Índex per February 2017 a Computer Music

“That magic sound at a fraction of the price…” Whether it’s the smooth saturation of magnetic tape, the smoky summing of a hardware mixing console, or the warm girth of a retro synthesiser, the elusive sound of ‘analogue’ will never die. Physical circuitry can give instant imperfection, flavour and cohesion. Nevertheless, more and more producers and mix engineers (including me) are selling their valuable outboard gear, as DAWs and plugins can provide that magic sound at a fraction of the price, in a portable, recallable form. But to backwards engineer the studios and signal paths of old, you need the knowledge. So no matter if you’re an old-school purist or a digital obsessive who prefers Massive over Moog, skip to p22 to find out the essential tricks and techniques for…

INSTANT ANALOGUE Turn up the heat to make your tracks snap, crackle and pop with our video-packed guide Read the full article on p22 PINK CM Unwrap classic EQ tones with this issue’s plugin giveaway from DSP maestros Acustica Audio Read the full article on p52 JACKY We tracked him down to his Ibiza studio to see him pour over his track Apache in this exclusive video Viewing instructions on p45 MULTIBAND MASTERCLASS Process in bitesize bands to get greater flexibility Read the full article on p63 NEW YEAR STUDIO WORKOUT Get your tracks ripped in no time with our simple exercises Read the full article on p57 To download all these videos onto your PC/Mac, just head along to vault.computermusic.co.uk and register this issue…

THE HALO EFFECT Ever struggled to learn a piece of music? Halo Neuroscience thinks that technology could be the solution, with their ‘neurotechnological’ Halo Sport headset promising to ease the process by sending electrical charges to your brain. For $750. BATTLE OF THE SYNTHS If you’ve ever argued with someone about which synth is the greatest, we’d recommend that you get hold of GForce’s Vintage Synth Trumps 2 card game, which enables you to pit classic instruments against each other across cm12 categories. You can buy a set for £7 plus P&P. THE COIN-OP CONTROLLER We love MIDI controllers and we love old arcade games, so what could be better than the Miclop Ctrl Boy, a MIDI controller that looks like an arcade game? The project was about to go…

SoundToys Sie-Q N/A » N/A » $149 Clearly not content to slap their name on yet another 1073 or Pultec clone, Soundtoys’ first EQ plugin recreates the w295b EQ module from a 60s Siemens Sitral console. Improvements include fully sweepable gain rather than stepped selections, and adjustable drive for adding juicy analogue saturation. www.soundtoys.com Slate Digital Virtual Mix Rack cm214 » 9/10 » $199 No roster of analogue EQs would be complete without an SSL-alike, and FG-S is one of the finest, found in Slate Digital’s Virtual Mix Rack package. It works just like the real thing, with a high-pass filter, low and high shelves switchable to bell shapes, and two midrange peaking filters. Powerful, clean and musical. www.slatedigital.com PSP Audioware ClassicQ N/A » N/A » $69 Developers might be…

AudioThing Vinyl Strip cm226 » 9/10 » $55 This well-equipped channel strip is a must-have tool for injecting old-school flavour and vibe into your channels. Of Vinyl Strip’s six reorderable modules (which include drive, compression, sampler crunch, tone tilting and reverb), our favourite is the fully stocked Vinyl section, for mixing in customisable vinyl noise and crackle into the mix. www.audiothing.net Vengeance-Sound VPS Vinylizer cm214 » 9/10 » £85 (bundle) Part of the Vengeance-Sound’s VPS Essential FX Bundle 2, this virtual ‘ageing’ toolkit places a plethora of noise-outputting generators at your fingertips. Dial in noise hum, rumble, crackle and scratches; customise tone and density; and even change the speed of your virtual record, and switch between line/phono inputs. www.vengeance-sound.com iZotope Vinyl N/A » N/A » FREE Throw this fantastic freebie…

