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June 2019 / CM269

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contents
F

Cover f ature
Dmin

C
44 88
Producer
EASY MUSIC Masterclass
THEORY TIPS 44 MATRIX &
FUTUREBOUND
The dancefloor DnB legends break
Chords, scales, intervals and down their vocal anthem, Let It Go,
produced in Steinberg Cubase
songwriting simplified, p22
92
Features Interview
80 CARL CRAIG
54 TRAX CM The Detroit techno pioneer on
How to use this month’s free drum machine plugin adapting his back catalogue for a full
symphony orchestra
58 MIXING WITH DISTORTION
Drive, saturate and clip your way to perfect mixes Free samples
65 THE GUIDE TO FATHOM CM 104 POWER SYNTHS
Part 1 of our step-by-step modular synthesis course Give your tunes a shot of synthetic
clout with these one-shots and loops
80
Reviews Essentials
88 ROB PAPEN 10 NEWS
VECTO
/experts 90 ROLAND CLOUD
14
16
FREEWARE NEWS
WHAT’S ON YOUR
Your guides to the TB-303 HARD DRIVE?
ever-expanding world
of production are here 92 IK MULTIMEDIA 42 SUBSCRIBE
SAMPLETANK 4
74 EASY GUIDE
Exotic scales demystified
74 94 DMG AUDIO
114 BLAST FROM
THE PAST: PPG
with Dave Clews MULTIPLICITY WAVETERM
968KROTOS AUDIO
76 STUDIO
IGNITER
STRATEGIES
ACM tutor Shea Stedford 98 K-DEVICES
beefs up weak samples WOV+TTAP
78 DR BEAT 101 MINI REVIEWS
Ronan Macdonald delves
deep into cross-rhythms
76 114
4 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019
Your FileSilo
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88
Dmin

EASY MUSIC G

THEORY TIPS
Take your songwriting to G

the next level with this 1

0
1
2 2

collection of all-new 3
Flats Sharps
3

4 4
tutorial videos 5  7
Enharmonics

6 6
7  5

Read the full article on p22

F

C D F G A
Key signature

D E G A B D E F G A B C

C D E F G A B C D Em F  m G A Bm C°

TIP 13 Note names TIP 15 Keys + key signatures TIP 26 Chord inversions

TIP60 Chromatic TIP62 Pivot chord TIP 7 7 Diminished 7ths

modulation modulation

6 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019

 video

Producer Masterclass
TRAX CM
MATRIX & FUTUREBOUND Fire up our video and get up to
See the dynamic DnB duo at work in the studio speed with this sample-powered
drum machine for PC and Mac
Note: this video is only available using the link on page 45

Read the full article on p44 Read the full article on p54

THE GUIDE TO
FATHOM CM
The first part of our
modular synth workshop
Read the full
article on p65 2 Building a synth voice 3 Modulation Matrix 4 ADSR Envelope

5 Filtering 6/7 Envelopes/LFOs 8 Sequencing 9 Effects

EASY GUIDE STUDIO STRATEGIES DR BEAT

EXOTIC POLISHING POLYRHYTHMS
SCALES SAMPLES PART 2

/experts
Our resident music
production gurus
walk you through
their specialist field
every month Read the full Read the full Read the full
article on p74 article on p76 article on p78

June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 7

 NEW VIDEOS
ON THE
CHANNEL

SUBSCRIBE FOR:
Exclusive hands-on sessions
with the latest software In The Studio with Feed Me
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> news

NEW RELEASES • COMMENT • INDUSTRY HAPPENINGS

Native Instruments Massive X

The eagerly anticipated softsynth is shaping up to be something special
Having missed its originally
suggested February release slot (and
then some), the sequel to Native
Instruments’ seminal Massive – arguably
the first plugin ‘super synth’ – is now
scheduled for availability in June. The
wait feels interminable, but at least the
developers have started sharing details
and screenshots of Massive X via the
Massive X Lab page on their blog – and,
boy, is it looking good…
First and foremost, Massive X is
described as “an entirely new instrument,
designed from the ground up”, and the
interface reflects that, with its clear, clean
layout, and enticing colours and
iconography. The two main wavetable
oscillators will apparently be boasting
“around 125 wavetables at launch” and
operate in ten distinct modes for plenty of
sonic variation.
They can be further messed around with If looks are anything to go by, Massive X is certainly on the right track
using a pair of phase modulation oscillators,
and an array of intriguing Insert FX and
Insert Oscillators, the latter being for There’s no restriction on how signals are freely assignable rhythmic, performance
“complex DX7-style phase modulation passed around these modules, either: just and MIDI-controlled modulation.
environments” but also usable on their own drag connections between oscillators, filters We simply couldn’t be more excited to
for subtractive synthesis. and FX as you see fit. get our hands on Massive X, which looks to
Eight new filter types are also in place, For getting Massive X’s parameters build on the foundations of the original
each with numerous modes, from the usual moving, up to nine envelopes and LFOs are Massive in spectacular style. Hopefully it
low- and high-pass to combs and beyond; available in any combination, and the will hit its June launch date, at a price yet to
and up to three Unit FX (delay, reverb, Performer, Remote Octave and Tracker be confirmed.
distortion, etc) can be applied. modules provide a veritable playground of native-instruments.com

FIRST LOOK
Serato Studio
Digital DJ specialists Serato are getting into the
VIDEO
See our first impressions at:
DAW game with Serato Studio, a production
bit.ly/SerStdFstLk application aimed at beginners and DJs looking
to make their own tracks. The interface is
modelled on their DJ software, and although it
appears basic, the beat-making workflow looks
to be fast and fun.
Fans of
Serato’s DJ
It’s currently at public beta stage, but will be
software available soon through monthly subscription.
will love
Studio serato.com

10 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019


Audio Damage’s new Enso looper effect promises to make time travel a reality – sort of
Audio Damage Enso
Inspired by vintage and modern looper
hardware, Audio Damage’s new plugin
effect lets you capture, loop and overdub up
to ten minutes (five on iOS) of audio input
without stopping playback at any point. A
‘dual tape deck’ option alters the Feedback
parameter for ‘Frippertronics’-style creative
layering; and with independent speed and
direction controls for recording and
playback, time becomes a fluid plaything
Positive Grid BIAS FX 2
The second generation of Positive Grid’s
complete guitar processing software suite
introduces a re-engineered DSP engine and
“greatly improved workflow”, and a
shedload of new amps and effects, as well as
advanced Harmonizer, Fuzz and Time
modellers. The amp engine is lifted directly
from the company’s superb Amp 2 amplifier/
cab simulation, thousands of custom foot
pedal presets are downloadable from
ToneCloud, and if you opt for the Elite
edition, you also get BIAS Pedal, with which
you can build your own effects. Perhaps the
most exciting new feature, however, is
Guitar Match, which lets you turn your
guitar “into a hoarder’s collection of
legendary axes, each precisely recreated
PSP Audioware HertzRider can help you on
retuning duties where others can’t
– record backwards at half speed while
playing forwards at double speed, say. Up to
four ‘Sectors’ can be defined, too, each with
its own start and end points, for on-the-fly
loop rearrangement; and Tape saturation,
Filter and Chorus effects are onboard. The
gorgeous main display visualises the loop
and Sector markers in real time.
Available now for Mac and PC, $79, and
iOS for $8. We’ll be reviewing it next issue.
audiodamage.com
down to their pickups, body type and body
thickness”, without any additional hardware.
Available now in Standard ($99),
Professional ($199) and Elite ($299) editions,
differentiated by the number of amps,
effects and Guitar Match models in each.
positivegrid.com
PSP Audioware HertzRider
The latest plugin effect from acclaimed
Polish developers PSP is a creative
frequency shifter for retuning inharmonic
and manipulating harmonic source signals
in ways that conventional pitchshifting can’t.
The two Shift knobs enable independent,
linked or opposite shifting of the left and
right channels within a 1kHz, 3kHz or 10kHz
range, and the meter in between shows the
amount of shifting taking place in real time.
The ‘creative’ part comes in the shape of the
onboard LFO, which features variable offset
between the phase of the left and right
channels, and modulates the pitchshifters at
up to 10Hz.
HertzRider is out now for Mac and PC,
and costs $49. We’ll review it soon.
pspaudioware.com
news <
App watch
We report on the latest
developments in phone
and tablet music making
iPad Air
First, some hardware news: Apple have
launched a new iPad Air (from £479) and
the iPad mini 5 (from £399), both of which
look like decent options for music makers.
They feature the same A12 chip and each
comes with either 64GB or 256GB of
storage. The Air rocks a 10.5-inch screen
and the mini a 7.9-inch display. We like the
look of the Air in particular, and we’re
pleased to say that both models have
headphones and Lightning ports.
apple.com/ipad
Koala Sampler
Sometimes, app developers over-
complicate things, but Elf Audio’s Koala
Sampler is a fine example of the ‘keep it
simple’ approach. You can sample sounds
to its pads using your device’s built-in mic,
and then make quick edits before
sequencing them into a track. There are
performance effects, too, plus a keyboard
mode that plays sounds chromatically.
Basically, it’s a blast – and at £2.99, it’s
cracking value, too.
elf-audio.com/koala
Endlesss
Tim Exile is known for his inventive
plugins, but with Endlesss [sic], he’s taking
on his most ambitious challenge yet.
Starting life as an iOS app, this is a
collaborative music-making platform that
lets you create Rifffs [sic] and share them
with other users so you can work on
projects together. A VST plugin is also
coming too. You can sign up to test the
beta on the website.
beta.endlesss.fm
June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 11
> news

Get with the Process.Audio Sugar

Allegedly “conceived by a team of award-
winning producers and mixers”, Process.

