Inhoudsopgave van May 2017 - Computer Music

The HALion sampler has reached v6, and – on paper at least – it represents serious competition for NI Kontakt and UVI Falcon. For starters, there’s “next-generation” wavetable synthesis – you can extract single-cycle waveforms from imported audio files, then crossfade smoothly through them. New patch content includes two grand pianos, Hot Brass, Studio Strings, Anima (wavetable-based synth), and Skylab (granular synthesis instrument). Custom patch interfaces can be whipped up in the Macro Page Designer using templates and drag-and-drop controls, while HALion Script allows programming of advanced behaviour and custom features. The new Library Creator should make it a breeze to export creations as VST Sound libraries for HALion and the HALion Sonic workstation (which, incidentally, has reached v3, with 25GB of added content and new effects). HALion 6 now…

“When you first start making music, it’s natural to get a bit crazy with your plugins” ABLETON LIVE 9.7 “I started with Cubase and found it way too difficult. At the time I was more of a DJ than a producer, and Cubase didn’t make sense. Ableton wasn’t so good technically, but it allowed me to find my way in the world of the studio. On average, I create three or four tracks every week on Ableton – that’s good enough for me.” ROB PAPEN PLUGINS “Almost all my bass sounds come from Predator and SubBoomBass. Many people comment on the quality of my basses, so I know these are the right plugins for me. When it comes to bass, I try not to make things too complicated – I…

Music is all about moments. Put on a favourite track and you’re swept along on a wave of pulsing, cresting energy. One minute the beat is simmering down to give you a breather (literally, if you’re on the dancefloor), and the next it’s winding back up, tightening like a coil spring. As it gradually swells in size and power, all that tension has to be released somehow , and you can just tell that something big is on the way – yep, it’s the ultimate moment in any track! Are you ready for it? You know it’s coming, right? Nearly there… Building up to it… Just a little more… And… BOOM! Yep, we’re talking about the drop, the modern dance track’s equivalent to the chorus. The bass…

Computer Music : The all-important drop is the climactic moment of any DnB track. How do you approach the track-writing process to ensure that the drop hits hard enough? C&K: “The most detailed, creative and emotional parts of a tune are often not to be found within the drop itself, but it’s still the most important ingredient for a DnB tune, as lots of it is designed to work in the club. We try to approach the drop in different ways – sometimes it’s the more ‘classic’ drop, with all the energy within the drop moment; but what we really enjoy is to play more with it in a kind of anticlimatic way. So the most energy and euphoria in the breakdown, and a drop that hits deeper with…

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Tight kicks and snares Sound selection is really important for drum sounds – let’s start with the kick. We’ve chosen the sample Kick.wav because it’s got a natural punch that’s solid without being overbearing, and a decent weight in the low end. You’ll hear that the sample has what appears to be a short snatch of vocal at the end, but it’s possible to make that less obvious by truncating the end of the sample slightly and applying a fade. Set your DAW’s tempo to 140BPM and place the edited kicks on the 1st, 4th, 9th, 11th and 14th eighth notes of a two-bar sequence. Snare.wav is a snare with more than a hint of clap, and it’s also got a fairly long reverb tail. While reverb on snares sounds…

“Immense layered patches, composite multi-instruments and mini arrangements are the order of the day” The first release from newcomers Parawave, Rapid (VST/AU) is clearly a direct competitor to Vengeance-Sound’s VPS Avenger (10/10, cm238), whether it means to be or not. Chief among the similarities between the two are that both are built on extensive eight-layer architectures (although Avenger actually has nine layers if you include its Drums oscillator); both feature enormous and expandable libraries of waveforms, samples and wavetables; and both have more modulation options and effects than most users will ever need. Beyond that shared conceptual framework, however, there are marked differences in the two synths’ approaches, and dismissing Parawave’s less well-known offering as a ‘me-too’ copycat would be a serious mistake. Indeed, launching on PC last October (followed…

A modelled emulation of the exquisitely rare RSF PolyKobol 2 analogue synthesiser, PolyKB hasn’t seen a full-length appraisal in cm since version 1, way back in 2010 (9/10, cm154), so here we’re reviewing the latest version of it as a whole, rather than just looking at what’s new. For owners of v2.5, which was a free upgrade from v1 (introducing a new GUI, high- and bandpass filter modes, the ability to use the sequencer as a modulation source and more), the €39 upgrade fee gets you a third extra oscillator and second filter (the latter bringing with it dual filter input selection and output mixing, plus an accompanying envelope), a second 2x4 User modulation matrix, and separate time multipliers for each envelope. So, PolyKB III is a three-oscillator, dual filter…