Cytomic The Drop cm214 » 10/10 » $99 The Drop is a one-stop shop for vintage filters. Cytomic have modelled the filters from two Roland synths (the SH-101 and Juno-6), Moog’s Prodigy, Korg’s MS-20 MkI and MkII, the Oxford Synthesiser Company’s OSCar, and their own state-variable filter. You get two at a time, and loads of drive to make them grunt, growl and scream www.cytomic.com UAD Moog Multimode Filter cm138 » 10/10 » £149 Get the best of Robert Moog’s classic filter designs, along with that used on Moog’s modern Minimoog Voyager synthesiser in one slick UAD-powered plugin that adds drive and an LFO for creating interesting, evolving timbres. As is usually the case for UA, the emulation is dead-on, and it’s even got the official go-ahead from Moog themselves.…

“I was so buzzin’ I couldn’t sleep that night! … a year after that I decided I didn’t want to work in the bank!” Living the DJ dream in Ibiza Although his first release only dropped in 2014, Geordie giant Jacky Maughan has quickly become a mainstay of the tech-house scene. And it’s not just down to luck – his ‘overnight’ success, with support of huge DJs like Sasha, Roger Sanchez and Huxley, and slots at clubs like Eden and Sankeys Ibiza, is the result of plenty of hard work. Jacky left his secure full-time job to throw himself into production, and moved to the party island of Ibiza to get closer to the dance music scene… and that’s exactly where we caught up with the young producer. During the…

“With a nice chain on that final fader, your mix becomes a living, breathing thing” Ilpo Kärkkäinen Ilpo – aka Resound – is a veteran drum ’n’ bass producer who’s worked with many of the scene’s biggest labels. As well as being an in-demand game soundtrack artist and mixing and mastering engineer, he runs a popular production blog focused on productivity. After 20 years in the game, Ilpo still has a passion for pushing the boundaries of production. www.resoundsound.com For more than 15 years, I shied away from doing any processing on my master bus – I kept it clean as a whistle. But recently, a lot has changed, and I’ve become an advocate of mixing into a processing chain. It’s a different philosophy of mixing altogether, and one that…

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. A slowed-down derivative of samba, bossa nova is a Brazilian style of dance music (in the traditional sense) birthed in the 50s, and one that’s found a place on the UK music scene, both in its own right and via early 21st century chill-out, in which it was pretty popular for a good length of time. It’s also earned notoriety in a broader social sense, thanks to the cheesy preset rhythm tracks built into 80s home organs by the likes of Casio and Bontempi. In this walkthrough, I’ll…

“Predator 2 also features the same 128 waveforms, but now each oscillator can host two at once” DUAL WAVE OSCILLATORS Mix two from Predator 2’s 128-strong roster of waveshapes in each ARPEGGIATOR Very potent… and a bit annoying X/Y PAD Modulate up to eight parameters ENVELOPES AND LFOS You now get four of each, and they can do more than before USER WAVES Draw your own waveforms and build eight-slot wavetables FILTER 2 Filter 2 now does everything Filter 1 does, bar distortion MOD MATRIX 20 slots for your own routings AMP DISTORTION The Multi Distort effect is now built into the amplifier EQ Separate Pre- and Post-FX three-band EQ modules CHORD GENERATOR Create user-defined chords of up to eight notes, with Strum UNISON MODE Up to six voices of…

“It is, essentially, a scaled-down version of Steinberg’s Cubase DAW, designed for touchscreen” MEDIA BAY Access all your sounds, presets and projects CPU METER Keep an eye on your system overhead with this handy indicator ARRANGE WINDOW Lay out audio and MIDI clips in a traditional arrangement area TRANSPORT CONTROLS Well, it is a DAW, after all! INSPECTOR Tap a header to access its named parameters for the selected track PITCHSHIFTING Apply up to two octaves of offline pitchshifting by tapping this button DLP Pick up two bargainous effects packs in the Steinberg online store TIMESTRETCH Apply automatic or manual real-time timestretching to your audio clips CHANNEL STRIP A console-style channel strip with filtering, dynamics and saturation It’s been over three years since we last looked at Steinberg’s iPad DAW,…

