Sound On Sound UK December 2020

One of the cruellest things about the Covid-19 crisis is that the burden hasn’t been shared equally. Indeed, some manufacturers are reporting record sales, thanks to people spending more time in their home studios. But for anyone who supplies or works in live sound, or the wider events industry, it’s been a disaster. Gigs, tours, festivals: all were closed down practically overnight back in March, and there seems no prospect of them restarting any time soon. Live music is hardly the only casualty of Covid, but a combination of circumstances has meant that it’s been hit particularly hard. For one thing, it’s a sector where conventional full-time employment is relatively rare. Even at the highest level, it’s normal for people to be self-employed, working freelance or on short-term contracts. Such government…

A plug-in that offers two identical modulation effects slots, each of which can host Phasing, Flanging, Chorus or Tremolo effects, might not sound all that exciting, but Waves Kaleidoscopes (which supports all the common Mac OS and Windows formats) makes it possible to squeeze a lot of extra mileage out of these effects. That said, there’s nothing complicated or intimidating: there are just a few more controls than you’d find on a typical modulation stompbox, and in modes where not all the controls are relevant, the unused ones are greyed out. Two slots can each host one effect, chosen using the tabs above, and a choice of routing allows one effect to be fed into the other or for the two to run in parallel. The modulation can be driven by…

Headphone and microphone technology have much in common, so it’s no surprise that Austrian Audio followed up their superb OC-series microphones with a range of cans. First off the block were the Hi-X55s, reviewed in April this year. A smart, versatile and cheerful-sounding pair of closed-back studio headphones, they have now been joined in Austrian Audio’s armoury by another smart and versatile pair of closed-back headphones. The difference? The Hi-X50s are an ‘on-ear’ design, meaning that the earcups sit on top of the outer ear rather than surrounding it completely as do ‘over-ear’ models like the 55s. In terms of physical design and construction, the new ’phones have much in common with their siblings. Their being equally smart is thus no surprise. More unexpected is that the Hi-X50s are very comfortable…

Black Rooster have collaborated with multiple award-winning mix engineer, producer and sound enthusiast Koen Heldens to create a signature series of processors. The first of them is the KH-COMP1 studio compressor, which comes in AAX, VST and AU formats and works on Mac OS and Windows computers. Koen wanted a very specific type of compressor, and this plug-in incorporates his ideas relating to process timing, channel linking and side-chain filtering. KH-COMP1 is a zero-latency compressor, and as it doesn’t require your DAW to perform any sample-delay compensation it can be used equally well for tracking or live performance. Although many of the controls will be familiar to anyone who’s used a compressor before, there are four detector modes that affect this processor’s attack and release envelopes, as well as its reaction…

Dust is a synthesizer and an effect plug-in based around both granular processing and convolution. It appears to be designed to create continuously evolving textures and beds rather than melody lines or pads and it is all controlled by an interface that looks like a Space Invaders-type arcade game. Clearly these guys think so far outside the box that they’d need the Hubble space telescope to find out where the box was! If you imagine up to eight satellites wandering around in a force field, each one capable of generating sound, that’s pretty much the basis of Dust. These satellites, or Particle Emitters as they are called, generate sound based on the granular manipulation of either the onboard samples or, when used as an insert effect (Dust FX), a combination…

On the bench today we have two new Toontrack expansion packs curated by the celebrated Eddie Kramer. These drum sound libraries — one for Superior drummer and one for EZdrummer — really live up to their titles as the kits and combinations on offer slot into pretty much every genre of rock, and rock is something Eddie Kramer knows a thing or two about. I’ve had the privilege of chatting to Eddie at various NAMM shows and events, and he’s one of those producers who is happy to talk about his working methods rather than pretending that everything is a secret. His career started in the 1960s, including working alongside acoustician John Storyk in the creation of Electric Lady Studios, Jimi Hendrix’s million dollar Manhattan studio, after which Eddie went…