Table of contents for Autumn 2015 in Computer Music

A BIT OF ALRIGHT Many of us cut our computing teeth on the original BBC Micro, so we’ll admit to feeling rather pleased that they’re launching a new pocket-sized machine, the Micro Bit. We can’t tell you if it’ll be any good for music making, but we already like it. IN-STORE APPEARANCE So, what do you do if you lose your laptop but want to carry on making music? If you’re US rapper Prince Harvey, you head to your local Apple Store and create an entire album using GarageBand on one of the display Macs over four months. Now that’s real ‘Genius’… HAPPY LANDR Love it or hate it, it seems that the LANDR auto-mastering service is here to stay. The company say they’ve already mastered more than 1.2 million…

01 MIX AS YOU GO It can be productive to quickly throw your track elements together roughly at the composition stage, then address the mix later once your ideas are down. This does mean that the incomplete mix may lack the professional sheen of your favourite releases, which may cause you to lose heart. In this case, try the opposite approach and mix as you go, adding basic processing to each sound as you slot it in the track. Having pre-prepared plugin racks or channel strips are invaluable. Try both approaches and discover which works best for you. 02 RTFM! Getting stuck on a DAW feature or synth parameter is a workflow killer, so become a ninja at your chosen software by reading the manuals of your DAW and plugins.…

DOWNLOAD Download the accompanying video and the MIDI/audio files at vault.computermusic.co.uk 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 At the forefront of all Western music theory is a principle so fundamental that its influence stretches from its original conception by the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras in ancient Greece thousands of years ago, right through the intervening centuries up to the present day, where it’s still in abundant use. I’m talking about the circle of fifths, alternatively known as the circle…

DOWNLOAD See it in video and get the tutorial files on your PC/Mac at vault.computermusic.co.uk 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. In the earliest days of the drum kit, the ride cymbal provided the pulse behind the elaborate grooves of blues, jazz, and rock ’n’ roll. Then Ringo and his peers came along, and the rock and pop drumming paradigm switched to the hi-hat-led backbeat. However, the ride is still an absolutely essential part of the kit, giving a very different sonic flavour to the hats. Bigger, thicker and heavier than its crash cymbal…

ALTERNATE TOOL The blue line indicates which alternate tool is assigned to the modifier key ARRANGER TRACK Facilitates making quick changes to the arrangement structure SCRATCH PAD Drag Events to this alternate timeline to try out new ideas BROWSER The new Browser features tag-based searching and proper categorisation TRACK LIST Activate and deactivate tracks and their automation MACROS Assign Multi Instrument and FX Chain parameters to a single control DRAG AND DROP Add instruments, effects and loops via drag and drop AUTOMATION Now with curves for smoother transitions MULTI INSTRUMENTS Combine different instruments onto a single channel and set keysplits GAIN REDUCTION METERING Compatible with PreSonus’ dynamics devices PANELS Open and close the Editor, Console (Mix) and Browser panels With three years having passed since version 2 (9/10, 175) of…

Wave Arts’ original Tube Saturator plugin promised to faithfully recreate the effect of vacuum tube saturation, with the caveat that it took an unusually high toll on the host DAW’s CPU. The justification? Tube Saturator’s algorithms were/are real-time adaptations of analogue circuit modelling technology. In other words, Wave Arts painstakingly modelled the voltages and currents through every tube, resistor and capacitor of a dual-stage triode preamp with three bands of analogue EQ, in a bid to capture every last detail of the real thing. Tube Saturator 2 (VST/AU/AAX) sports a brand new GUI and is essentially a continuation of the mission embarked upon by its forebear, the aforementioned preamp/EQ circuit emulation. The intended usage ranges from adding subtle warmth to driving into aggressive fuzzbox territory, with a broad palette of…

The Base II is something of a blank canvas, with the only thing in the box, apart from the unit itself and a USB cable, being a card bearing the Livid Instruments URL. Here you can find the downloadable scripts required to configure the unit to control your software of choice. All instructions and some useful video tutorials can also be found on the website. Because the controller layout hasn’t changed, all the templates and mappings that were created for Base work with the new model, including scripts for Ableton Live, Bitwig Studio and Reason, Traktor mappings and more. Should the script for your favourite DAW not already exist, the handy browser-based editor can be used to set up fader display modes, pad velocity responses, button functions, colour assignments and…