“The Space knob is Pro-R’s most important control, combining the selection of ‘over a dozen’ room models” DISTANCE Simulates movement towards and away from the source signal BRIGHTNESS Tilt the frequency of the tail from dark to bright with the Brightness knob CHARACTER Bring early reflections to the fore and introduce modulation SPACE Interpolates through a range of room models and sets the delay time POST EQ Inspired by Pro-Q 2, this six-band EQ enables precision frequency sculpting DECAY RATE Scale the base decay time from 50-200% STEREO WIDTH Pull the stereo image from mono to super-wide DECAY RATE EQ Pro-R’s ingenious EQ-style decay time/frequency shaping system Given their propensity for bringing us groovy new spins on workhorse effects, it’s quite surprising that FabFilter have taken this long to get…

The ADA Stereo Tapped Delay (STD-1) for UAD-2 and Apollo is a physically modelled vintage bucket brigade delay unit from UAD development partner Brainworx, officially approved by the original hardware manufacturers A/DA Signal Processors. But despite the delay tag, this isn’t your normal delay line… or even multitap delay! Rather, the purpose of STD-1 is to create short, multi-voiced, modulated delay effects – including doubling, chorus, ambience and short reverb. Its effects are achieved using six tap delays. These have unrelated (but set) delay times that can be modified collectively using the Fixed control; from x1 (1.3, 2.2, 4.6, 5.8, 8.3 and 11.1ms) up to x5 (6.5, 11, 20, 29, 46.5 and 55.5ms). Each tap can be sent to either the left or right output or bypassed completely. Delay feedback…

One of the key selectable parameters on the 2500 is the feedback (Old) or feedforward (New) topology, which influences whether the sidechain is taken before or after the gain reduction VCA. It’s often suggested that feedback designs are far more gentle and that feedforward designs more aggressive. Classic feedback designs like Neve’s 2254 desk compressor (and its rackmounted 33609 version), and feedforward designs like dbx’s 160 would seem to confirm this view. But there are many other influences on a compressor’s design and behaviour, and there are plenty of feedback style compressors (Urei’s 1176, for example) that can hardly be described as gentle or laid-back. On the API 2500, the feedback Type does influence the behaviour, making the circuit more responsive, particularly when compressing harder or transient-heavy sounds. But the…

The Plugins collection is a suite of complete, limitation-free instrument and effects plugins. It’s an incredible resource, boasting more than 65 pro-quality plugins that you won’t find anywhere else, all for PC and Mac, in VST and AU formats. All of the included software is created exclusively for us by respected commercial developers such as D16 Group, AudioRealism, Ohm Force, KV331 Audio, u-he, Cableguys, AudioThing, XILS-lab, Vengeance-Sound, Rob Papen, zplane and more. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS What is Plugins? Is it just freeware from the internet? No, and neither are the plugins limited or ‘crippled’. It’s a set of virtual instruments and effects created by some of the best developers in the business just for us – you won’t find this set of plugins anywhere else! Where do I get Plugins?…

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 239), 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 t more 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, but is made available via internet streaming. See page 45 for details.…

“The first composer writes 30 seconds or so and then hands it onto the next person in line…” Two issues ago we brought you news of the updated ProTracker v2.3D clone by Olav ‘8bitbubsy’ Sørensen. It was jolly exciting in its own right, but it now also seems Olav has a clone of Fasttracker II on the go. This new project aims to recreate the last ever version of FT2 (the leaked version 2.09, rather than the stable 2.08 which most people used back in the late 90s), in all its glory, for Mac and PC. A great deal of the legwork has already been done, including implementing the all-important easter egg, the ‘Nibbles’ Nokia-esque snake game, as per the classic tracker we remember fondly from our youth. Visit 16-bits.org/ft2.php…