Joey Sturgis Tones have built an enviable reputation for delivering high quality focused but affordable plugins, and given Joey’s own history playing and producing metalcore and heavy rock, these tools often dovetail nicely into those specific genres. The latest, Guilty Pleasure (AU/VST/AAX/ RTAS), is their third guitar-focused Toneforge plugin, designed for classic high-gain amplifier tones. In order of signal flow, its seven modules are Pedal, Amp, Cab, Magic, Effects, EQ and Limiter, with global Input and Output gain (+12 to -70dB) and an input Gate rounding things off. All but the Magic module have editable parameters, and the six are accessed by clicking on the relevant icon at the bottom. Clicking on the Signal Flow button reveals all seven modules, allowing you to bypass the Magic module should you wish.…

Sample Magic Boost £90 Web www.samplemagic.com Format PC/Mac Billed as a “mix finalising utility”, Sample Magic’s streamlined multieffects VST/AU plugin is built to deliver intuitive, uncomplicated master bus processing, with the user operating a variety of under-the-hood parameters via a bank of just four ‘macro’ knobs, two buttons, and Input and Output level controls. The four modules beavering away in the background comprise a multiband compressor (Compress), a four-band dynamic EQ (Colour), a stereo widener/narrower (Stereo) and a Limiter. Simply turn the governing knob clockwise to dial in each process, increasing the compression amount, frequency shaping (Colour boosts the lows and highs and cuts the midrange), stereo spread (from mono to overly wide) and limiter threshold. Activating the Boost button repositions the EQ after the limiter – we’re surprised there’s…

FEATURED PLUGIN XILS-lab XILS 3 CM The VCS 3 by EMS is one of the most revered modular instruments ever created, and our cm version completely nails its analogue character. You get three oscillators, ring mod, filter, then delay, reverb and chorus effects – and best of all, everything’s routed together through the distinctive pinboard mod matrix, just like the original hardware! www.xils-lab.com EQ/ FILTERS Acustica Audio Pink CM • Analogue-modelled API-alike EQ • Four EQ bands, two with shelf toggle • Output adjusts to match Input Trim • Cut from the full Pink channel strip • AU/VST/AAX www.acustica-audio.com DDMF CM EQ Pack • Two superb equalisers • IIEQ Pro CM: 19 filter types • LP10 CM: Linear phase mastering EQ • Based on commercial DDMF plugins • AU/VST, 32-/64-bit…

The drop is the climactic moment of the track. It’s when the strobes flash, the smoke machines blast and the bass hits hard. The term comes from the idea of dropping things back into the track – with most electronic music, this means the core rhythmic elements, and of course, the bass. Over the years, the arrangement of electronic music has become quite uniform, dance music particularly so. We’ve all heard so much of it now that we expect things to happen at certain times… Arrangement 101 Typically, things start off with minimal elements to set the tone, then move forward in 16-bar sections, adding elements every four or eight bars to ramp up the power. This building continues until the breakdown, which typically falls right in the middle of…

cm: How do you approach the track arrangement and mixing process in order to make sure your drop hits the hardest it possibly can? FPB: “The build-up towards the drop plays a crucially important part before the drop itself. We tend to make the build less bass-heavy by using filters – this makes the impact of the drop more intense when it finally comes in. “We always make sure that the kick is nice and punchy, with a nice attack on top – often using the Vertigo Sound [VSC-2] compressor to achieve this. Then, we’ll roll off some of the low-end to make way for the lower, bassier tones from the sub frequencies. It’s important to always make sure that each musical part in the drop has its own space…

Maximal 2 is a powerful maximising limiter (PC/Mac, VST/AU) that delivers characterful compression, limiting and saturation in Clean, Loud, Tape and Tube modes for a variety of flavours. Developed exclusively for by DSP rising stars Venomode, Maximal 2 CM brings you the full functionality of its big brother’s Tape mode, enabling you to squeeze every last drop of loudness from your tracks or just tame errant peaks, in convincingly analogue style. Featuring just three controls, Maximal 2 CM is very easy to use. Push the limiter with the Drive knob, set the output volume with the Ceiling knob, and tailor the limiter’s adaptive release with the Response knob, leading to more or less signal transparency. Comprehensive peak and RMS metering keep your eyes up to speed with your ears, and…

