicing is the name of the game, and both free and premium versions offer auto and manual slicing of imported files. Files are imported via a built-in browser or simply dragged in from your computer’s browser. You can rearrange/resequence the slices as you like, reverse them, independently adjust their volume levels, and lock them down to prevent the plugin’s randomisation…

Although mastering is no longer a ‘dark art’ performed by hermits in lab coats, the topic is still widely misunderstood. A little boost here, some multiband squashing there, a stage of slammin’ peak reduction to finish, and you’ve just mastered your track! Easy, right? This is the attitude of an amateur, of course. While many pros use gentle two-bus processing to sweeten and shape a mix, pro musicians and mixing engineers send their mix to an independent mastering guru for a reason. That final pair of ears is a safety net to make sure the end product – be it a single, EP or album – is error-free, sounds sonically consistent among its peers, and is outputted and delivered correctly. Then there’s the common misconception that two-bus processing will elevate…

Often, the best indication that you need multiband compression or dynamic EQ is when static EQ doesn’t give you the results you need – for example, if a mix needs more high-frequency air, but boosting with a high shelf makes certain elements too bright or too prominent. In this case, using a dynamic high shelf, or the highest band of a multiband compressor, can provide a boost that automatically flattens out (or becomes a cut) when those high frequencies get too loud. Compressing just the high frequencies in this way can add a glossy sheen to a mix, making it sound bright and airy without becoming splashy or sibilant. If the mix sounds harsh in places, it may help to compress the upper midrange, dynamically cutting the harshness when it…

VU and RMS Standardised in 1942, the ‘Volume Units’ (VU) meter was deliberately designed to be slow and sluggish. The physical mass of the needle made it too slow to react to very short transients, so the reading tends to average out signal levels. Peak levels are almost irrelevant when it comes to perceived loudness – a long, sustained sound will always seem louder than a short transient at the same peak level, so you need a way to average out levels. RMS (Root Mean Squared) meters take a short window of the signal, and measure ‘power’ in a way that correlates much better with perceived loudness than VU metering. The choice of window size makes a big difference, though: averaging over a longer period will give slower readings, and…

Limiting is generally defined as compression at a ratio higher than about 10:1, but there’s a special type of limiter called a ‘brickwall’ limiter, which guarantees no signal level increase at all when the input exceeds the specified ceiling. This is achieved using a ratio all the way up at infinity:1, and an instantaneous attack time – a time-bending feat that can only be performed by means of a short lookahead delay, enabling the limiter to start reacting just before the actual transient occurs. The payback for this is a bit of inevitable latency that might need to be compensated for by the host DAW. Modern brickwall limiters typically have highly program-dependent release stages, and allow you to push the levels much further than a clipper before they distort audibly.…

Mark begins his track with an arpeggio from an analogue synth. “I’ve got a Prophet-6. It’s quite cool to start with, because you can do a lot with it,” he enthuses. He selects a detuned sawtooth-based patch and uses a fast-decay envelope to modulate the low-pass filter, creating a pluck. The bottom notes of the arpeggio change to develop its feel, but it loops over the first four bars for the intro. Mark records the Prophet part onto an audio track, opening up the low-pass filter over the 16-bar section in which the arpeggiator part plays in its entirety. He then adds reverb with ValhallaDSP VintageVerb. “I quite like the harmonics that drift with reverb over other notes. It gives it a nice atmosphere, and you can kind of hear…

Bus processing Mark routes the arp, bass and guitar channels to a bus in Logic for collective processing. First in the chain is XFer Records LFOTool, creating a sidechain-like ducking pattern with a slight groove that gives Mark something to work with when it comes to adding the drums. He then uses Pro-Q 2 to calm some of the raging resonant frequencies, and Soundtoys PanMan to give the guitar element more stereo width. “When you use that and LFOTool together it adds a nice pulse to the sound,” he enthuses. Adding bleeps with Serum Mark duplicates the entire pitched section that he originally designated as the chorus/drop to give the track a 48-bar intro, then loads Xfer Records Serum to experiment with sounds over the top: “I like the bleeps…

Back in 239, we teamed up with Acustica Audio to bring you a deluxe equaliser plugin, Pink CM – and the Italian analogue-modelling gurus have delivered again! Violet CM is an exclusive multiband compressor that combines a dynamics-processing algorithm painstakingly modelled on the legendary Thermionic Culture The Phoenix valve compressor, paired with a three-way crossover inspired by the equally revered Tube-Tech SMC 2B multiband compressor. By employing the same cutting-edge dynamic sampling and Volterra nonlinear convolution technology used in their other products, Acustica Audio have created a special plugin that’s ideal for adding high-end valve magic and smoothness to individual sounds, buses or – crucially – your master output. Violet CM features familiar controls for the three bands (Attack, Release, Threshold and Makeup gain) alongside an input-dependent Ratio, and two…