programmers Audio’s debut plugin is billed as the “ultimate

audio sweetener”. Essentially a multiband
enhancer, it divides the signal into Low,
Medium, High and Air bands, every one with
We talk SampleTank 4 and more with IK Multimedia’s two colouration modes, intelligently
applying what seems to be a particular and
CTO and product designer undivulged combination of EQ and
compression to each, via the raising of a
single fader. Linear phase high- and low-pass
SampleTank 4’s library is jaw- filters, and three flavours of saturation are
dropping in scope. How did you do it ? also involved.
Erik “It sounds simplistic, but we developed Process.Audio Sugar is available now for
these sounds one instrument at a time. We PC and Mac, for £119.
found the best piano, clavinet, vibraphone, process.audio
etc. We looked at our existing sound library
and saw what needed to improve and
expand. Then we went after the sounds using Acon Digital Verberate 2
IK Multimedia all our resources across many countries. We We rated Acon Digital’s original algorithmic
took what we learned from Syntronik and reverb plugin 8/10 when we reviewed it in
Davide Barbi Miroslav Philharmonik 2 and applied that to 202, and version 2 is said to take it to the
the new SampleTank 4 sessions. We are next level with the addition of the new
and Erik constantly evolving our sampling techniques, Vivid Hall algorithm. This models
and I have to say, we get better with each random fluctuations in the virtual
Norlander passing year. Syntronik was a milestone for acoustic space, such as would be
that, and SampleTank 4 is another one.” created by air currents and the
movement of performers and
The Acoustic Pianos collections are a ST4 library highlight. How audience, for a “higher degree of
did you go about it, and why’s it better than dedicated piano libraries? realism”. There are also new Dispersion and
Erik “We listened to so many pianos! We checked out instruments across Swirl parameter for better simulation of
the USA and Europe before deciding to go after this particular piano. It’s plates and vintage digital hardware.
an extraordinary instrument in an extraordinary studio. The combo of the Verberate 2 can be yours right now for
instrument itself with its dedicated maintenance, the room it sits in, the the price of £80.
microphones and preamps used… all of those contribute to this very acondigital.com
special sound. There’s also a certain soul in the piano that has developed
from all the music played on it, on so many great recordings. When you
find these rare, special instruments, there is always something a bit NoiseAsh Rule Tec
unidentifiable about why they’re so so special. You hear it instantly, but it’s Heritage Pro
difficult to identify with words. The best way to say it, I suppose, is that Every producer needs a decent Pultec EQ
from the moment you play the samples, you hear music in them.” emulation plugin in their arsenal, and
NoiseAsh’s triple header looks to be a
With the modulation matrix, ST4 is halfway to becoming a synth! thoroughly viable new option.
Any plans to add virtual analogue or wavetable oscillators? Modelling the Pultec EQP-1A, MEQ-5
Erik “We always try to balance user friendliness with functionality. We and HLF-3C – the last particularly rare
don’t want to hit the user with so in software form – in a single plugin,
many controls that editing becomes Rule Tec Heritage Pro gives you plenty
“Our sampling difficult or impossible for a large part of passive EQing options, including,
of the user base. Syntronik was an most notably, the classic ‘Pultec low
techniques get better exercise in that for sure, but in 2019, end trick”, whereby simultaneous cut and
most synth users are more boost are applied at 60Hz for a solidifying
with each passing year” sophisticated than in the past, so a effect on kick drums and basses.
modulation matrix is not such an Rule Tec Heritage Pro is out now, for $130.
imposing feature now. As far as adding new sound sources like virtual noiseash.com
analogue or wavetable technology, we’re always thinking about that.”

Your new iLoud MTM speakers mark your first foray into the pro Nembrini Audio LoFi
monitoring market. What inspired them, and what sets them apart? Vintage Clipper
Davide “The iLoud MTM builds on a simple principle: first understanding Distortion plugins don’t get much more
the weak links in a monitoring system, then giving a practical solution – at straightforward than Nembrini Audio’s debut
a good price – so you can mix easier and faster, with less back and forth. In release for Mac and PC. LoFi Vintage Clipper
our opinion, the weakest links in conventional monitoring systems are makes the process of applying edgy
bad time alignment (ie, bad phase response) and bad interaction with the analogue-style clipping and less
room/environment. For this reason, the iLoud MTM offers a truly flat sonically-punishing saturation idiot-
magnitude and phase frequency response – a feature pretty unique in this proof by offering just two operational
price range. Mixing on a phase-flat system means less work for the knobs – one for each of the
hearing system to decipher what’s going on, allowing decisions to be aforementioned distortion styles,
taken by the engineer in a fraction of the time it takes on a conventional which are applied in parallel – and an output
phase-shifting system. Plus, the iLoud MTM includes a self-enclosed level control.
automatic room tuning feature that allows for the monitor to be properly It’s out now, although having been made
EQed to its positioning in the room in seconds – no expertise needed.” available as a free download for a limited
time (sorry if you missed it!), it now costs $79.
ikmultimedia.com URL nembriniaudio.com

12 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019

 years
back
June 2009’s issue revealed
the not-at-all elusive secret
to making music pay out
It was time for us to dive deep into
Ableton Live 8 in June 2009 ( 139), as
we gave you the customary and
comprehensive guide. To be fair, you
had plenty of time to get to grips with this
Softube say they’ve taken the best multi-waveforms and distilled them with new plugin Parallels particular version of the DAW; Live 9
wouldn’t be released for another four
Softube parallels years, practically an aeon in music
software development terms.
Based on “painstakingly recorded and calibrated multi-waveforms We also had a guide to making money
from your music, something that some
from every dream-machine must-have synth you could ever want”, would argue is now even more difficult
Softube’s first synth plugin aims to be instantly gratifying. Two of the
aforementioned waveforms – each constantly evolving through its “Making money from
15-second duration – are loaded as parallel sound sources for music is now even more
wavescanning, blending, manipulation, modulation and processing by
the modelled filters and effects for which the Swedish developers are difficult than back then“
known. It all happens in one of the most beautiful user interfaces we’ve than it was back then. In fact, the best
seen. Parallels is out now, priced $149. advice for anyone who wants to earn a
fortune would probably be ‘don’t
softube.com
consider a career in music’, but we all do
it for the love anyway, right?
In the news section, we covered the

Ins & outs launch of PreSonus Studio One, which

USB PHWOAR
New connectivity standards can
often spell trouble for computer
musicians – or new dongles and
adapters at the very least – but USB
4.0 might just be different. It’s set to
fully incorporate the Thunderbolt 3
standard, so one port might finally
be set to rule them all.
MYWASTE
OK, you might be ashamed of
those tracks you put on MySpace
15 years ago, but at least you knew
they were still there. Except they
probably aren’t anymore: as a result
of a “server migration”, anything
more than three years old may’ve
been lost forever.
has gone on to perform the tricky feat of
establishing itself in the big league of
DAWs. Our deputy editor, meanwhile, was
pondering the best method of cable
coiling, discussing the relative merits of
both the ‘over/over’ and ‘over/under’
techniques. We think he was talking
about cable coiling, anyway.

THE WHITE (cHANNEL) STRIPS AMERIcAN PI

We’re all familiar with the idea of
road-testing your mixes on a car
tereo, but Jack White has gone one
step further by transmitting them
n an FM frequency from the studio,
en tuning-in in his ‘whip’ so that he
can offer real-time feedback on how
things are sounding.
Pi Day takes place on 14 March
(you can work out why), and to
celebrate, the creators of AI
songwriter Amadeus Code
created a song based on Don
McLean’s American Pie. The
results were… arguable, but judge
for yourself: bit.ly/am_pi

BAcH TO THE FUTURE THIS IS THE ENDEL

Google love a musical Doodle, and
their latest, coinciding with what
would’ve been Bach’s birthday, was
a doozy. Feed it a two-bar melody
and it’ll generate a Bach-style
harmony for you. There’s even a
‘Switched On’ version if you know
where to look…
Relatedly, we’ve now learned that
Warner Bros’ hot new signing is…
an algorithm. It’s Endel, the app
that makes personalised sounds
to help you sleep, relax and focus.
So, we’re not just competing with
other humans for record deals
now, but machines, too. Readers in June 2009 were treated to a
comprehensive guide to Ableton Live 8