A scaled-down alternative to Universal Audio’s flagship Apollo 8 and 16, the original Apollo Twin (10/10, 204) has been giving ‘the rest of us’ access to those mythical Unison preamps, first-class I/O and swanky UAD plugins for three years now. The new Apollo Twin MkII is essentially more of the same, but with a few minor improvements, and an optional DSP upgrade. Let’s start with what’s stayed the same. Still a desktop-format 2-in/-6-out interface with 24-bit/192kHz capabilities, the Apollo Twin MkII would be almost indistinguishable from the original were it not now black rather than silver. It connects to your Mac or PC via Thunderbolt, but it has to be powered from the wall; and while the original Twin (still available) could be had in a USB 3 version, it’s…

Rapid’s modulation setup is enormous. Each layer features four LFOs, four envelopes and four step sequencers, all of them assignable to any of (only) that layer’s controls, including those of its loaded effects. You get 32 assignments per layer, using drag-and-drop or menu selection (via the target control itself, or in one of the 32 routing blocks at the bottom of the layer), and the same source can be assigned cumulatively to the same target multiple times, for modulation scaling and accelerating. The LFOs load two waveforms at a time from a lengthy list of standard and ‘designed’ shapes, with A and B Phase and Bend knobs shifting and skewing each wave, and the X-Fade knob morphing between them. The envelopes are ADSRs, with a Level control for the Attack…

PolyKB III’s two X/Y pads enable detailed 2D positioning and modulation triggering of and by each polyphonic voice, which can be set in number from 1 to 16. Space XY has you dragging dots in front of two virtual cardioid microphones to alter their left/right stereo panning and forward/back proximity. Three fixed and two random presets get you started, and two Dynamic animation options (Aquarium and Magnet – hopefully many more are in the pipeline) move the points around the pad in a prescribed pattern by a variable amount, at a rate set by the Speed knob. The angle of the mics and distance between them are adjustable, as is the Width of the stereo field. Voice XY lets you load a modulation target (with bipolar Amount control) onto each…

The latest dynamics processor from Polish plugin wizards PSP Audioware is a FET-style feedback compressor inspired by the Urei 1176, which is widely regarded as one of the greatest character compressor/limiters ever made. FETpressor (VST/AU/AAX/RTAS) isn’t intended to be an exact emulation, as the substitution of Threshold and Makeup gain knobs for the 1176’s Input and Output dials, and the addition of various new features, make clear. It doesn’t aim to sound exactly the same as any specific revision of the 1176, either – PSP tell us they designed FETpressor to provide the best of the ‘generic’ 1176 sound, but with enhanced controls and a more conventional, modern workflow. Fine FET FETpressor’s GUI is typical PSP: a photorealistic hardware-style fascia footed by preset management and A/B controls. The Threshold knob…

Following up their Sand SSL 4000/5000 emulation plugin (8/10, 241), Acustica Audio’s Lime is almost exactly the same thing again, reskinned and powered by 1.4GB of impulse responses. They’ve been captured from a range of Neve console channel strips and outboard: the 8801, VR, 88R, 1073, V-Rack and 8051. Again, it comes as part of a bundle – Lime Crazy88 – that includes a zero-latency version and individual plugins for its three component modules: Lime Pre, Lime Bus and Lime EQ. Like that of its stablemate, Lime’s chunky, photorealistic fascia is a beautiful thing to behold. The left-hand side houses a four-band EQ, the central panel is home to the Control, Preamp and Filter sections, and a Compressor occupies the right. This layout doesn’t represent the actual signal flow, however,…

Capsun ProAudio Future Beats & Fractal Organica £35 A cerebral sound design tour de force, the artistry and production expertise on display in FB&FO’s 2GB of glitchy electronica loops and shots are jaw-dropping – from the thoughtful use of stereo motion and front-back placement to the sublime frequency shaping and granulising. The FX & Atmopsheric and Glitch Melodic folders are high points, not that there’s a dud to be found anywhere in the pack. With every loop being eight bars long at 80bpm, you get an awful lot of audio for your money. A future classic. www.loopmasters.com 10/100 Toontrack Alt-Rock EZX £53 Surely Toontrack’s most prestigious EZX yet, Alt-Rock is produced by cantankerous engineering legend Steve Albini, at his almost equally legendary Electrical Audio studios. It consists of two full…