Applied Acoustics’ Strum GS-1 and Strum GS-1 Electric demonstrated that physical modelling – as opposed to sampling – could deliver authentic acoustic and electric guitar sounds. Nonetheless, GS-2 (VST/AU/RTAS/AAX/ standalone) sees the whole concept given a refresh, finessing the modelling engine, redesigning the interface (now three pages: Play, Edit and Effects), improving the onboard effects, introducing three Play Modes, and – most significantly – amalgamating both Acoustic and Electric instruments in one plugin. GS-2 still has much in common with v1, the fundamental principle remaining its ability to translate keyboard chords onto the fretboard in a number of user-selectable voicings and fret positions. GS-2 recognises an impressive 84 chords (visible in the central Chord Display) and assigns individual notes to the most ‘likely’ string. The outcome of this analysis is…

The iConfig software handles three main functions – audio mixing, audio connections and MIDI connections – with further ancillary options also accessible. Any connected device can have audio or MIDI routed to and from any other connected device via a simple matrix interface, and all audio ins and outs are combined and routed using the iConfig mixer. The ‘dual interface’ concept works so well that we’re amazed it’s never been done before. Possibilities opened up by the software include being able to send audio and MIDI between computers, cleanly integrating Mac-only software into a PC-based studio and vice versa, and combining two machines on stage without an additional mixer (great for DJ setups). It makes using connected iOS devices as MIDI controllers a doddle, too, and enables iOS instruments and…

GFORCE SOFTWARE IMPOSCAR 2 Truly a labour of love, impOSCar is a spot-on recreation of the original OSCar, boasting some nifty extras like polyphony, nine different filter types, multiple mono and poly unison modes, and the ability to route incoming audio into the signal path. Oh, and there is a staggering patch library, if you aren’t inclined to roll your own. www.gforcesoftware.com STEVEN BATEMAN OSCORE Users of Native Instruments’ mighty Reaktor can pluck this little beauty from among the many gems found in the Reaktor User Library. Though its creator claims it isn’t a completely faithful recreation, it can certainly provide much of what was loved about the original. We especially like the random waveform generator. Cool stuff. bit.ly/ReaktorOSCore BIG TICK RHINO Though not a direct emulation of OSCar, Rhino…

After more than six months of breath-holding, our favourite megamultiplatform modular tracker, SunVox, has finally seen an update to v1.9. Except that it’s actually become slightly less multiplatform, dropping support for PalmOS and MeeGo in a move that will almost certainly upset the combined user base of ten people who are now stuck in the past with the old version 1.8.1. Highlights among a boatload of new features are a pair of effects modules, Feedback and Filter Pro (a type of IIR filter), some crucial updates to the MultiSynth module that add the ability to offset the start positions of samples and phases for some generators, and a plethora of added MIDI capabilities. www.warmplace.ru Yet another crowdfunding initiative is under way, this time for prolific C64 game music legend Jeroen…

91’s cover blasted you with two seemingly contradictory pieces of advice: “Speed Up!” and “Limit yourself”. But, in the crazy world of music technology, it all made sense. We’re not sure the same can be said of the illustration, which featured two computer mice labelled Synths and Drums mocked up to look like Scalextric cars, lovingly rendered with the very best 3D visuals available at the time. In the mag itself, we showed you how to create a podcast – “the latest buzzword in online media distribution”, apparently. It looks like the word podcast might end up outliving the device that inspired it. Elsewhere, a reader chastised our use of US English (American cultural imperialism wasn’t quite so big back then), while our Art Editor put out a plea to…

Kirnu Cream cm192 » 9/10 » €35 An evolved, inspirational take on sequencing that places a wildly flexible real-time, keyboard-triggered pattern sequencer inside your DAW. With four tracks and chord memory, it’s a thumping, pumping powerhouse. Best of all, we have our own Cream CM edition – check it out in Plugins, p16. www.kirnuarp.com Michael Ourednik Argotlunar N/A » N/A » Free Granular processing lets you break down a signal into constituent “grains” that can be manipulated in a variety of ways – the results can be unpredictable, but very often exciting. With Argotlunar, you can turn a riff into an ambient atmosphere or drums into an alien landslide. bit.ly/Argotlunar Audio Damage Automaton cm133 » 8/10 » $49 What happens when you turn John Conway’s Game of Life cell replication…

