Sound On Sound UK October 2021

“When it comes to the creative manipulation of sound, sample slicing is one of the most powerful tools we have.” When we think of musical genius, we tend to call to mind people with exceptional powers of planning and control. Whether it’s Bach composing fugues, James Brown drilling his band to obsessive levels of perfection or Brian Wilson crafting Pet Sounds over long months in the studio, genius is the person with a special type of command over music and the means of making it. But there’s another type of genius. Exemplified by the likes of Brian Eno, John Cage, Daphne Oram or Miles Davis, this form of genius is all about giving up control. It’s about creating conditions where chance can flourish. It’s about inviting accident and happenstance into the room,…

UJAM specialise in virtual instruments and effects that sound excellent, are super-easy to use and are accessibly priced. It’s a winning combination. However, the latest KISS offering is perhaps the cutest example yet; it’s called Groovemate ONE. Priced at just €19, Groovemate ONE provides the essentials of pop-based percussion — shaker, tambourine and claps — in a compact format. Easy Does It The UI, while instantly familiar to anyone who has tried their virtual guitar, bass or drum instruments, is ultra-streamlined. You can start with any one of 30 pattern presets. For each of these, individual hits and three intensities of the pattern (plus a fill option) are mapped to MIDI keys starting at C3. You can trigger the pattern options to create an instant percussion part and add your own playing…

The bundle of software is a little on the light side. Usually M-Audio products come with a big bundle of instruments from their family of InMusic products but this time you get MPC Beats with some sound packs, Ableton Live Lite, the MiniGrand and Hybrid 3. The manual says it has presets for many more but they are not actually included. However, once you’ve jumped through the registration, software manager download, install and iLok activation hoops you do get a couple of half decent things to play with.…

It often feels like these M-Audio Oxygen MIDI Controllers have been around forever. The Oxygen 25 MkV that I have before me definitely has shades of the original MIDIMAN Oxygen8 that first arrived in 2002. They were chunky then and they’re chunky now. These are not the stylish controllers that you’d be too scared to take out of your Instagram-curated studio space, no, these are the chunky controllers that get pulled out of rucksacks at Electronic Music Open Mic Nights covered in stickers and graffiti with probably a bit of gaffer tape to keep the sides on. It’s quite reassuring that M-Audio haven’t gone down the elegance route of so many of their competitors and instead are keeping it real with substantial plastic shells that feel like they’re going to…

Sound Particles’ Brightness Panner has much in common with their Energy Panner, which Hugh Robjohns reviewed in the August 2021 issue of Sound On Sound, so to avoid excessive duplication, I’d suggest that you read that in conjunction with this review. The panning engines seem pretty much identical, so the difference between the two plug-ins is really in the way the panning is controlled. While Energy Panner responds to the amplitude of the incoming signal (which can be mono, stereo, immersive or surround) to trigger panning, Brightness Panner can be triggered by note pitch (with user-adjustable high and low note ranges), by tonal brightness via a variable filter, or via MIDI. The plug-in supports VST 2 & 3, AU, AUv3 and AAX native on recent Apple and Windows operating systems;…

Bad Dogs were founded in 2020 by Italian electrical engineer Francesco Canacci and recently sent us their debut product, the P1 500-series mic preamp, for review. A high-quality but cost-effective preamp, it offers an interesting twist that should help it stand out in what is a crowded market place: the user can choose to add or swap output transformers, to tailor the sound to taste. On Test The P1 is a simple, tasteful-looking design that includes all the standard features you’d expect of a good preamp: 48V power, switchable polarity inverter, 20dB pad and 80Hz high-pass filter, and a front-panel quarter-inch TS jack instrument input. The mic preamp can apply between +12 and +65 dB of gain and has an input impedance of 1.5kΩ, while the instrument input offers -5 to +45…