Casio VL-1 (VL-Tone) TECH SPECS Year of manufacture 1980 Original sale value $150 Current price £15 - £60 Number made unknown If you’re old enough to have been listening to the radio in the early 1980s, you can’t have missed Trio’s Da Da Da , a charming chunk of proto-chiptune cheerlessness, a jaunty ’jerker of indifference delivered in dour monotone over a chirping electro beat. US listeners relived the rollicking low-fi lament nearly two decades later when its re-emergence in a Volkswagon ad propelled the tune onto the dance charts. The song’s infectious rhythm and chiming ‘piano’ sound came courtesy of Casio’s VL-Tone – a slim, sleek brick of white with a speaker at one end, and a keyboard consisting of buttons seemingly culled from the company’s…

Get maximum bang for your buck at the crucial moment with our pro tutorial videos Read the full article on p22 1 Snare roll design for enhanced build-ups 2 Ultra-rapid riser design using NI Massive’s macros 3 Repeating build-up FX with free plugins 4 Auditioning and selecting FX to maximise a drop 5 Using drum fills to add impact at the end of a section 6 Adding in an unexpected element at a crucial time 7 Master processing for an attention-grabbing sound 8 Using glitch techniques in a restrained way 9 Ramping up reverb and delay effects 10 Bring the beat back for a smooth transition 11 Using white noise as a crash cymbal alternative 12 A sustained, reverbdrenched crash sound 13 Creating impact with a reverse-whip kick 14 Allowing…

Inear Display Regressif This demonic digital destructor is designed to shred incoming signals into brain-bursting bits So how important to you is it that the sound going out resembles the sound going in? Not at all, you say? Then have we got a pluggie for you! Inear Display’s rip-snortin’ Regressif is a sonic mangler par excellence with a fistful of features ready to fry your frontal lobe. You might think you know what you’re getting when you hear terms like ‘bitcrusher’ and ‘filter’, but Regressif’s brand of sonic degradation has a sound all its own. With both the aforementioned effects joined by a drive circuit and a pair of tempo-synced LFOs – each with seven waveforms from which to choose – there are enough options to utterly annihilate any audio…

Noisebud Fletchy-Muncher Adjust audio based on Fletcher-Munson equal loudness curves www.noisebud.se MeldaProduction MFreeEffects Huge bundle of processors from the prolific DSP developer www.meldaproduction.com Klevgränd Svep Stereo modulation effect with a creative user interface www.klevgrand.se Voxengo SPAN This very competent visual analyser costs no money at all www.voxengo.com Klanghelm IVGI Saturation and distortion sim with Assymetry control www.klanghelm.com iZotope Vinyl Re-released classic freeware for bringing the analogue crackle www.izotope.com Acustica Audio Tan Free Analogue-style VCA compression from the masters of modelling www.acustica-audio.com…

We’ve all been there, listening over and over to a finely crafted eight-bar loop that sounds amazing… but it’s not a whole song, is it? If breaking your perfect loop is giving you separation anxiety, you’re going to need a tactic to spin it into a full-blown track. A common approach is to create the drop first, crafting your idea at its fullest, with all the elements in place. Next, duplicate the loop out to the desired length of the track, and start removing elements of the track at the points at which they’re not required. This tactic of subtractive arrangement can create a basic skeleton of a track extremely quickly, and all that remains is to smooth transitions between sections and add elements to keep interest where required. While…

5. Filling time A drum fill is typically used at the end of a phrase to let us know a resolution’s coming, or that something’s about to change or restart. So what better place to use one than the last bar of your build-up? A great way of making your fill stand out as a point of interest is to use drum sounds which don’t appear in your main groove. Tech-house music popularised the use of ‘real’ drum sounds as fills before the drop, giving a welcome break from the tension of the build-up and leading back into the track. You can either load in a recording of a real drummer, which may give you some authentic swing and groove, or you can try loading in some samples from real…