DOWNLOAD Get the video and audio examples on your PC/Mac at vault.computermusic.co.uk InsideInfo As a drum ’n’ bass producer and DJ, Paul InsideInfo’s back catalogue features releases on such lauded labels as Virus, Viper, Metro, Critical, Hospital and Renegade Hardware. In between gigging and twisting up weird noises for his tracks and sample libraries, Paul also produces music for commercial advertising. www.insideinfo.co.uk One of the things that I love about sound design is the sheer number of ways you can end up at the same kind of sound. This month, I’m going to show you how to make really short synthetic blips. Originally, I was going to use synths and pitchshifting, but I thought about attacking it in a different way – and quite often in sound design, that’s what…

“When I was 14 years old, I was at a school party and I heard a record called Can You Party ,” remembers Dutch DJ/producer Gregor Salto. “It was a Todd Terry production by Royal House, but I had no idea who Todd Terry was, and I had no idea what house music was. All I knew was that I’d seen my future – I was going to make records that sounded like Can You Party .” Salto can’t help but laugh at the naïve bravado of that 14-year-old kid. “I liked disco music and I studied classical piano, but that was the full extent of my talent. What equipment did I need? How do you even write a song like that? Where do…

There’s something quaint and even comforting about the familiar drippy ‘boing’ of spring reverb and, like all things old, it’s undergoing something of a renaissance. Aegean Music know it and have created Spirit Reverb to recreate that gloriously lo-fi effect. Spirit Reverb (VST/AU) is presented in a large and – it has to be said – potentially confusing interface. The top section sports a trio of dropdown menus. Front and centre is one that allows you to choose from a bare handful of preset “templates” to quickly get up and running without much tweaking. Classic-style setups like Vintage Spring, Small Spring, Dark Spring and Dark Digital sound good on their own, but also make fine jumping off points for your own patches. There’s no indication as to which template is…

One of our favourite things about Tube Saturator 2 is the Equalisation section. The middle band has a centre frequency around 800Hz, while the outer Bass and Treble bands are based on smooth Baxandall filters with corner frequencies at 100Hz and 1kHz, respectively. All EQ bands can cut or boost by up to 12dB, and new in version 2 is the ability to route the EQ to be placed in the signal chain either before or after the Drive section, so you can EQ the signal running into the virtual tubes or shape the sound after it’s been saturated. The addition of the Dry/Wet mix knob means that Tube Saturator 2 can double up as a basic parallel EQ. This technique can produce a very sweet sound and tends to…

Since the 70s, dedicated ‘exciters’ have exploited all manner of psychoacoustic tricks, saturation, EQ and effects combinations to help give individual sounds more presence and make mixes stand out. The main modern development in exciter technology, thanks to the power of software, has been to make multiband operation pretty much standard across the board. XCTR (VST/AU/RTAS/AAX), from saturation specialists Audio Assault, is a straight-up saturation-based exciter, but with multiband functionality baked in, it combines the power of the new with the purity of the old. XCTR is joyously easy to use. Input and Output knobs give control of the signal levels into and out of the plugin (the former ranging from full signal attenuation to heavy driving of the saturation stage), while a VU meter displays the input level. We’d…

GS-2 has three operational Play Modes: Keyboard, Guitar and Loop. Keyboard plays the notes you play – chords or solo lines – with notes allocated to the correct strings, and hammer ons/offs and legato also catered to. In Guitar mode, the keyboard is split into a Chord Key zone in the middle, flanked by two identical Strumming Key zones. Keys in the Chord Key zone define the currently used chord, while keys in the latter are used to play the various strumming articulations, with 13 functions including muffled and regular downstrokes and upstrokes, palm mute, etc. Loop mode swaps the Strumming Keys for rhythmic strumming pattern Loops, which are superimposed on the current chord. Loops are bundled in genre-specific Packs (of which there are 101), and loaded from the Loop…