“We got our first look at reFX Nexus” It’s one thing for a hardware synth to become a classic, but a software emulation? Native Instruments’ Yamaha DX7-inspired FM8, which we reviewed in February 2007 ( 109), has certainly become something of a legend in its own lifetime, so maybe the next logical thing to do would be to go full circle and make a hardware version of that. Our Burning Question asked if Linux was becoming a mainstream musicians’ OS – a decade later, we’d say that it still falls into the cult category – and we got our first look at reFX’s Nexus, which would go on to become the king of ROMplers (in EDM circles, at least). We also spoke to the sound designer and engineer on Madonna’s…

Ian Goold “Modulate detuning between oscillators, drive filters and add harmonic distortion with whatever plugins you have, compress liberally, and warm it up a bit with an additional low-pass filter. I like to add a very subtle fast slap delay with two barely audible repeats and a very subtle short-decay reverb to emulate a room sound.” David Graham “I got reviews that thought I was using analogue gear – I just used very light distortion, taken to the point where you can just hear it and then rolled back a touch. I took off a little high end with EQ, and lastly split each ‘vintage’ synth part across two MIDI tracks, deleted some notes from one and the rest from the other, and then tuned one track up about 6-8…

Professional audio gear is designed to give acceptable noise and minimal distortion at appropriate signal levels. By keeping levels throughout a real signal path around 0dBU, the producer should get good results. Even so, producers were desperate to keep noise levels down, so they would often intentionally run signals ‘hot’ to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. Most analogue gear breaks up and distorts in a pleasant way, and this characteristic eventually became associated with classic production. So what is distortion? At its simplest, when a signal is played too loud, the excess is chopped off or ‘clipped’. A sine wave’s smooth top and bottom would be flattened off, making it more like a square wave. This process introduces harmonics, in the same way that ‘squaring off’ a sine wave does. Analogue…

Soundtoys Decapitator $cm199 This brutal box of wave-chopping tricks houses five unofficial emulations: an Ampex 350 tape preamp, Chandler/EMI TG Channel, Neve 1057 input channel, and triode and pentode modes from Thermionic Culture’s Culture Vulture. www.soundtoys.com Vertigo Sound VSM-3 $299 Developed by Brainworx, this recreates Vertigo’s $8000 saturation station in software, available natively and for UAD. The VSM-3, with its tube-like FET Crusher and gritty Zener Blender, is aimed at serious mixing and mastering uses. www.uaudio.com Slate Digital Virtual Tape Machines $cm149 Let the virtual reels spin as you choose between 16-track (recording) and 2-track (mastering) machines, two tape formulations, three bias settings and two running speeds. It’s dead easy to use and sounds as tapey as can be. www.slatedigital.com XLN Audio RC-20 Retro Color €80 All you need to…

TOGU AUDIO LINE TAL-U-NO-62 Roland’s cut-down line of single-oscillator synths of the early cm1980s helped bring polyphony to the masses while carving out a unique and much-vaunted sound all their own. The Juno-60 was arguably the best of the bunch, and is here lovingly recreated in digital form. All of the original’s key features are here, including a beefy sub-oscillator and that rich Roland chorus. www.tal-software.com DISCODSP OB-XD Initially developed by 2DAT and Soshi Studio, OB-Xd is, as the name suggests, an emulation of Oberheim’s legendary Oberheim OB-X and OB-Xa, instruments with the raw analogue power to cut through the mighty metallic din of bands like Rush and Van Halen. This free and open-source plugin sounds big, brash and ballsy, and you can now customise the GUI, too. www.discodsp.com ICHIRO…