June 2019  /  Computer muSiC  /  13

>  news
freeware news
This month’s bevy of gratuities includes MIDI modules, clever clavinets,
grungy guitar goodies and some 80s-tastic digital drums
STL Ignite
Emissary
Plug-in Bundle
A collaborative effort from a pair
of metal-minded developers, this
bundle is all bark and bite
Ignite Amps have made quite a name
for themselves among the plank-
spanking populace (erm, that’d be
guitarists) with their powerful software
amp sims and ear-shredding hardware
counterparts. Among their most popular
products is Emissary, a recreation of a
one-off custom head.
For the latest version, they’ve joined
with STL Tones to bring out the Emissary
Plug-In Bundle, a free collection that
features the brand new version of
Emissary, and the latest 2.0 version of
NadIR, their convolution-based
2gether Audio
Ticky Clav 2
What with the revival of
Big Tick’s Cheeze
Machine still on all of our
minds, we thought we’d
feature Ticky Clav
among this month’s classics – but 2gether Audio
has gone and put paid to that plan by issuing a
brand-spanking new version of Big Tick’s chunky,
funky virtual keyboard.
Just like with the original, Ticky Clav 2 is
bursting with that 70s sound that can be heard on
so many groovy tunes. Built-in wah drives the
classic quacking clav sound home.
2getheraudio.com
14  /  ComPuTEr muSIC  /  June 2019
processor. Plus, they’ve included a sextet
of studio-quality impulse responses
tracked at a pro studio, with the hardware
version of the Emissary driving a limited
edition Kirk Hammett 4x12 cabinet. NadIR
itself gives plenty of sound-shaping with
built-in filters, room controls, and more.
Mind you, the Emissary 2.0 plugin
needs little help on shredding sonic
signatures, though it has plenty of
PlugIn Guru
ShowmIDI and modmate
John ‘Skippy’ Lehmkuhl is a
legendary figure among
longtime electronic
musicians, selling custom
sample sets in the 1980s,
followed by a lengthy stint with Korg where his
factory patches were among the standouts on
some classic synths.
As PlugIn Guru, he offers patches, samples,
and a pair of useful MIDI effects. ShowMIDI does
just what the name says – it displays MIDI activity.
ModMate likewise displays MIDI CC activity, but
allows you to reroute and stack CCs and more.
pluginguru.com
CLASSIC FREE SOFTWARE
Wavosaur vsT speek
While we’re on the subject of movies from
the 1980s, shall we play a game? That’s
right, we’re looking to sing a duet of Daisy
Mae with a computerised collaborator.
While developers have yet to synthesise a
computerised voice as silky as Douglas
Rain’s, they have managed (just about) to
give us something akin to that of Matthew
This collab between STL
Tones and Ignite Amps will
get things crunching
characterful clean tones, too. Don’t
discount it as a guitarist’s plaything,
either: the Emissary can also impart
brutal tones to your synth patches.
Both Emissary and NadIR are
optimised for real-time use with easy-on-
the-CPU performance and zero latency, so
don’t be afraid to plug right in and have a
jam with the band.
stltones.com
Hora Music
PCm Drum
The 80s are nigh-on
inescapable at the
moment, with heaps
of plugins devoted to
recreating the era of
neon colours and
asymmetrical hair cuts.
If you’re a VCV Rack user and itching to score
the next retro actioner, you’d do well to check out
the free version of Hora Music’s PCM Drum. This
module collects 25 samples from the mighty
LinnDrum. What’s more, they sound just as crisp
and crunchy as they did in the old days.
hora-music.be/pcm-drums.php
Broderick’s binary buddy from War Games.
Based on the SAM software for the
Commodore 64, VST Speek will pronounce
anything you type into it in a gritty, grainy
diction that sounds a bit like Stephen
Hawking with a bad case of smoker’s cough.
Yep, it’s that good.
blog.wavosaur.com
>  make music now / outro
what’s on your hard drive?
What’s on your hard drive?
Giorgia Angiuli
The Italian producer and live artist reveals the software behind her
recently released debut album, In A Pink Bubble
Ableton live 10
“Ableton Live is a platform that you’ll fall in
love with. It’s simple, versatile and reliable.
Even if Ableton is the first and only DAW
you’ve worked with, you’ll have no problems
using it after a while – it’s so intuitive! I use it
for everything: to compose, arrange and mix
my tracks, and also when I play live.
“Right at the start, when I was first
beginning electronic music production, it
quickly became the only DAW I wanted to
work with. Without hesitation, I can suggest
it to everyone who wants to make music.
Every day, it will offer you new possibilities.”
UAD thermionic cUltUre vUltUre
“I bought my UAD Satellite three years ago,
and it’s now one of the most important
tools in my studio. There are so many great
plugins to choose from, but one of my
favourites is the Thermionic Culture
Vulture. I find it hard to explain the colour it
gives to my sounds… it adds fantastic
16  /  Computer musiC  /  June 2019
harmonics and reproduces the warmth of
those old valves. It always makes an impact
on basslines and leads.
“Can I mention two more UAD plugins?
RealVerb Pro is wonderful on synthesisers;
and my other essential UAD tool is the
Pultec EQP-1A equaliser – it’s so round and
smooth, especially when used on vocals
and guitar.”
brAinworx bx_DigitAl v3
eQ collection
“The beauty of the Brainworx EQs is that
they all have such a clean sound. They never
sound harsh, which is something that you
can often find when it comes to other digital
EQ plugins. Some EQs will only work on
certain instruments, but with Brainworx
EQs, you can use them on everything,
especially when you’re EQing subtractively –
you know, when you’re trying to find space
for something in the mix. They do their job
fine, but then they add nothing. In my
opinion, it is essential to have this kind of
tool on your computer.”
vAlhAllA vintAgeverb
“I discovered this about three years ago, and
haven’t stopped using it since. As the name
suggests, it’s modelled on older reverb units,
but still manages to maintain its own
character. I find it particularly good for
vocals, leads and pads, and I’m pleased to
say that it’s also light on the CPU – despite
the high overall quality! It’s easy to use, too –
with a few adjustments of the Predelay,
you’ll soon find the sound and space you’re
looking for.”
tAl-chorUS-lx
“This is another effects plugin that’s
remained on my computer for at least four
or five years. It’s built its reputation on being
a reproduction of the mighty Juno synth’s
chorus, and yes, it does come in useful when
I want to make a synth stand out in the mix.

giorgia recommends tAl-chorus-lx for widening
and thickening centred synth sounds
It provides a simple change in the stereo
field, but the human ear perceives the
sound source with much more… presence. If
you have to give a synth character in the
centre and sides of a mix, this’ll work.”
U-he DivA
“I only installed this last week, but
immediately found it to be a lot of fun. For a
virtual instrument, it has an incredible
sound. If I were to mention one small
problem, it would be that it can be quite
heavy on the CPU when using the ‘Divine’
mode for the best-quality sound.
“One of my favourite tricks is to combine
modules from famous vintage synths and
turn them into one ‘single’ instrument. It has
an excellent arpeggiator, too. Experiment
with the progression values [which alters
how and when it moves between octaves]
and you can create some amazing patterns.
A simple starting point will soon become
very exciting!”
wAveS S1 Stereo imAger
“This does the one thing I often need:
increase the perceived stereophony of a
sound. But it does that well! I know that a lot
of producers use it on submixes and the
master channel, but I personally use it on
individual channels, which gives me more
control over the width of each of sound.
Listen to any song of mine and you’ll
probably hear it on synths and leads.”
wAveS renAiSSAnce vox
“Another tool you’ll find in the Waves suite,
and one that I consider to be something
giorgia has recently discovered u-he’s Diva – a softsynth that’s heavy on the cPU, but worth it
special. It’s been designed to work with
vocal signals, and that’s exactly what it
does. There aren’t many controls – just a
gate and a compressor. The latter is a soft-
knee compressor with auto make-up gain.
That means that you really must set this one
up by ear – adjust the controls until you find
something that fits your voice.”
FAbFilter Pro-Q 3
“If I had to list all the plugins that make a big
difference to my sound, then FabFilter’s
famous EQ would be close to the top, for
sure! Personally, I think Pro-Q is the best all-
round equaliser available on the market in
2019. By double-clicking on any point of the
GUI, it’s easy to add an EQ band that can be
switched between several filter types.
“One of the coolest features for me is the
ability to EQ in M/S mode – breaking the
stereo sound in to two different
components [signals that are the same in
the left and right channels, ie, mono, and
signals that are different, ie, stereo]. Once
you’ve mastered this one, it’s really easy to
use, but this feature really allows you to dive
deep into the different frequencies of a
song. Try it if you have quite a difficult
stereo bassline – you can keep control of
the low frequencies, without losing any
stereo spread in the mids and highs.”
Giorgia Angiuli’s new album, In A
Pink Bubble, is out now
iSSUe 269 JUNE 2019
Future Publishing Ltd.
Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA
Tel: 01225 442244
Fax: 01225 732275
Email:computermusic@futurenet.com
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Chief Content Officer: Aaron Asadi
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Head of Art and Design: Rodney Dive
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NEXT ISSUE ON SALE: 15 May 2019
> roundup

roundup
Drum processors
A handful of plugins to pump up your beats and percussion

Voxengo
Drumformer
All-in-one multiband
dynamics, harmonic
excitement, gate, drive
and more
voxengo.com

Waves
JJP Cymbals and Percussion
US producer/engineer Jack Joseph Puig’s top-end
treatments boiled down into a handy multieffect
waves.com

SoundRadix
Drum Leveler
Apply upwards/downwards
compression or expansion to
specific drums within a multitrack
soundradix.com

18 / COMPUTER MUSIC June 2019

 roundup <

Audified
DW Drum Enhancer
Choose a drum type, then apply gating,
compression, EQ and tube saturation
audified.com

MeldaProduction
MDrumEnhancer
This advanced drum processor
uses clever sample-based
trickery to bolster your kicks,
snares and percussion
meldaproduction.com

Joey Sturgis
Tones Transify
An affordable four-band transien
nt
shaper to help you customise
drum dynamics
joeysturgistones.com

Audio Damage
Rough Rider 2
Embiggen drum hits and
pump up beat busses with
this assertive freeware
compressor plugin
audiodamage.com

June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 19

 F
G

Dmin

EASY MUSIC
THEORY TIPS

22 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019

 88 easy music theory tips  /  make music now  <

Theory-phobic?
Our bite-sized,
2019-relevant
C guide is here to
help you out…
The relevance of music theory as a whole to the
computer musician of 2019 is a much discussed
and debated topic. With so many compositional aids
and hugely powerful DAWs on the market, and the
widely-held view that the average pop song is, by
definition, inherently simplistic, you could argue that
there isn’t really much need to know a great deal of
theory. And yet, music is one of those fields in which
there’s always something new to learn, no matter
what level of musician you consider yourself to be, so
it can’t be denied that a little extra knowledge is
always a good thing.
Here at , although we get that an in-depth music
theory background is by no means essential to create
great tunes, we’re always keen to squeeze our in-house
experts for as much easily-accessible and useful know-
how as we can get our hands on. Even if you’re a swirling
maelstrom of raw talent with an enviable natural feel for
what makes a great track, being armed with just a
smattering of the basics is only going to put you in a
stronger position musically, enabling you to make better,
more informed production choices. So to that end, we’ve
curated this approachable collection of bite-sized, theory-
based hints and tips, gathered together by topic and
aimed at precisely that – using music theory as a
springboard to help you make better tunes. Progressing
from beginner-level theory and basic definitions through
to more advanced concepts, over the next few pages
you’ll find us highlighting the sort of stuff that’s useful to
know if you want to take your songwriting, arranging,
production and even mixing to the next level. So what are
you waiting for? Let’s get theory-ous!