With the tribal beats in place, Hatcha and Lost decide to accompany them with a propulsive subby bassline. “So next we have the bassline, my favourite part!” Lost enthuses. “This is made in Rob Papen Albino 3 – it was an old preset, Dark Pulsy Bass. I’ve just messed with it and revamped it to fit the track. It’s a pretty simple bassline to be honest!” The bass sound is indeed fairly straightforward, based around a sine oscillator and a harmonically richer saw oscillator pitched three octaves up. These are run through a low-pass filter to dull the sound, and the main pitch is modulated by an LFO, causing it to drop in pitch at the start of each note, creating a punchy, kick-like effect – no spreading or other…

“A good track is built with good ingredients. The kick, snare, the bassline and your basic melody. As you’re putting them together, you gotta immediately start thinking about your final mix. And if that track ain’t sounding fucking awesome with those first few building blocks, you might as well throw it all away and start again. “And don’t be afraid to use ingredients that have worked for you in the past. This isn’t a competition where you get a prize for using the most amount of different kick drums and snares. If that fucking kick makes you move, stick with it until it stops making you move. "The number one Morillo rule is: never ever say that you’re gonna fix it in the mix – there’s no such thing as…

All members of the Apollo family are configured and handled using the excellent Console software application, which looks like a mixing desk with up to 14 Input channel strips (four of them ‘Virtual’ ones, visible as hardware outputs in your DAW), two auxiliary effects channels, and Control Room section and Monitor sections. As well as the auxiliary buses and main Monitor bus, signals can be routed to Line outs 3/4 and the Headphones bus for discrete cue mixing. Each of the two Analog Inputs has a Unison insert point, and every channel, including the Talkback mic, can host up to four regular UAD effects plugins, making Console a useful standalone mixer. The plugins browser that pops up when an insert point is clicked shows the entire UAD range by default,…

To the left of the Layer tabs, the M tab flips the interface over to the Master page, which, as the name suggests, is where Rapid’s eight layers come together for mixing and keyzoning. It’s also where presets are loaded and a couple of synth-wide tweaks are made. The mixer doesn’t do anything beyond setting the levels for all layers – there’s no panning and no soloing, although at least layers can be muted by turning them off directly on their tabs. Below it, though, is a simple multiband compressor that proves to be much more useful than we expected. It has Threshold and Gain controls for each of its three bands, and eight presets governing the rest of its behaviour internally. It’s not a detailed dynamics processor, but as…

A sample-based emulation of the classic Yamaha CP-80 electric grand piano, as made legendary in the 80s by the likes of Elton John, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Toto, Herbie Hancock and many more, Waves’ new instrument keeps things as simple as such a thing should be, but still manages to work in a handful of useful extras. Built on a 500MB bank of multisamples captured at a range of velocities and with round-robin variations, Electric Grand 80 (VST/AU/AAX/RTAS/standalone) employs separate sampler engines for the Main, Key Up/release, Mechanical and Pedal sounds, and the four faders controlling them make it a cinch to get your desired blend of notes and noises. Related to this, the Sustain Resonance knob dials in the sympathetic vibration of nearby strings to those being played when…

Melda’s new flagship dynamics plugin, MTurboComp (VST/AU/AAX) is, at heart, a full-on compressor/limiter construction kit. However, for most, its main draw is probably going to be the collection of classic and vintage compressor emulations that have been made for us by the developers using its inbuilt tools. These emulations are called Active presets, and there are 14 of them, plus four totally original creations including a gate and expander. You can’t save your own custom devices into the panel as Active presets, it’s worth noting – they’re just stored as regular presets. Turbo kid Each emulation features all the controls of the original hardware informing it, and a standard set of further common parameters, found in the Globals, Detector and Detector EQ sections. The Globals section hosts knobs for In…

Come and take a look down our tops and browse the 500 high-end samples in this month’s pack! Feel the heat of our glistening arps, get chills from our bubbling bells, and gulp down sparkling pads to make your highs even higher. Don’t waste time designing your own sounds – these samples and multi-instruments are all royalty-free, ready for use with absolutely no guilt. Go on, grab them now! 500 EXCLUSIVE SAMPLES 26 Filtered noise hits 24 Sparkling pads 50 Pad loops 30 Arps at five tempos each 4 Multisampled instruments 28 High-end one-shots 45 Chiming bell loops 95 High-end shining loops DOWNLOAD Get these exclusive samples on your PC/Mac over at vault.computermusic.co.uk…