Audio Damage Ratshack Reverb N/A » N/A » $29.99 Many a young American muso got their first taste of effects with the Radio Shack’s Realistic brand reverb unit. A desktop device with four sliders, it was actually an analogue delay box, and Audio Damage have created this keen simulation as a tribute. www.audiodamage.com iZotope Trash 2 cm187 » 9/10 » $75 Ostensibly designed for guitarists, Trash 2 sounds great on just about anything you plumb through it. Use it to add a hint of analogue warmth or to utterly destroy your signal. It’s packed with over 60 distortion algorithms. www.timespace.com Softube Spring Reverb N/A » N/A » $99 Before digital reverbs hit the scene, gigging musicians had to use spring reverbs, in which suspended metal springs vaguely simulated an acoustic…

Everybody loves a good winter holiday – the fun, the food, the lie-ins… and that’s totally fine, people! Nobody should feel guilty about taking a little valuable R&R time out of their studio program. In fact, many scientific studies conducted amongst our friends and colleagues prove conclusively that taking a little studio break is awesome for your mixdowns! After a few weeks of rest, you’ll feel primed to flex those faders, bench that bass and pump out some productions! But be honest – who wants to spend a few weeks working hard in January just to get our sound back to where it was at the end of December? Why not use this fresh start to push our skills forward, build on our strengths and learn exciting new techniques? Our…

You can take your mix bus game further by applying dual mono processing with some of the plugins in your chain. Dual mono operation means you’re processing the left and right channels of the stereo signal independently, instead of mirroring the same processing for both channels as usual. The benefit is a wider and deeper stereo image, but there’s a real risk of creating imbalance and phase issues, especially if you’re hitting the mix bus hard. Once again we run into the same old advice: know what you’re doing, and be on the lookout for potential issues. Some plugins come with a ‘stereo unlink’ option, which instantly makes the plugin process audio in this dual mono configuration. For any plugins lacking that feature, you can set it up yourself –…

Identical to that of RP-EQ (9/10, 225) but with the addition of an extra pair of assignment slots, Predator 2’s X/Y Pad serves as a spectacular modulation source, with up to eight parameters from throughout the synth assignable to its X and Y axes, and the depth of each assignment set independently. In Live mode, the red ‘puck’ can be dragged around with the mouse or automated in the host DAW. The real fun comes when you switch to Record mode, however, in which your movements are captured to memory as a ‘path’ for playback in Play mode. The replayed movement of the puck along this path is open to plenty of creative tweaking, including looping, speeding up and slowing down, syncing to host tempo, and quantising to path resolution,…

Described by its developers – Helsinki-based newcomers oeksound – as an “advanced de-esser” or “automatic dynamic frequency notcher”, soothe was originally conceived as a vocal processing plugin (VST/AU/AAX), but turned out to be effective on any signal suffering from harshness, narrow-band noise or excessive brightness – cymbals, electric guitars, brass, piano, acoustic fret noise, etc. Essentially an automatic, task-orientated dynamic EQ, soothe uses spectral processing to automatically detect and dynamically (ie, modulated by changes in input level) reduce what it perceives to be undesirable mid-high resonances in the source signal. There, there… The majority of soothe’s very pretty interface is taken up by what looks like an EQ but is in fact the ‘Frequency and Reduction Graph’. The blue area in the bottom half is a spectrogram that shows the…

A key aspect of STD-1 is its capability for modulating signals. It can be used in subtle ways to great effect, of course, but starts to deliver some pretty interesting outcomes when you start pushing it to extremes. For a new take on guitar vibrato, we used the two short delay taps combined with a slow Sweep setting and a fast Sweep Mod setting. Blended in with the non-modulated signal and dry input, this wobbly effect was far less uniform than traditional vibrato. Next, for an underwater special effect that works on percussive sounds such as picked guitar, we set the Regeneration to almost maximum, sourced it from tap 6, and turned the Hi Cut down low. Using just the two longest taps (5 and 6) combined with fast Sweep…