Originally released by Thermionic Culture in 1998, The Phoenix can be found in the studio racks of many of the world’s top mixing and mastering engineers. Designed to bring all the vibes and feel of classic valve gear but with improved clarity for modern scenarios, The Phoenix focuses squarely on offering a flat frequency response with low levels of harmonic distortion and phase shift, making it an ideal candidate when you’re looking for valve flavour in your analogue signal path without excessively colouring the signal. The Phoenix features a pull-push design for high output levels, and boasts an all-valve signal path, with valves from Mullard and Siemens doing the heavy lifting. After feedback from mastering engineers, a Master Phoenix was released in 2006 that offers the same great sound but…

The wait is over for Studio One users, who can now get their hands on the fourth version of PreSonus’ comprehensive music production system. For the uninitiated, Studio One is a serious challenger to the far more established DAWs, built from the ground up to go head-to-head against those in the old guard. While Studio One 3 saw new additions aimed at mixing and browsing, version 4 has it where it counts in other areas, offering features of a more creative than technical bent. First up, the new Chord Track helps Studio One users detect and manipulate the chords used in a DAW project. It works on individually specified tracks, and both MIDI and audio clips are fair game. We’ll show you how to use this awesome compositional tool in…

“If you’re a multi-OS user, you get so much bang for buck, you might be wondering what the catch is” FL Studio consistently tops polls as the most popular music production software in the world, and it’s not difficult to see why. 20 years ago, it was born as the humble MIDI drum sequencer, Fruity Loops, and it’s certainly grown since. Over the course of its recent evolution, its reputation as an amateur choice has crumbled away as the number of professional fans skyrocketed. It now stands as a feature-rich, wholly capable production environment that allows for composing, mixing, mastering and performance. It’s become a joy to use for those who like its unique workflow, and the last update saw a gorgeous vector-based interface introduced. However, there was room for…

Bass Master includes three ‘Layer’ effects modules (Distortion, Stereo Chorus and Reverb Send) and a multiband compressor (Frequency Booster) on the master output. Like the rest of Bass Master, the Layer FX (which, along with the filter, can be bypassed for the Sub Layer) are designed to be operationally fast and unfailingly effective. To that end, each has just two controls (Drive and Colour for Distortion, Amount and Rate for Chorus, Level and Size for Reverb), plus a menu of five, four and three distinct algorithms respectively for variation within each module. Switch Chorus to the Detune algorithm for analogue-style pitch drift, or Widen when you want to fill out the stereo field, for example. It’s a nifty, well thought-out arrangement, and the diversity of the algorithms opens up plenty…

“There’s a lot going on in TRK-01’s many tabs and sub-pages, but it’s fairly easy to navigate” As every dance and electronic producer knows, getting the kick drum and bass working well together is one of the most important considerations in the making of any track. Native Instruments’ TRK-01 aims to make building that perfect rhythm section easier than ever by bringing kick and bass together in a single sequencing synth- and sample-based instrument. It’s a Reaktor Ensemble that requires either the full Reaktor 6 or the free Reaktor 6 Player (VST/AU/AAX/Standalone) to run, but once fired up, it operates and feels just like any other plugin or application. In a nutshell, TRK-01 comprises dedicated Bass and Kick engines, in which various synthesis methods – and/or samples for the Kick…

With all of TC2290-DT’s main parameters not only edited but also displayed on the controller, the plugin GUI is used only to negotiate the secondary ‘Special Keys’ layer of the original device. These parameters include Input and Output levels, Pan position, dry/wet Mix, input Threshold levels for the Env and Trig mod sources, and selection of presets beyond the 100 defined ‘Favourites’ addressed by the controller. While the separation of these things from the main controller interface is perfectly acceptable (with the possible exception of dry/wet Mix, although at least that’s the default assignment for the Special Number parameter – see below), the DAW Sync Mode selector, with which triplet and dotted note values are activated, should ideally be on the controller, next to the Delay Time up/down buttons. Having…

Obviously inspired by Ableton’s excellent Drum Buss plugin (introduced with Live 10), Beatformer (VST/AU/AAX) is a ‘one-stop shop’ for applying multiband transient and dynamics shaping, and bass and high-frequency harmonic generation to full drum tracks. A dozen processors are at work in the background, comprising transient shapers, saturators, a compressor and a bass booster, but everything is boiled down to just four knobs at the front, keeping things eminently simple. The two pertinent questions, then, are: does the lack of detailed control over the underlying modules matter, and is Beatformer as sonically effective as Drum Buss? Punch drunk Immediately after the Input Gain circuit (+/-24dB), the signal is divided behind the scenes into its low, mid and high components, each of which is sent to its own processing chain, as…