June 2019 / Computer musiC  /  23

>  make music now  /  88 easy music theory tips

Jargon buster
Some definitions to kickstart proceedings
interval
An interval is the distance in pitch between two tone (Whole-Step) semitone (Half-Step)
notes, and there are two possible types –
harmonic and melodic. Harmonic intervals
happen when two different notes are played
together at the same time – in other words, a
two-note chord. On the other hand, a melodic
interval is between two notes played one after
the other – that’s a two-note melody.

oCtave
An octave is an interval of 12 semitones
between two notes that have the same name,
eg, C3 and C4. An octave spans all 12 notes on
the piano keyboard.

semitone / tone C2 C3
Also sometimes known as a half-step, a
semitone is the distance between any two
adjacent notes on the piano keyboard – the
smallest possible interval. It’s also the interval
between the degrees of a chromatic scale. A
octave
tone, short for ‘whole tone’ is the same as two
semitones, and is also sometimes called a Octaves, tones and semitones are the building blocks of music theory
‘whole-step’.

DiatoniC represent the same progression in any key? By

With regard to scales and chords, the term
‘diatonic’ can literally be translated as
‘belonging to’, eg, the diatonic chords for C
major are C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am and Bdim. They
all ‘belong to’ the harmonised C major scale,
and therefore to the key of C major.
using Roman numerals to label the diatonic
chords (see pic), you can write out
progressions regardless of the key. Major
chords get upper case numerals, while minor
and diminished chords are represented by
lower-case numerals.

CHromatiC
Chromatic generally refers to semitones – for
instance, a semitone is a chromatic interval,
and an increase in pitch of one semitone is
known as a chromatic shift. The term
chromatic can also mean the opposite of
diatonic, used to describe any note that
doesn’t belong to the current key or scale.
toniC
The term given to the lowest note on which a
scale is based, or the first chord in a set of
diatonic chords. For example, the tonic of the C
major scale is the note C, whereas in a chord
progression that’s in the key of C major, the
tonic chord is C major.
Harmonised scales are formed by stacking alternate
Dominant notes to form diatonic triads

Degree The name given to the 5th note in a scale or the

The name given to a note that appears in a
scale. So the note C is the first degree of the C
major scale, D is the second degree, and so on.
A major scale contains seven degrees, while a
chromatic scale contains 12.
roman numerals
Using chord names to spell a chord
progression is great, but what if you want to
5th chord in a diatonic set. The dominant is the
second strongest chord in a key after the tonic.
seConDary Dominant
The name given to a chord based on the 5th
(dominant) note of any key or scale other than
the one you’re currently in. Secondary
dominants are often used in a chord
progression to prepare the listener for an
upcoming shift to a different key.

Roman numeral notation of a diatonic set
Harmonisation
To harmonise a scale means to create chords
built on each note in the scale using only notes
from that scale. The easiest way to build a
harmonised scale is to start with the root note,
then stack up every alternate note until you’ve
built a three-note chord
HarmoniC FunCtion
Diatonic chords can be thought of as having
one of three types of job, or ‘harmonic
The harmonic functions of diatonic chords
function’ within a chord progression. For
instance, tonic chords provide a sense of rest
or ‘home’, while predominant chords provide a
sense of instability that takes us away from
home. Chords with a dominant function bring
us back home by resolving to the tonic, which
basically means when we hear one, we most
want to hear a tonic chord next.

24  /  Computer musiC  /  June 2019

 88 easy music theory tips / make music now <

C D F G A
Intervals
An interval is the distance

D E G A B
in pitch between any two
notes, and each has its
own name (see chart),
from the smallest (the
minor 2nd, equivalent to
C D E F G A B C one semitone) to the
largest (the major 13th,
equivalent to 21
semitones). The chart
Note names shows the interval names
In the Western musical alphabet, there are found within an octave.
seven note names: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. These Interval name Semitones
note names, however, apply only to the white notes
Unison 0
on the keyboard – so what about the black keys?
Minor 2nd 1
Around the time the keyboard and music notation
were first invented, the design of the keyboard Major 2nd 2

centred around the scale of C major, which has no Minor 3rd 3

sharps or flats in it. When accidentals (sharps and Major 3rd 4

flats) needed to be added in order to raise or lower Perfect 4th 5

notes by one semitone in pitch, this became the Aug 4th / Dim 5th 6
function of the black keys on the keyboard. When Perfect 5th 7
naming accidentals, a sharp or flat sign is placed
after the note name – C, for example, is one
Minor 6th 8

Major 6th 9
semitone higher in pitch than C. Depending on the
key you’re working in though, C can also be called
Minor 7th 10

D, D can be E, and so on. Major 7th 11

Octave 12

Keys and key Key signature

signatures
When we say that a piece of music is in a
particular key, it means that most of its

F C
chords and melody are taken from a
certain ‘parent’ scale. The parent scale

major scale – D E F G A B and C – and all of the

for the key of D major, for instance, will be the D D E G A B
diatonic chords for the key – D, Em, Fm, G, A, Bm
and Cº – are built using those notes. On a score,
the key signature tells us what key the piece is in
via sharp or flat symbols placed at the start of the
stave, on the lines corresponding to the relevant
notes. These indicate which notes need to be
played as sharps or flats throughout the piece in

Em F  m G C°
order to stay in key.

D A Bm

June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 25

> make music now / 88 easy music theory tips
Chords
Chords can be defined as multiple
notes played simultaneously. For
everyday songwriting duties, the
humble triad, or three-note chord, is
the order of the day
01
FORMING
BASIC TRIADS
The common-or-garden basic chord
is known as a triad, which contains
three notes. To build one, you start on any note
of a scale, then add alternate notes from the
scale until you have a stack of three. So to build C
02
major (C-E-G), for example, you start on the root
note of C, skip the next note of the scale (D) to
land on E, then skip the next note (F) to land on
G. Triads can be major or minor depending on
the position of the middle note. An interval of a
Basic triads are stacked alternate notes from a scale
Add a dash of tension to your progression with suspended chords
26 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019
03
AUGMENTED REALITY
In contrast, augmented chords are
formed by taking a standard major
triad and raising the 5th by a
semitone. So to create C+, for example, you’d
up one semitone to G to end up with C-E-G. This
start with C major (C-E-G) and raise the 5th (G)
results in three evenly-spaced chord tones, each
separated by a major 3rd interval (four
semitones). As there are 12 notes in an octave,
augmented triads are symmetrical, so any of the
three notes in the chord can be the root note.
Like their diminished cousins, augmented triads
also make great passing chords – try C - C+ - F.
04
major 3rd between the middle note and the root THE 4/3 RULE
results in a major triad, while if the interval is a If you don’t know the notes in the
minor 3rd, it’s a minor triad. This is why building scale you work with, you can
a triad using notes from the C major scale and work out how to build major or
starting from D results in a minor chord – Dm (D- minor triads on any root note with the 4/3 rule.
F-A) – because the interval between D and F is Find your starting note, count four semitones up
three semitones, or a minor 3rd. the keyboard to find the 3rd, then another three
to get to the 5th. So, start on C, four semitones
DIMINISHED up is E, then three more gets you to G – voila, a C
RESPONSIBILITY major triad (C-E-G). For minor triads, reverse the
If you take a regular minor triad formula to 3/4 – three semitones up from the
and lower the 5th by a semitone, root to the 3rd, then four more to the 5th.
you get what’s known as a diminished chord.
Because the 5th has been lowered, the interval
between it and the root note of the chord is
referred to as a diminished 5th, and this has
another name – the tritone, so called because
it’s an interval of precisely six semitones, or
three whole tones. This interval is considered so
unstable and unsettling that it was actively
feared in the Middle Ages! Because of this sonic
instability, diminished chords sound fairly tense
and unnerving in certain contexts, but work
between a major triad and a minor triad – try B -
really well as passing chords to bridge the gap
Bº - Cm as an example. Use the 4/3 rule to find any major and minor triad
05
SUSPENDED ANIMATION
A close relative of major and
minor triads, suspended chords
are great for movement. They’re made by
taking the 3rd – the middle note – from a
standard triad and moving it up or down by
one scale note. Moving it up makes a sus4
chord, with a perfect 4th interval between
the middle note and root, while moving it
down to a major 2nd interval above the
root makes a sus2 chord. So C major (C-E-G)
played as Csus4 becomes C-F-G, and played
as Csus2 becomes C-D-G.
 88 easy music theory tips / make music now <

06
EXTENDED ABILITIES
While it’s perfectly acceptable to
build a song using basic triads,
extending the chords by adding
more notes can really help to ramp up the level
of sophistication. To build them up, start with a
normal triad, but just keep on skipping and
stacking notes from the scale. So, in the case of
C major, we’d continue from the 5th (G), skip the
next note in the C major scale (A) to land on B
for CMaj7 (C-E-G-B), then just keep on going, C Major G Major
adding a 9th (D) and 11th (F) to give us CMaj11
(C-E-G-B-D-F).

07
LUCKY 13TH
The limit of chord extension is the
13th (any more than this and the
note-skipping tactic means you
just land on the root again). A quick way of
working out the 13th interval above the root is to
just play the 6th an octave higher – so in the
case of C major, to get Cmaj13 we’d play C-E-G-B-
D-F-A. That’s quite a wide spread of notes for
anyone’s fingers, so the chord can be ‘voiced’
with some of the higher notes shifted down an Cmaj9
octave, making it a bit easier to deal with.