New from Universal Audio, in collaboration with Softube, is the Chandler Zener Limiter. If you’re familiar with Chandler’s real-life hardware unit, you’ll appreciate that the Zener is an expanded version of their original Zener diode-based TG1 Limiter, and is thus based on the classic EMI TG console limiter, that rare breed of 1960s desks found at Abbey Road and other EMI establishments. The Zener was born when Wade Goeke at Chandler increased flexibility of the TG1 by adding extra knob positions (there are 11 positions for Attack and 21 positions for Release), as well as including the settings of the original TG1 (labelled in white). These details are carried over in the software emulation, allowing you to replicate both the Zener and the TG1. Additionally, there’s a Side Chain high-pass…

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 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 a virus checker before use. We also recommend that you have an up-to-date backup of your hard drive before using the content. Future cannot accept responsibility for any disruption, damage and/or loss to your data or computer system that may occur while using this magazine’s programs and/or data. Consult your network…

To help you get the most out of our immense plugin collection, we’ve assembled the Plugins Tutorial Bank, containing over 100 guides and tutorials for our cm Plugins, specially selected from past issues. You’ll find Getting Started PDFs and videos for most of the individual plugins, along with tutorial PDFs and videos on using Plugins for sound design, mixing, and even creating entire tracks. You’ll find all of this as a handy download in our Vault – go grab it now and start getting more out of your plugins! vault.computermusic.co.uk…

“The problem is that it limits the access to patents that are useful to society as a whole” cm Tell us how you got started with SampleScience. If you could give one ‘mission statement’ for the company, what would it be? PP “15 years ago, SampleScience was the pseudonym for my sample-based electronic music project. With time it became my company name – interest in my sample libraries and plugins has always been a lot larger than for than my musical output. People on KVR are also familiar with this name, so I kept it to avoid confusion. SampleScience’s mission is to provide new inspiring sounds and plugins to modern music-makers. As a musician myself, I’m always seeking new, ‘unheard’ and weird sounds. This is what I’m trying to provide.”…

FruityLoops Paving the way for today’s FL Studio 12 Cubase 1 No VCA Faders or Sampler Tracks here Cakewalk Sonar 1 The first incarnation of today’s Sonar, following on from the ‘Cakewalk’ software Reason 1 The rebirth of Rebirth shown at the birth of Reason (pic from cm29) Emagic Logic Good luck getting a Drummer track in this one Ableton Live 1 V1 of the fresh-faced DAW looks surprisingly familar… Digidesign Sound Designer The 1984 forerunner to Avid’s modernday DAW…

> Technique 2. Get signals out of a DAW Here’s how to take a digital signal out into the real world through your audio interface 1 Most DAWs provide some means of routing selected signals through any additional outputs on a given interface – and Ableton Live users have a dedicated plugin. Open a Live project with a couple of audio channels. 2 Currently, track 1 is routed to the main outputs. In the browser, find the plugin called External Audio Effect and drag it into our first channel. It goes quiet because our new plugin has no output assigned. 3 On the device, locate the Audio To dropdown. We select an output, to send the signal out from our interface. You can use the same plugin to route processed…

SLATE DIGITAL VIRTUAL CONSOLE COLLECTION Comprised of two plugins – one designed to be used per-channel, the other designed to be placed on the master buss, Slate’s VCC takes its cue from five legendary (and carefully unspecified) analogue tube and solid-state consoles. With a minimum of controls, and almost imperceptible individually, they add up to a classic studio sound. www.slatedigital.com PRESONUS CTC-1 CONSOLE SHAPER Just announced as we were going to press this month, CTC-cm1 is the second of PreSonus’ Mix Engine FX processors for Studio One. When added to a bus (whether a group or master), CTC-cm1 applies noise, crosstalk and drive to both the individual channels and the bus itself. It’s said to emulate the sonic behaviour of a choice of three consoles: “classic British, vintage tube and…