Plugins Download Violet CM, plus the rest of our CM Plugins collection Samples Download this month’s exclusive packs and power up your tunes Tutorial Videos See and hear exactly how it’s done with our expert video guides Tutorial Files Follow along in your DAW with WAVs, project files, MIDI clips and more Log in at www.filesilo.co.uk/computermusic Register this issue for instant access to our plugins, samples, videos and files on your desktop computer Free for digital readers, too! Read on your tablet, download on your computer…

Chances are you’re well stocked with virtual analogue, wavetable and FM synths – but the cupboard marked ‘granular’ is likely comparatively bare. Audio Damage want to plug that gap with Quanta, their most ambitious virtual instrument yet. And in a first for AD, there’s a downloadable demo, so you can try before you buy. At the heart of Quanta is an “incredibly easy-to-use and capable” granular engine that slices any WAV/AIFF/OGG/MP3/FLAC file into up to 100 grains per voice, each up to 1000ms length. Grain parameters include Number, Length, Tuning, Position and Level, each with Rand knob for random variation. Other controls are Shape, play Direction, Fine tuning, and stereo Width. Going against the grain, an auxiliary oscillator provides virtual analogue waveforms: sine, square and saw, or any point in…

LOGIC PRO “My bread-and-butter DAW since it first came out for the Atari – when it was still called Notator. As it allowed for heavy use of the first MIDI-sync interfaces, it became my weapon of choice, especially as you could cascade multiple Unitor MIDI interfaces with it. I stuck with it up until Logic 7, but I do use 8 for occasional projects. Pro X is just not for me. Some of my favourite older plugins wouldn’t be compatible with the new 64-bit-only version, so updating would cause me a lot of headaches.” STEINBERG VOICE MACHINE “When it comes to treating single audio tracks that contain vocals or even solo instruments, I always have this in my standard channel strip. It was discontinued a long time ago, but it…

The definition of a ‘mastering’ compressor is a little fuzzy, but it’s generally a design that will react gracefully to complex program material, without being too aggressive and ‘grabby’ on the attack, or pumping too obviously in release. FabFilter Pro-C 2’s Mastering mode is a perfect example: it can add density and glue, but it’s so gentle and well behaved that it’s difficult to make it sound bad. TDR’s free Kotelnikov compressor can be similarly transparent, though it’s also capable of adding subtle colour, especially if you shell out for the GE version. Sometimes, though, these designs are too ‘safe’, so we move into another category, equally loosely defined as ‘bus compressors’. These tend to be more aggressive and colourful, and a bit more prone to pumping (which can sometimes…

When going for maximum loudness at the mastering stage, clipping and limiting – one after the other – can be a good strategy. There are two basic approaches. You can push your signal into a limiter first, which can be a little more relaxed in its behaviour; and then follow it with a clipper to catch the short overs that squeeze through. Alternatively, you can start by clipping the shortest peaks, then follow that with a brickwall limiter, which is less likely to pump, seeing as you’ve already tamed those transients.…

Mark elects to base the chorus drop around a looped section of the arpeggio audio. He loops the end of the phrase, copies it and uses Logic’s pitchshifting to create a new chord progression from the sample. “I can imagine a lot of different notes underneath that, and I’ve also high-pass filtered it with FabFilter Simplon, so that it comes out of the build-up. Then it’s just a case of trying to work out where I go, melody-wise, from this,” he explains. To help him find his way musically, Mark creates a bass part to underpin the pitched audio. “I want to do it with the Prophet-6, because I want it to feel like it’s from the same palette of sounds. It’s quite fizzy, with quite a lot of unison...…

One of the best tricks up Violet CM’s sleeve is the SHmod control, which allows you to fine-tune the plugin’s attack behaviour to suit any source signal. Set the dial to 2 and Violet CM will precisely emulate the behaviour of the original hardware. Between a value of 1 and 2, the attack time will appear faster, as the curve is more ‘compressed’. This response is the same for values between 0 and 1, but variable lookahead is also engaged. SHmod values between 2 and 4 will give a slower, smoother attack shape. Try out settings and tailor the response to your source material.…

Drum mode Studio One always had a Drum Mode built in. This would take your piano roll keys away and leave lanes for drum names, letting you program non-tonal instruments like drum machines or samplers without getting distracted by octaves, sharps and flats. Now, Drum Mode has been souped up to offer a more comprehensive drum programming experience. Gone are the MIDI note lengths of the traditional piano roll, and in this version triangular ‘flag’ markers have been introduced. Since drum samples depend on MIDI Note On messages and usually ignore Note Offs, it’s the note onsets that count here, hence the design of the new ‘triggers’. You can access Drum Mode from the top-left of the piano roll, and ‘pitch names’ are still available for renaming. If you’re using…