Combine simple triads together to make more complex polychords

09
POLYCHORDS
A quick and easy way to form complex
chords, polychords are created by
combining two regular major or minor
triads to make a larger chord. For instance, we can
smoosh together a C major triad (C-E-G) and a G major
A dominant chord’s primary role is to take us back to the
tonic chord
triad (G-B-D) to form Cmaj9 (C-E-G-B-D). Playing the
triads in different inversions (or even separate octaves)

08
DOMINANT 7TH
Used extensively in rock, pop,
can yield even more interesting results. Bear this
blues and jazz, the function of the
dominant 7th chord is to resolve
technique in mind when figuring out chords for your
back to the tonic chord. It’s built by adding a track – experiment by squishing triads together in
example, is C-E-G-B.
flattened 7th on top of a major triad – C7, for
random combinations until you get something that
sounds cool.

The 5th chord in a diatonic set is called the as C-E-GA. Interestingly, because diminished
dominant, which in the key of C major would be 7ths contain four notes that are all separated by
G major (G-B-D). Turning this into a dominant equal three-semitone intervals, they span the 12

a result, Cº7, Eº7, Gº7 and Aº7 are all basically

7th by adding an F makes a stronger resolution notes of the octave in a symmetrical pattern. As
back to the tonic C major chord.

Diminished 7ths are special in that they’re symmetrical
in structure
10
DIMINISHED 7THS
A diminished 7th is created by
adding an extra note onto the top of
a diminished triad, three semitones
up from the 5th. Therefore, Cº7 would be played
notes. The same goes for Cº7, Eº7, Gº7 and Bº7,
the same chord, which are sharing the same
and also Dº7, Fº7, Aº7 and Bº7. Diminished 7ths
have a function that’s similar to that of the
dominant 7th, which is basically to resolve back
to the tonic.

June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 27

> make music now / 88 easy music theory tips

Chord inversions Chord voicings

When writing progressions, how
do we avoid the jerkiness that
often results from playing every
chord with its root note at the
bottom of the stack? Inversion
therapy, that’s how!
Voicings are similar to inversions in that they
involve adjusting the order in which notes in a
chord are played. Rather than just shifting octaves
around, however, voicings spread notes across the
keys into different octaves, for instance, or
sometimes remove a note altogether. As an
example, an A minor triad is played normally as
A-C-E. If we shift the 3rd (E) up an octave but leave
the root and 5th where they are to get A-E-C, this is
known as an open voicing rather than an inversion,
because the 3rd is now in a different octave than
the root.

This four-bar chord progression in
Rootless voicings
Rootless voicings are a way of playing chords
without the root note. In band scenarios where
the root note is handled by a bass player, they’re
useful since they can be played with the left
hand, leaving the right hand free to improvise.

1 C major (C - Am - Em - F), has all the

chords played in ‘root position’ – with
the root note as the lowest note. Played
this way, the chords jump around the
You can create a rootless voicing for a major
chord by building a minor 7th chord off the
major 3rd. In the case of C major, the major 3rd is
E, so you would play Em7 (E-G-B-D). You could
keyboard a fair bit and it sounds quite then invert this to, say, B-D-E-G for a different
disjointed, not to mention harder to
vibe. Meanwhile, for minor chords, simply build
play as a result.
a major 7th chord off the minor 3rd.

Voice leading same inversion of each chord to keep the note

Voice leading is the practise of inverting chords
in a progression so that they flow together as
seamlessly as possible. The trick is to use
inversions to keep notes that are common to
both chords in the same position in each chord.
If there are no common tones, then use the
To make a first inversion of a triad,
movement to a minimum. For example, moving
from C major (C-E-G) to F major (F-A-C), with
both chords in root position produces a major
jump up the keyboard. But by inverting the F
chord to a second inversion (C-F-A), the lowest
note remains C, with minimal movement in the
upper two chord tones.

2 we transpose the bottom note up

by one octave. Doing this to the first,
third and fourth chords in our piece (C,
Em and F) brings them closer in pitch
to the second chord of Am, making a
smoother progression. Previously C - E
- G, the C chord is now voiced E - G - C.

This sounds better, but we can

3 improve things further by turning

the C chord into a second inversion. We
do this by shifting the 3rd of the chord
(the E note) up by an octave as well,
making the 5th (G) the lowest note in
the chord. There’s now minimal
movement up and down the keys as
the chords change. Good voice leading is the secret to a polished harmonic progression

28 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019

 88 easy music theory tips  /  make music now  <

Finding the key of a song

Whether you use your own innate
04
ear training
The more you dabble in the
abilities or a technological aid, being black art of music theory, the
phenomenon of ear training

able to determine a song’s key is a tends to occur naturally to some extent – you
gradually get used to the sound of certain
scales, chords and intervals to the point where

crucial skill for DJs and producers you might even be able to identify them by ear.
If you’re looking to speed up the process with
some actual exercises to hone your aural pitch-
detection skills, there are websites and apps

01
available that are specifically dedicated to ear
play along analyse audio in real time, then does some training. These allow you to regularly test
The simplest way to work out the key tricky maths based on the frequencies present yourself on different intervals and chords. Just
of a song is to grab a keyboard and in the audio to work out the most likely key of type ‘Ear Training’ into your search engine of
try to play along with the main the tune you’re playing into it. choice to browse them.
melody of the song. Chances are the tune will be
in one of the major or minor keys, and you
should be able to figure out from the notes it
uses which key it’s in. For instance, if it mainly
contains notes from the C major scale and the
root note feels like C, the key will be C major.

02
analyse auDio
If you have a solo vocal or other
audio track, try using a pitch-
correction or analysis plugin to
work out what notes are occurring in a melody
(our Photosounder Spiral CM, available free with
) is great for this. Alternatively, many pitch-
correction processors such as Auto-Tune or
Melodyne feature a real-time keyboard display
of the incoming signal’s pitch. Many DAWs have
their own versions built in, such as Logic’s Pitch
Correction plugin.

03
tHere’s an app
For tHat
Use Mixed In Key’s Key Detect iOS
app to determine the key of a
song. This clever piece of kit uses your phone to Pitch analysis tools can be helpful when trying to establish a song’s key

05
Ableton Live’s Fold feature keeps you in key when pencilling in melodies
key moments
The piano roll editor in many
DAWs can be useful if you’re
having problems keeping in key. Ableton
Live has a feature that allows you to show
only the notes that currently exist in a part,
hiding all the ones that haven’t been used
yet. If you know the notes in your scale, you
can add these in at the start of your clip and
drag them back before the first beat. Now
you can hide all the other notes and click
away, safe in the knowledge that you’re only
entering notes that work with your key.
June 2019 / Computer musiC  /  29
>  make music now  /  88 easy music theory tips

Scales
The basic definition of a scale is a set of musical
notes arranged in order. Most people are
familiar with the C major scale as being the one
where you start at middle C on the piano and
just play all the white keys up the keyboard until
you’ve covered the notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B,
eventually hitting C again an octave above
where you started. This is usually the first scale
we learn, but there are different types of scale,
each with their own individual sound, some
containing different numbers of notes. They
sound so different due to the variations in
patterns of intervals between notes in each
scale. With 12 starting notes to choose from, and
numerous patterns for each one, this gives rise
to a dizzying number of scales to commit to
memory. So why do theory practitioners place
so much emphasis on learning them?
Aside from the physical benefits of practising
them, the main reason to know a scale or two is
that it gives you more of an idea of what notes
to actually play over any given chord sequence.
If you know you’ve got a song or track in a
particular key, knowing the notes in the parent
scale of that key means that you’ve got much
more chance of hitting a note that will work over
the chords that make up the tune. This is
because most of the time, in popular music,
chord progressions are made up of chords that
are diatonic to one key or another, and those
chords will themselves have been built using the
notes from the scale in question. So, for
example, if you know your song is in the key of A
major, there’s a good chance that if you play the
notes of the A major scale over the chord
progression, you’ll get something musically
palatable. So knowing your scales gets you off
to a solid start when coming up with vocal
melodies, lead lines, basslines and solos that
actually work.

Common types of scale

Chromatic Major Natural minor

Taking in all 12 notes found within an octave, the
chromatic scale isn’t generally used a great deal
other than as a collection of every note you can
possibly play on the keyboard, so it’s more useful as a
teaching and practice aid rather than a practical scale
to be used in your tracks.
The major scale is usually the first one we learn,
chiefly because it has a cheerful, happy demeanour
and is one of the easiest scales to memorise and play.
If you start on a C and play the seven white keys to
the right in sequence, you’ll get a C major scale – C D
E F G A B.
If you play a major scale from the sixth note in the
sequence, the interval pattern produces the natural
minor scale, which sounds darker and moodier than
its major cousin. So with the 6th degree of C major
being A, we get A B C D E F G – A natural minor. C
natural minor would therefore be C D Eb F G Ab Bb.

Major pentatonic Minor pentatonic Blues

While major and minor scales have seven notes,
pentatonic scales have only five. Essentially a major
scale minus the 4th and 7th – C D E G A – the major
pentatonic is a staple of folk, blues, rock and country,
as it uses the five notes from a major scale that work
over the largest number of underlying chords.
The minor version of the pentatonic scale is formed
in a similar way to its major cousin, but by omitting
two notes from the natural minor scale. The missing
two notes in a minor pentatonic are the second and
sixth degrees, so C minor pentatonic would be
spelled C Eb F G Bb.
Take a minor pentatonic scale and add an extra note –
the sharpened 4th degree – to get the blues scale.
The C blues scale, therefore, goes C Eb F F# G Bb.
Although you can play a standard minor pentatonic
over the blues, adding that extra sharpened 4th gives
it that essential flavour so characteristic of blues.