01 SUMMING THINGS UP FOR HEAT: SATSON CM You may have seen Sonimus’ Satson and Britson plugins over the last few pages. These and our own version, Satson CM, were meant to be used per-track and combined on your master bus to subtly suggest the cumulative effects of analogue mixing desk circuitry. They’re designed for subtle, under-the-radar warmth, but we’ve often used a single Satson CM to add extra drive to a signal by pushing up the Gain. Use utility plugins before and after to customise the drive amount, plus in and out levels. 02 REIGN IT IN WITH DEEMONITOR CM This simple utility gadget from Dotec-Audio offers a handful of convenient monitoring tools that are designed to help you get a better mix. Among them are three different speaker…

Apple MacBook Pro “I tend to be travelling quite a lot, so my MacBook is ideal for producing on the go. I’ve boosted the RAM up to 16GB, and I’ve also recently thrown in a solid-state hard drive so that Ableton Live runs a lot more smoothly.” apple.com Beyerdynamic DT 150 “I swear by these cans, and have done since I started producing. They have a great frequency response and are very comfortable over prolonged periods of time. They’re also very affordable, and you can buy individual parts for them, so no need to ever replace the full thing!” beyerdynamic.com Akai Professional MPK mini mkII “I love this keyboard! With 25 keys and pads, both velocity-sensitive, accompanied by eight knobs and a four-way thumbstick, it has everything you need. You…

FADER PULL-DOWNS / PULL-UPS If you’ve mixed your track with compression applied to the master, disengage it, pull all your channel faders right down and set all of the levels from scratch, attempting to achieve the same balance as when you had the compression applied. Hint: you can, and it will be better for it! And even if you didn’t have compression applied, do this anyway! DON’T OVER-EXERT KICKS & SNARES For punchy kicks and snares that slice through cleanly without being too loud or harsh, start by adding a sidechain-enabled compressor to your bass (using kick and snare as the trigger). Set very fast Attack and Release times, and reduce the Threshold until you achieve 25-30dB of attenuation (ie, ‘a lot’). Now apply a high-pass filter to the sidechain…

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 If you’ve ever wanted a phrase perfect for impressing your mates down the pub with your amazing musical knowledge, you’d have to go pretty far to beat ‘diatonic chord substitution’. In reality though, it’s not that tricky a concept to get around, so let’s break it down into its constituent parts to figure out exactly what it means, and why it’s useful. In a musical sense, the term ‘diatonic’ means ‘belonging to’, so…

You’ve probably triggered a compressor using an external sidechain before… but have you ever thought of sidechaining the compressor on your master bus? Triggering mix bus compression with something other than the mix itself might seem counterintuitive; but this is a technique absolutely worth trying, no matter what genre of music you happen to be working with (OK – I probably wouldn’t do it with classical music!) This technique offers almost endless creative possibilities to experiment with. The most obvious thing to try with most kinds of music is to sidechain the mix bus compressor using your kick drum. This can create solid movement, especially with mixes that have a lot going on. It doesn’t end there, though – if your song has vocals, try triggering the mix bus compressor…

Our promise We bring you honest, unbiased appraisals of the latest computer music products. Our experts apply the same stringent testing methods to all gear, no matter how much hype or expectation surrounds it. What the ratings mean 1-4 A seriously flawed product that should be avoided 5 This product’s problems outweigh its merits 6 A decent product that’s only held back by a few flaws 7 Solid. Well worth considering 8 Very good. A well-conceived and executed product 9 Excellent. First-rate and among the best you can buy 10 Exceptional. It just doesn’t get any better than this! See and hear the latest software in action in our ‘2 Minutes With…’ videos! Wherever you see the icon, head straight to your DVD, the Vault download area, or our YouTube…