LIKE A VERSION Studio One comes in three flavours: the standard-issue Artist version, the free Prime version, and the full-on Professional version, which will net you every new feature. Artist users don’t get to use Chord Tracks, but they do get Drum and Pattern Modes, plus the two new instruments. Of the major new features, Prime users get only Drum and Pattern Modes. AAF AF With its ability to read and write in AAF format, Studio One 4 helps you translate whole projects – including files, their positions on the timeline, automation and console options – to and from Pro Tools, Logic, Premiere and other DAWs and video editors that support the standard. As a side note, AAF stands for Advanced Authoring Format. It was created by the Advanced Media…

FL’s Plugin Delay Compensation system operates automatically – with optional manual adjustment – to ensure your audio stays in time by correcting latency introduced by processing. This can be pronounced when using CPUintensive plugins. Looptalk forum-members have been patiently waiting for an overhaul of PDC, and this is perhaps the most significant change in version 20. Are their prayers finally answered with this release? Almost. This under-the-hood improvement is a huge improvement for users, and the familiar problem with delayed audio arising from sending one mixer channels to another no longer requires tedious workarounds. A considerable drawback that persists is that automation clips are still not delay compensated. Automation clips in FL Studio instruct changes to parameters over time, and can be placed in the playlist like MIDI or audio…

Almost a decade after the launch of their trio of native Tube-Tech valve EQ and compressor emulations, Softube have collectively upgraded and tweaked them to take advantage of today’s much more powerful Macs and PCs, and their higher-spec displays, and thrown in a couple of completely new features to sweeten the upgrade deal. As was the case with its predecessor, Tube-Tech Complete Collection Mk II centres on plugin (VST/AU/AAX) virtualisations of Tube-Tech’s PE 1C (which originally scored 8/10 in 156) and ME 1B (8/10, 167) EQs, and the CL 1B compressor (9/10, 150). The first and most obvious of the bigger changes, however, is that the EQs now come combined in a single plugin rather than being provided as two separate ones. As before, you can buy the MK II…

With no regular MIDI note input, TRK-01’s Kick and Bass engines can only be triggered by its two step sequencers. Thankfully, though, these are intuitive and effective, offering eight keyswitching up-to-16-step patterns apiece, with each pattern cycling automatically through up to four separately programmed pages. Steps are activated by clicking them, and dragging upwards in a step sets its velocity. The Pitch lane in the Bass sequencer offsets the pitch for each step by up to five octaves up or down, while activating steps in the Hold lane extends note lengths. The base key/ root note is set in the top bar, where preset and custom scales can also be defined for the Bass engine to snap to, and Swing and Groove timing modifiers are applied to both sequencers. As…

Built within the same highly developed semimodular processing, modulation and metering framework as its stablemates, MSpectralDelay is a delay plugin (VST/AU/AAX) that gives the user total control over delay time, feedback and other parameters on a per-frequency-range basis. For example, you could set up one particular echo treatment for the hi-hats in a mixed drum loop and another for the snare; or spin out an envelope follower-modulated frequency band within a vocal, with different feedback levels and even pan positions for smaller frequency ranges within that. And that’s really only the beginning… In the Edit Melda’s very welcome Active Presets (see Active duty) are worth the price of admission alone, but the meat of the plugin is found in Edit mode, which turns it into a ridiculously deep delay design…

522 EXCLUSIVE SAMPLES including… 275 BPM-synced loops 30 Beat loops 88 Drum hits 5 FX 16 Bass loops 37 Melodic loops Step by step Three ways to use this issue’s Downtempo Dreams samples 1 This month’s pack is full of dreamy pads and drones, ranging from sinister to euphoric. Load them in your sampler of choice and retrigger them at different pitches, or throw them into a more creative instrument — we’re using Audio Damage’s granular synth Quanta — to generate new timbres and textures. 2 The pack is full of synth sequences, bass grooves and chord progressions. All these are royalty free, so you can use them wholesale in your tracks, guilt-free – but if you’d rather get more creative, chop out individual notes from different loops, then pitch,…

Though there are a wide variety of DAWs, each with its own unique interface, there are similarities when it comes to loading up and using plugins, and most stick to one of two approaches. The first – as seen in Steinberg’s Cubase, Apple’s Logic, and Cakewalk’s Sonar – involves insert slots on a track or mixer channel. These are used in the same way as an insert effect would be used on a hardware mixer. In other words, the effect is placed ‘in line’ on that mixer or track channel. Plugins might be loaded in by use of a dropdown menu tree or right-clicking in the effects slot. Clicking in the insert or effects slot in some DAWs – Cockos’ Reaper, for instance – will reveal a dedicated browser from…