Indonesian developers Kuassa are building a solid reputation for quality affordable plugins. Their latest, Cerberus (VST/AU/AAX, Reason Rack Extension), is a bass amp simulation with a well equipped amp head, twin cabinet modelling, and the ability to load external WAV format impulse responses, opening it up to third-party sampled cabinets. It’s topped and tailed by global input and output sections, each with level controls, and the input section also includes a noise Gate, Input Channel selection (L, R, Stereo or Sum), Dry/Wet mix, Hi Quality mode, input metering, preset handling and global bypass. The output section, meanwhile, houses a Limiter, output overload indicator and the aforementioned impulse response loader. It’s important to note that Cerberus doesn’t include any IRs of its own. The amp head features three core preamp options…

What’s your background in music and in programming? QS “I started from school, with a strong background in maths. I was so lucky to have a good teacher when I was six years old – she used to teach us about alternative numbering systems (binary and also base three, four, etc) using special wooden blocks for numbers! “When VST and similar technologies were coming out, and desktop computers started to be able to really manage real-time audio, I was experimenting with DSP chips and their development systems. 12 years ago, we started our recording studio in Sicily. I couldn’t have developed a feeling of sound quality and good processing tools without that first-hand experience in the studio.” As well as your many plugins, you also create plenty of hardware processors.…

TAL-Reverb-4 Stripped from TAL-Sampler, this new reverb puts Togu Audio Line back in the freeware spotlight What goes around comes around – and goes around again. The modern desktop mixmeister has all manner of world-class reverb options at his or her disposal. One can choose from highly refined algorithmic reverberation plugins or opt for astonishingly convincing convolution ambience. Yet it’s hard to deny that vintage algorithmic reverb had a certain charming character. Those 12-and 16-bit units were often grainy, gauzy and anything but realistic. However, a good one could be deep and diffuse – if not detailed . Even a cheapo tacked onto an 80s ROMpler provided a brittle wheeze that could liven up and mask the flaws of any poorly looped sample file. It should come as no surprise,…

Dom Kane “I think the whole Stems format could potentially be a game-changer for live performance. Not so much for DJs, as I think they have their thing and it works, but more for the people looking to go beyond that with live laptop performances, and even record labels looking to offer some unique content. The fact that it’s an open format for software/hardware developers to use means that there’s some real scope for it to become more than just a closed system for a niche market, too.” Simon Shackleton “Whilst it might make producing mash-ups easier and more intuitive for the beginner, I can see it having a fundamentally detrimental effect on the sound quality, groove structure and flow of what’s coming out of the speakers in anything other…

Picture the scene. You’ve set aside a chunk of time for music-making, your other half/kids/dog/phone are all locked out of the studio, and you’re finally sitting down at the computer, bursting with enthusiasm. It’s the moment you’ve been building up to for days: it’s time to get a new track underway! Visions of label interest, Beatport No.1s and A-list DJ-play briefly flash through your mind as you fire up the DAW. You have a good feeling about this one – after all, you’ve spent sufficient time and effort learning the right tools and techniques, so why can’t this be your best track yet? Yet, when greeted with an empty arrange page, it’s almost impossible to transfer that enthusiasm into anything resembling a good idea. Every sample you audition is greeted…

DOWNLOAD See it in action in video, and get the necessary files from vault.computermusic.co.uk When Xfer Records’ massively anticipated Serum finally arrived in Autumn 2014, we were absolutely blown away by its intuitive, powerful interface, impressive versatility and stunning sound. It scored 10/10 and scooped our Editor’s Choice and Performance awards in 213’s review, and it has been similarly lauded by the public, winning MusicRadar’s user-voted 50 best plugin synths in the world poll ( bit.ly/BestVSTsynth2015 ). So, what is it about Steve Duda’s cutting-edge instrument that makes it such an essential inclusion in any electronic musician’s arsenal? Well, it’s a combination of several things. First, there’s the extensive library of editable onboard wavetables for loading into the two main oscillators, the beautiful, genuinely…

DOWNLOAD See the video and get the audio demos on your PC/Mac at: vault.computermusic.co.uk Owen Palmer As an in-demand dance music engineer, Owen’s worked with a slew of outstanding underground artists behind the scenes from his London studio. After years of meticulously studying what makes a great production tick, Owen has promised to share his most advanced and coveted techniques each month exclusively in . Get in touch with Owen about this month’s subject at… cm221@owenthegeek.com Perhaps I’m a bit of a saddo, but I get super excited about fine details in a mixdown – not due to technicalities, but because such details can amount to a sense of magic that enhances the feeling of the music. I’m talking about that wonderful impression that the music’s really working its way…