PRESET BROWSER Navigate the packed preset library and use the main controls while auditioning NOISE MODULE Fabulous vinyl, tape and other background noise types on tap FLUX SLIDERS Ramp up the chaos with these variable randomisation controls DISTORT MODULE Six distortion algorithms can be targeted with the Focus Filter MASTER SECTION Adjust input and output levels, stereo width, and apply basic EQ DIGITAL MODULE Sample rate and bit depth reduction, plus filtering MAGNITUDE SLIDER Scales all the big knobs and the master section controls – great for sweeps! MAGNETIC MODULE More tape emulation, this time applying three degrees of volume modulation SPACE MODULE A simple reverb with PreDelay BIG KNOBS Set the depth, mix balance or level of the modules with these six dials With the vinyl comeback in full…

The Sharpness and Selectivity dials let you tailor the depth and width of the cuts soothe makes, and how relaxed it is with what it does and doesn’t qualify as ‘resonance’. With Sharpness at 0, the dynamic gain reduction occurs over broad, smooth, wide bands. As it’s increased, the bands become narrower, sharper and more numerous, until, at maximum, the attenuation gets surgical, with no crossover between resonant frequencies. Selectivity acts like a threshold for resonant peaks. Fully clockwise, only the most overtly apparent peaks are processed, but as Selectivity is lowered, less prominent resonances are brought into the ‘circuit’, too, ultimately delivering smoother, less targeted dynamic reduction. Below, the Stereolink dial determines whether processing is applied individually (ie, dual mono) to the left and right channels of a stereo…

API’s 2500 bus compressor is a classic workhorse processor and is the latest fully endorsed emulation from Universal Audio’s in-house team. The 2500 is a modern VCA design, and while VCAs are often lambasted as clinical rather than characterful, the API sits shoulder to shoulder with equally revered VCA compressors such as SSL’s Bus Compressor and Neve’s 33609. In fact, the 2500 is one of the most flexible bus compressors available. The UAD emulation retains all the features of the hardware aside from the left/right ‘tilt’ tweaker (you can use your DAW’s pan pot to do this). The plugin’s layout is slightly different, and there’s an operating-level headroom tweaker (HR), and a Mix blend for parallel processing. The main compression controls (Threshold, Attack, Ratio and Release) are joined by manual…

From spectral analysis, it’s clear the saturation is dominated by odd harmonics, adding a nice richness, and what you’ll hear is subtle then more obvious mid- to high-frequency enhancement as you drive the circuit towards clipping. If you want the best of both worlds (and have the available DSP, of course) one nice option is to chain two Zeners in series, using one just for compression and one just for the THD feature. One rather excellent feature on the Zener is called THD (total harmonic distortion). This removes the threshold from the circuitry leaving the remainder of the circuit active, and allows you to take advantage of the Zener’s excellent saturation characteristics without compression or limiting. You may have spotted that the Input labelling indicates a couple of THD values…

Don your loosest jeans and your paint-covered vest, and dive into the singer-songwriter’s ultimate toolbox. Within, you’ll find diamond-pointed drums, razor-sharp guitar chords and licks, heavy bass samples, and a spare bunch of keys (electric and acoustic) for when your two-hour lunch break comes. This cm1200-strong container of one-shots, loops and patches will help you express your deep-seated feelings of inadequacy through the time-honoured medium of the moany four-chord song! 1200 SAMPLES Including 93 Bass hits 385 Electric piano chords 302 Guitar chords 226 Drums 61 Keys…

AKAI MPC ELEMENT/ESSENTIALS A hybrid product from Akai themselves, Element consists of an inexpensive USB controller clearly carrying the legacy of the MPC line. MPC Element works with the MPC Essentials software or can be used with an unlocked copy of the higher spec’d MPC software for a fully realised MPC experience. Other hardware options are also available. www.akaipro.com AKAI iMPC Akai conspired with Retronyms to offer iMPC for the iPad. Loaded with over cm1200 samples, it provides the instantly recognisable MPC interface, albeit one based on their more recent MPC hardware. Though tapping out a beat on a glass screen lacks the tactile feedback of the real thing, iMPC is loads of fun for a steal of a price. www.akaipro.com ONE SMALL CLUE POISE Like so many others both…