30  /  Computer musiC  /  June 2019

 88 easy music theory tips  /  make music now  <

there are only two possible versions of it,

Scale name Intervallic
formula
depending on whether you’re starting on a sCale Quantising
white or a black key. If all this learning makes your head hurt, and you
Whole tone scales are hexatonic, which want to ‘cheat’ a bit, you can use a MIDI
Chromatic 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1
means that they contain six notes, all separated transformer like AutoTheory or an iOS app like
by intervals of a whole tone – hence you get the ThumbJam. Software tools like this only allow
major 2-2-1-2-2-2-1
name. With a formula of 2-2-2-2-2-2, wherever you to play the notes from a pre-selected scale
you start from on the keyboard, there are only of your choosing.
natural minor 2-1-2-2-1-2-2
two possible versions, and they work really well Some DAWs actually have this feature built in
over augmented and dominant 7b5 chords. already – Logic Pro, for example, contains a scale
major pentatonic 2-2-3-2-3
quantise feature that shifts any wrongly-played
relative vs parallel notes to the nearest correct note in the chosen
minor pentatonic 3-2-2-3-2
Relative and parallel scales are often mistaken scale – handy indeed.
for each other, as they’re pretty similar- Many hardware controllers also feature
Blues 3-2-1-1-3-2
sounding. So what’s the difference? similar approaches: NI Maschine, Ableton Push
Well, relative scales are two scales – one and Novation Circuit, for instance, all feature
Intervallic formulae is the number of semitones you
have to count to build each scale major, the other minor – that contain the same scale modes that lay out only the notes in the
notes but start on different notes. For example, specified key across a grid of illuminated pads.
C major, which contains the notes C D E F G A And if you get the key and scale settings right,
intervalliC Formulae and B, and A minor which contains A B C D E F just flailing around randomly on the keys or
Keyboard players are at a disadvantage to and G. Parallel scales, meanwhile, are two scales pads can produce unexpectedly cool results you
guitarists when it comes to memorising scales – – one major, one minor – that start on the same wouldn’t ordinarily have used, even if you
the latter only have to memorise one shape for a note, such as C major and C minor. already know your scales anyway!
scale, then move that shape up the neck to play
it in a different key; whereas on the keyboard,
playing the same scale up just one semitone
requires having to remember a completely
different pattern of keys – play a C major scale,
then a C# major one, and you’ll get the idea.
Rather than spending hours practising them
until muscle memory takes over, you can
remember simple number sequences – known
as intervallic formulae – to help you work them
out on the fly, based on counting the number of
semitones between each note in the scale.
For example, the formula for a major scale is
2-2-1-2-2-2-1, so to play, say, D major, you’d start
on D, move up two semitones to E, then another
two to F#, then one semitone up to G, two more
to A and so on, following the formula to
complete the scale.

tHe sCale oF your Dreams

Scoring a dream sequence? Use a whole tone
scale! The whole tone scale is a bit special as Logic’s Transposer locks incoming MIDI notes to a scale, and Scale Quantize corrects already-played parts

Scale name
Intervallic
formula
Scale tones soloing tips
C major 2-2-1-2-2-2-1
When improvising over a chord progression,
knowledge of scales is handy, as the type of chord you
C lydian 2-2-2-1-2-2-1
play over governs the scale type you use to select
C mixolydian 2-2-1-2-2-1-2 your notes from. The best solos take the chord
C Harmonic major 2-2-1-2-1-3-1 changes into account – safest choices are the major/
C major pentatonic
minor pentatonics and blues scale, as they contain
2-2-3-2-3
fewer notes and work over more chords. However,
C lydian Dominant 2-2-2-1-2-1-2
each chord type has a wide selection of scales to
C phrygian Dominant 1-3-1-2-1-2-2 choose from that contain the notes of that chord –
C Bebop Dorian 2-1-1-1-2-2-1-2
major chords alone can support at least eight types of
scale (see panel), so the more scales you learn, the
All of these scales contain the notes of a C major triad
(C-E-G), so should work over the top more you’ll know what keys to aim at.
June 2019  /  Computer musiC  /  31
>  make music now  /  88 easy music theory tips

C
MAJOR
F G
MAJOR
MAJOR
A
minor
D
Bb
E
minor minor
MAJOR
D
1b 1#
MAJOR
G 0
B

2#
minor
2b
minor

Eb
3b 3# F#
C Flats Sharps
A
MAJOR minor
minor MAJOR

4b 4#
C#
Enharmonics

5b 7#
F
7 b 5#
Ab 6b 6#
minor minor
E
B b /A# Ab / G #
MAJOR MAJOR

E b /D #
minor minor

D b / C# Cb / B
minor

Gb / F#
MAJOR MAJOR

MAJOR

the circle of fifths

The circle of fifths is a diagram that lays out every
musical note, key, three-note chord and scale, and
charts the relationship between them. A bit like a
musical version of the periodic table, the letters can
either represent notes, chords or keys. Go around the
circle clockwise and each note or key is separated by
an interval of a perfect 5th; go round anti-clockwise
and they’re ordered in 4ths. But what does the circle of
fifths actually do for us? Let’s find out…
32  /  Computer musiC  /  June 2019

How to use it…
RELATIVE KEYS
The circle groups together all 12 major keys with
their relative minors. A relative key is simply
defined as the minor key that uses the same
notes as a particular major key, or a major key
that uses the same notes as a particular minor
key. Major keys are found on the outer (yellow)
ring, with their relative minor keys shown in the
same segment on the inner (blue) ring.
DIATONIC CHORDS
The circles also group six of the seven diatonic
chords found in each key. Centring on the tonic,
the other two major chords will be found to the
left and right, and the same segments on the
inner ring will house the three minor diatonic
chords for that key. This works the same for
minor keys as well, but with the tonic centred on
the inner ring instead.
SHARPS AND FLATS
It tells us how many sharps or flats are in each
key, as seen on the central (blue) ring. As you go
sharp until you get to seven sharps (C major).
clockwise from the top, each key adds one more
Going anti-clockwise from the top tells us the
end up at seven flats (C major).
number of flats, adding a flat each time until you
BORROWED CHORDS
When working with borrowed chords, the circle
can show you the diatonic chords for the parallel
key to the one you’re currently in. Choose your
tonic note, then locate its parallel key by finding
the same note on the other ring. Now just select
a chord to borrow from the palette of five chords
that immediately surround it on the circle.
FINDING 3RDS
For a quick way to determine major and minor
3rd intervals (without a keyboard), simply count
four steps clockwise from the tonic to find the
major 3rd, or three anti-clockwise from the tonic
to reach the minor 3rd.
SIMILAR KEYS
The circle tells us the most similar keys. Similar
keys are keys whose parent scales differ only by
major (G A B C D E F) contain almost all the
one note – eg, C major (C D E F G A B) and G
same notes except for the F, which is F in G
major and F natural in C major. Pick a key on the
circle, and either adjacent key will only be one
note different. Because of this similarity, a lot of
Tonic
Chord
Pinpointing chords
to borrow from a
parallel key is just
one of the many uses
for the circle
88 easy music theory tips / make music now <
Primary
chords
G / F
The circle shows you the magic three-chord trick that’s
built thousands of songs
music tends to change key by moving between
adjacent keys on the circle.
DISSIMILAR KEYS
It also tells us the least similar keys. Spaced 180
degrees across from each other, you’ll find the
keys with the fewest notes in common – that is,
B) and its opposite number F major (F G A B C
just two notes. So, the key of C major (C D E F G A
D F) share only the notes F and B. The interval
between two directly opposite notes on the
circle is always a tritone (six semitones) – handy
when figuring out tritone substitutions.
ORDER OF EVENTS
There are several mnemonics (memory aids)
you can use to help you remember the order of
keys on the circle. For the sharp side (clockwise),
there’s Charlie Gets Drunk And Eats Beetroot,
while for the flat side (anti-clockwise), you could
go for Charlie Forgets BEADs.
You can also use mnemonics to remember
the order in which sharps and flats are added to
a key signature to indicate each successive key.
These include Father Charles Goes Down And
Ends Battle for the sharps and Battle Ends And
Down Goes Charles’ Father for the flats.
ENHARMONIC KEYS
When we get to the lower section of the circle,
five, six and seven sharps (B, F, C) continue
things get interesting key-wise. The keys with
Diatonic
Chords
those that have five, six and seven flats (D, G
clockwise around the circle, overlapping with
direction. So, for instance, F major with its six
and B) as they continue from the anti-clockwise
sharps and G major with its six flats are the
goes for their relative minor cousins, D minor
same key with two different names. The same
and E minor. Known as ‘enharmonic’ keys, these
keys have dual identities according to whether
you’re dealing with sharps or flats.
PRIMARY CHORDS
Pick any chord on the circle to be the I chord (or
tonic), then the chord to the left will always be
the IV chord, and the one to the right will always
be the V chord. Known as primary chords, these
are the basis for literally thousands of songs,
particularly when used in what’s known as the I -
IV - V progression.
ADDING RELATIVE MINOR
Building on the above, you can expand the I - IV -
V progression by squeezing in the relative minor
to the tonic, which you’ll find on the inner ring of
the circle in the same segment as the tonic. For
example, I - vi - IV - V in the key of C major would
the key of A major, A - Fm - D - E.
give you C - Am - F - G, or, as another example, in
MINORISING CHORDS
The ii - V - I progression is one of the most
widely-used musical phrases there is, especially
popular as a jazz turnaround, used to return to
the tonic. To find the minor ii chord in any key,
just count two notes over clockwise from the
tonic and ‘minorise’ that chord. From there, step
anti-clockwise back two steps to hit the V and I
chords. For example, a ii - V - I in the key of D
would be Em - A - D.
E
minor
D
1
MAJOR
B
2
minor
Root of
F
new key
3
harps
A
MAJOR
minor
4
C
cs
7  5
minor
E
A / G 
Dominant
MAJOR of new key
i
Select a chord as your tonic, and the next chord over will
be its dominant
EASY KEY CHANGES
The circle can help with easy key changes that
use the dominant 7th of the new key as a
method of modulation, placing the dominant
7th before the change to the new tonic chord to
prepare the listener. For example, to change key
from G major to A major, find the new key’s root
(A) on the circle, and the next note over
clockwise will be its dominant – E, in this case.
So the dominant chord you need for the key
change is E7: G - E7 - A.
June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 33
> make music now / 88 easy music theory tips

Modulation
Chromatic modulation
Key changes – or ‘modulations’, to give them
their proper, music theory-professor name –
may have become a bit of a pop cliché (picture
Westlife stepping off their stools), but knowing
how to craft a smooth key change is a useful
songwriting skill. There are various ways to
‘modulate’ to a different key, but one of the
easiest is via chromatic modulation – taking a
chord in one key and shifting it up one semitone
to a chord that’s in the new key. In this example,
a I - IV - V progression in E major modulates to
the key of F major by way of the V chord – B
major – shifting chromatically up by one
semitone to C major, which becomes the V
chord in the new key of F major.