FILTER The two resonant filters have input panels for oscillator routing assignment, and a choice of six modes OSCILLATOR Hive has two oscillators, each with a slaved sub oscillator CONTROL BAR Voicing, patch management and undo/redo controls ARPEGGIATOR & SEQUENCER/EFFECTS Hives six effects and arpeggiator/sequencer controls live in the central hexagon LFO Low frequency oscillator with phase control and a selection of eight waveforms ADSR ENVELOPES You get one per oscillator and two extra for modulation PITCH Controls for glide, pitchbend and Hives dedicated vibrato LFO MODULATION MATRIX Two sets of six modulation routings – each couples a source and ‘via’ signal to two targets In 2007, newcomers LennarDigital pulled the ultimate troll move on soft-synth-loving computer musicians, releasing an absolutely stunning debut in Sylenth1 (10/10, 113), then all but…

The principle behind spring reverb is simple: an audio signal stimulates one end of a spring suspended in an enclosure, while a pickup at the other end transmits the resultant vibrations, which are then mixed back in with the dry signal. The more springs used, the more ‘realistic’ the sound – many classic units have two springs, but some contain only one. Interestingly, in addition to standard mono and stereo modes, Spirit Reverb offers a Mono-to-Stereo mode in which the signal from spring 1 is sent only to the left output channel, while the signal from spring 2 is sent only to the right, with the third spring’s signal placed in the centre. In this mode, there’s a stereo spread control to adjust the width. It’s a surprisingly cool effect…

We heaped much praise upon Livid Instruments’ original Base MIDI controller when we reviewed it in 196, highlighting its robust construction, versatility and openendedness, and scoring it a rapturous 9/10. 18 months later, with the arrival of its successor, the Base II, what’s changed? Where the Base II differs is on the physical front. The good looks, expansive controller layout and tank-like build quality remain, but Livid have made the new unit slightly larger in order to give it the same footprint as its sibling, the DS1, so that the two can be more easily used together. Its redesigned aluminium chassis measures in at 12x11.5" – one inch wider and deeper than its predecessor. Despite this, it will still, just, fit into the average 13" laptop bag. The front edge…

The saturation algorithms in XCTR are lifted directly from Audio Assault’s Head Crusher, which emulates five hardware console channels. They aren’t explicitly named, but American and British are based on classic consoles from those countries; Vintage on a 50s tube console; Pristine on a “modern uncoloured transistor console”; and Razor on “a transistor console channel on its last legs”. Each model has real character of its own and all are equally useful, capable of everything from lovely warmth to wicked filth, depending on how hard they’re driven. And, obviously, being able to apply a different model to each band is a big selling point. For example, a bass-heavy loop can be tamed and brightened up by applying the Razor model to the low end, and Pristine to the highs, effectively…

Whether you’re making music on the move, in the studio or a bit of both, effectively connecting up all your kit can be tricky – doubly so if you have a dedicated studio computer and a laptop or iOS device for when you’re out and about. And things get even more potentially confusing when you regularly collaborate with others or have paying clients, with visiting musicians having to hook into your monitoring and recording setup to play and record their own instruments and sound sources, often meaning you have to disconnect your own Mac or PC. Thankfully, it looks like there might now be a simplifying solution… The iConnectAudio4+ is an audio interface with a difference: it enables any combination of two PCs, Macs and/or iOS devices to connect simultaneously…

Cerberus’ two-speaker Cab display handles two separate cab/mic combinations – left (A) and right (B) – each accessing the same list of three cabs (1x12, 4x10 and 8x10) and six mics (four dynamic, one condenser and one ribbon), as well as a DI option in the cab list that replaces the Mic setting with Tone and Character sliders. Each mic can be freely positioned anywhere on a centred horizontal line between the left and right side of the cone, and moved towards and away from it. A 45-degree mic offset option is also available as an alternative to the default ‘head on’ orientation. In the centre are a mono/stereo switch, sliders for A/B mix in mono mode, and L/R pan and volume for each cab in stereo mode. Cabs can…