Chromatic modulations work by shifting a chord up or
down a semitone to one that’s diatonic to the new key
Parallel modulation
Parallel modulations shift between major and minor keys
that share the same root note – C major and C minor, for
example. This is often done via the dominant V chord
common to both keys, which in this case would be G major.
But wait! Isn’t the V chord in a minor key a minor chord?
Well, yes, but in these cases we cheat by harmonising a
different minor scale made just for this purpose – the
Harmonic minor scale – which gives us a major V chord in
a minor key.

Pivot chord (aka diatonic) modulation

Another way to change key, using a pivot chord means finding a diatonic chord
common to the current and new key, then using that chord to bridge the gap

E - Cm - Gm. This is represented in the

Here we have a chord progression of In minor keys, the i, iv and v chords are Let’s bring about the change of key by

1 key of G minor as a VI - iv - i. Let’s say we

want to shift to the A minor key after eight
bars. Our first job is to figure out which
2 minor, and III, VI and VII chords are
chords are diatonic to both keys…
major. Here’s the diatonic sets for Gm and
Am keys. Note that the common chords
are Dm and F – v and VII chords of Gm and
3 inserting a D minor chord at the end of
our G minor section, and continuing the
same progression in the new key of Am.
The same VI - iv - i progression in this key
iv and VI chords of Am respectively. now produces the chords F - Dm - Am.

34 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019

>  make music now  /  88 easy music theory tips

lyDian Dominant
Kind of a ‘bonus’ mode, Lydian Mode Quality Example in C Intervallic Works over…
Dominant is formed by merging pattern
together Lydian and Mixolydian
modes to produce the equivalent of major triads
ionian major ttsttts
a major scale with a raised 4th and a major 7ths
flattened 7th. Lydian Dominant is a
great alternative to Mixolydian minor triads
Dorian minor tstttst
when used over dominant 7th minor 7ths
chords, and can also be used over
standard major triads as long as you minor triads
phrygian minor stttstt
avoid playing the major 7th over it! minor 7ths

moDe moDe lydian major tttstts

major triads
What differentiates a mode is what major 7ths
differentiates any other scale – the
pattern of intervals between the major triads
mixolydian major ttsttst
notes. As with any scale, it doesn’t Dominant 7ths
really matter if you can’t remember
it… or even play it for that matter! minor triads
aeolian minor tsttstt
Just Google the intervallic formula minor 7ths
and either step program it into your

m7b5 Chords
DAWs piano roll editor or, if your Diminished triads
locrian Diminished sttsttt
DAW supports it, select the preset
for the desired mode in the Scale
Lock/Quantize feature. Some The quality, interval pattern and best use cases of the seven major scale modes
arpeggiators such as Logic Pro X’s
(above) even support modes.

loCrian – tHe oDD
moDe out
The 7th mode, Locrian, is the only
mode that can’t be played over a
power chord made up of root and
5th, as it has a flattened 5th, which
would create a discordant semitone
clash. All other six modes contain a
natural 5th, so the dark, tricky-to-
use Locrian is a bit of a black sheep.
orDer oF BrigHtness
Each mode has its own identity and
tone, and they can be listed from
happy to moody. If you want a mode
to suit a particular mood or convey
a certain emotion, use this order of
brightness as your guide.
mode Quality example in C
lydian major
ionian major
Modes
A mode is a type of scale, and you probably already
know at least two – the major scale is known as
Ionian mode in mode-speak, while the natural
minor scale is known as Aeolian mode. But what
notes do we use to build them? Essentially, the thing
that determines one mode from another is the
pattern of intervals between the notes. An easy way
to generate all seven major scale modes is to start
with the scale of C major. Play this as you normally
would, from C to C on the keyboard, and you get
the Ionian mode. Start from any other note,
however, and you’ll generate a different pattern of
intervals with a different sound, and hence a
different mode. Playing the notes in the C major
no. of altered
degrees
scale from D to D results in the Dorian mode, E to E
1# gives you Phrygian mode, and so on, as illustrated
-
in the chart above. Broadly speaking, the modes
1b

can be split into two main categories – major

mixolydian major

Dorian minor 2b

aeolian minor 3b
modes and minor modes – depending on whether
phrygian minor 4b they contain a major or minor 3rd, and each mode
5b
locrian Diminished
has a particular type of chord that it can be used
The modes on a scale of brightness, from
light, quirky Lydian to dark, moody Locrian over the top of for best results.
36 / Computer musiC  /  June 2019 June 2019  /  Computer musiC  /  36
> make music now / 88 easy music theory tips
Progressions
HARMONIC RHYTHM
Harmonic rhythm describes the rate at which
the chord changes happen in a piece of music.
A verse section with chord changes every two
bars will have a different harmonic rhythm to a
chorus section that features a new chord every
bar. Varying the harmonic rhythm of different
song sections is a surefire way to add colour and
contrast to your song.
V-I
The two most stable chords in a key are the
tonic I chord, based on the root note of the scale,
and the dominant V chord, based on the 5th
note in the scale. The relationship between
these two has been exploited by composers for
centuries, mainly due to the sheer satisfaction
they evoke in our ears when they go from one to
the other. A V - I movement is thus a satisfactory
– in fact, almost ‘perfect’ – way to end a section.
CADENCES
A cadence is a short sequence of chords – for
the most part just two – that punctuates a
progression. For example, the movement from
the V chord to the I chord mentioned in the
previous tip is known as a perfect cadence, and
it brings about a feeling of rest, like a musical
full-stop. An imperfect cadence prolongs
tension by using a V chord as the final chord,
with the preceding chord being almost anything
else, creating an unresolved effect that works a
bit like a semicolon. A plagal cadence,
meanwhile, is constructed using a IV chord
followed by a I chord, and is often known as the
‘Amen’ cadence.
HALF DIMINISHED 7TH
A favourite in the fields of jazz and R&B, the m75
chord (also known as a half-diminished 7th
Modulation magic with diminished 7ths
The diminished 7th is a bit of a wonder chord for key changes – you can use just
one to modulate to eight new tonic chords! Here’s how…
One diminished 7th can function as
1 the viiº chord of four different major
To illustrate, Bº7 (B-D-F-A) can be the viiº
keys, and the iiº chord of four minor keys.
chord of C major and the iiº chord of A
minor. Known as secondary dominants,
their job (harmonic function) is to resolve
to the tonic of a new key.
38 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019
chord) is a great one to have in your back
pocket. It’s made by adding the 7th degree of
the minor scale on top of a minor triad to make a
minor 7th chord, then lowering the 5th by one
semitone. Try using it as the ii chord in a ii - V - i
turnaround. A standard 7th chord version of this
G7 (D-F-G-B) - Cm (C-E-G-B). However, swapping
in C minor would be played as Dm7 (D-F-A-C) -
Dm7 for Dm75 (D-F-A-C) creates a nice
chromatic movement from the A note to the G
in G7, ramping up the jazz flavour.
AUG79
The aug79 chord is a real jazz-funk monster
with a dominant function great for resolving to
any kind of minor tonic chord. Start with a
D-F) – and raise the 5th (D) by a semitone to D in
dominant 7th chord – say G7 as an example (G-B-
order to make a Gaug7 (G-B-D-F). Next, we need
to add in a 9th. To figure out this note, just take
sharpen it by raising a semitone – to A in this
the 2nd (A) and move it up an octave, then
case – and there you have it: Gaug79 (G-B-D-
F-A). You’re welcome!
TRITONE SUBSTITUTIONS
When you replace one chord in a progression
with another that does the same job, it’s called a
substitution, and you can pull off a really cool,
jazz-tinged one by swapping in a new chord with
a root note that’s a tritone (an interval of six
semitones) away from the root of the original
chord. Take the progression Cmaj7 - Am7 - Dm7 -
G7 - Cmaj7, in the key of C major: tritone
substitutions are most often to be found applied
to dominant chords (ones that resolve to the
semitones away from G you’ll find the note D,
tonic), so our target here is that G7 chord. Six
Dm7 - D7 - Cmaj7. This has a jazzier sound,
which makes our new progression Cmaj7 - Am7 -
chord as Dº7 (D-F-A -B). This can be
The next inversion up, Bº7, is the same
2 the viiº chord of E major and the iiº chord
(F-AB-D), viiº chord of G major and iiº of
of C minor. Ditto the 2nd inversion, Fº7
Em, and the 3rd inversion, Aº7 (A-B-D-F),
viiº chord of A major and iiº of Gm. These
are all basically the same chord.
root notes of the chords from D through D to C.
mainly due to the chromatic step down of the
MINOR 11TH POLYCHORD
Minor 11th (m11) chords are complicated, but
there’s an easy way to work out how to form
them if you know basic triad shapes and
semitone intervals. The trick is to combine two
triads into a polychord. Play a minor triad from
Cm (C-E-G) as an example. Find the note two
the desired root with your left hand – we’ll use
root – B in this case – and play a major triad
semitones (or one whole-tone) down from the
based on this root note in your right hand. So B
major (B-D-F) played above Cm equals C E G B
D F – ie, Cm11.
POWER 5THS
Power 5ths are made up of just the root note
and the 5th (also known as tonic and dominant).
With three-note chords, it’s the middle note – the
3rd – that determines whether or not the chord
is major or minor. Since power 5ths have no 3rd,
it makes them super-versatile, so you’re free to
flick between major and minor melodies at will.
As a bonus, if you tune the oscillators of a
synth apart by a 5th interval and play regular
triads, you’ll end up producing some really
interesting polychords – a technique that’s used
in the iconic intro to the Grace Jones classic
Slave to the Rhythm.
ALTERNATING INVERSIONS
Inverted chords aren’t just useful for good voice
leading – you can use different inversions of two
alternating chords to create interest. Try it by
alternating between i - VII in a minor key such as,
say, Gm-F. Start high and leap down the
keyboard an inversion at a time, then change
chord and jump back up for a reggae/ska feel.
So, in effect, this means that each
3 diminished 7th chord can effectively
resolve up one semitone to four different
major chords, or down two semitones to
four different minor chords, giving you
access to eight new keys from just one
chord. Phew! See above for an example of
this magical chord in action.

Use Logic Pro’s Reverse Pitch feature for an interesting way to generate new melodies
negative Harmony
Try taking an existing melody and flipping the notes
around a central axis pitch. Most DAWs can do this. Logic
Pro’s Reverse Pitch feature, for instance, lets you set a
central ‘mirror’ note around which to flip your melody.
Flipping a melody in a major key produces a result in a
minor key, and vice versa.
irregular arpeggios
Make arpeggiated parts more exciting by
setting the loop length to an uneven number of
notes – say, five, as opposed to the regular four,
eight or 16. That way, the part will loop around
with an irregular emphasis on certain notes,
making for an ear-catching hook.
HarmoniC tension
anD release
Music is all about a constant flow of tension and
release, and you can show this tension by
playing D major (D-F#-A) then G7 (G-B-D-F). Left
hanging, the dominant G7 chord really wants to
be finished off by resolving to another chord.
Now play a C major chord (C-E-G) and marvel at
the sense of release as that tension is resolved.
use soFtWare
OK, some may see this as cheating, but making
use of some of the cutting-edge AI-based music-
generation software and websites now available
can yield useful results. With products like Mixed
In Key’s Odesi and Captain Chords, or Cubase’s
built-in Chord Assistant feature, you learn about
theory just by using them.
suBsiDiary CHorDs
Chords that share two or more notes (subsidiary
chords) can be substituted within a progression.
Find a major triad’s subsidiary chord by raising
its 5th degree by a whole tone – so the
subsidiary chord of F major (F-A-C) is a first-
inversion Dm (F-A-D). So in a I - IV - IV - V
progression in C major, (C - F - F - G), you could
swap either F major chord for Dm.
88 easy music theory tips  /  make music now  <
Broken
chords
1
Block chords that change only on
the downbeats can often end up
sounding clunky at best, and rigid and
boring at worst. One way to spruce up
parts like this is to use broken chords.
These split the notes of the chord up
into rhythmic patterns. Let’s try it out
with this simple Cmaj7 - Am7 - Fmaj7 -
Dm7 progression…
motiF
A truly memorable tune always features a motif
– a repeated short melodic line that’s instantly
recognisable, like the main vocal melody in the
2
Here’s the same progression, this
chorus, say. One way to craft a great hook is to
time using broken chords. Instead
start with the rhythm, then populate that with of all the notes in the first two chords
notes taken from the key you’re working in. falling on the same beat, each one is
Often, the simpler the tune, the catchier it is. now split into individual notes
reminiscent of a picked acoustic guitar
oCtave DouBling part. We move the start of the notes in
If your lead sound or part lacks impact, try the first chord to the right by
doubling it up an octave to reinforce the melody. increments of a quarter note.
Octave doubling is also good for thickening
chordal parts – double the root and the 5th an
octave higher to widen the part, and try playing
the octave-shifted parts with a similar but
different sound for a harmonically richer result.
leaps oF FaitH
Try using 6th intervals to make giant melodic
leaps up the keyboard. With a major scale, a
major 6th is the distance between the root note
and the 6th degree of the scale. In the case of C
major, for instance, the root is C and a major 6th
above would be the note A. Making a leap up
from C to an A note will make your melody soar.
3
use a template part The fronts of the notes in the
When writing a melody over a chord second chord have been shifted by
progression that’s already down as a MIDI part, eighth notes for a quicker rhythm, and
we also apply both shifts on the third
copy and paste the chords to a new track, then
and fourth chords. Because the notes
mute all the notes in the piano roll so you can are from the chords themselves, this
see them, but not hear them. You now have a can be a great way to inspire ideas for
visual guide to where you can effectively pencil new melodies that work naturally with
in notes to create a melody that you can be the chord progression.
100% sure will work with those chords.
June 2019  /  Computer musiC  /  39
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June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 43

 Producer Masterclass

Matrix &
Futurebound
The legendary drum ’n’ bass veterans show you
how they get their polished, punchy sound
44  /  Computer musiC  /  June 2019

Double trouble
In the 15 years or so since individually
established producers Jamie Quinn
(Matrix) and Brendan Collins
(Futurebound) joined creative forces,
Matrix & Futurebound have become one
of the biggest acts In UK electronic music,
occupying a seat at the very top table of
drum ’n’ bass and even bothering the
mainstream charts with singles including
2012’s All I Know and Magnetic Eyes, and
2013’s Control.
Known for their clean, impactful and
diverse sound, the pair have also remixed
stars including Eric Prydz, Tinie Tempah,
Emeli Sandé and, er, Mark Owen, and
regularly play DJ sets at club nights and
festivals around the world. Last year saw
the release of their second album, Mystery
Machine – some 12 years after the first,
Universal Truth. With Brendan living in
Liverpool and Jamie a Londoner, putting it
together involved a lot of remote
collaboration, enabled, of course, by the
miracle of software technology.
“Any sort of vibe can be
put into a DnB mould, in
your own way”
“Living so far apart has its challenges,”
says Jamie, “but obviously, if you’re working
in the box, it gives you a whole load of
possibilities for collaborating, so we can
send sessions back and forth. Brendan is in
London reasonably often, so we get
together regularly in the studio. But it can
be tricky – you have to maintain the same
software on each computer, and the same
WAtCH
tHe ViDeo
In this exclusive video,
Jamie and Brendan
show you how they
made Let It Go, from their
album, Mystery Machine
Watch the video
tutorial on your
PC or Mac at…
http://bit.ly/matpmfut
producer masterclass  /  make music now  <
versions of plugins and so on. It would be
easier if we lived around the corner from
each other, but we don’t.”
“I think a lot of production duos don’t
really get in the studio day in day out any
more,” adds Brendan. “The way we do it is
that one of us will send a number of ideas,
then the other one will say, ‘This one’s really
cool, let’s take it forward’; and then we’re
passing the parcel, really. Then, when it
comes to near completion, we get together
and do the mixdown.”
As any Matrix & Futurebound fan knows,
they aren’t ones to slavishly conform to
genre, drawing instead on a variety of
influences that sets their sound apart.
“We’re into all sorts of music,” affirms
Jamie. “If you operate in a particular genre,
like we do, it’s good to try and not get too
bogged down with being influenced by
what’s going on inside that style of music,
because then you can just get sucked into a
bit of a boring path, I suppose. We’re into a
lot of stuff – a lot of house music, all kinds of
stuff, really. Literally anything and
everything. That’s one of the things I’ve
always liked about drum ’n’ bass: that you
can fit any sort of vibe you like into it.
Whether you want to get that progressive
vibe going on, or punk music, or techno, or
whatever, you can put that into a DnB
mould in your own way.”
In this Producer Masterclass and its hour-
long accompanying video, Brendan and
Jamie will walk us through the production
of the track Let It Go, from Mystery Machine.
One element of it is a heavily processed
vocal line sung by Jamie himself, which was
recorded – like all M&F’s vocals – in the most
straightforward way imaginable.
“I always like to just record straight into
the interface with nothing on it at all,” Jamie
Kit List
Steinberg Cubase
Native Instruments Massive
Native Instruments Reaktor
Native Instruments Razor
LennarDigital Sylenth1
Xfer Records Serum
Waves H-Delay
Waves OneKnob Filter
Waves CLA Vocals
Waves Manny Marroquin Delay
Soundtoys plugins
FabFilter Saturn
Xfer Records OTT
iZotope Ozone 7
Avid S3
explains. “Sometimes we’ve recorded
vocals in other studios and put it through an
analogue chain, and it’s sounded really
good, but you’re never quite sure how it’s
going to respond when you do the mix and
add a load more stuff. Sometimes we’ve
done vocals and maybe there’s been a little
bit of saturation, compression and
distortion going on when we’ve recorded it,
but when you add a load more compression
during mixdown, certain things can come
out of the vocal that you don’t really like. So
I’m more a fan of just going straight from
the mic into my Steinberg audio interface
with nothing in between. We’ve used really
high-end analogue gear – TubeTech
compressors, etc – and there’s nothing
wrong with that, obviously, but I just don’t
like to be committed to anything. Straight
into the interface and keep everything in
the box, is the way we do the vocals.”
Without further ado, then, let’s take a
tour of Let It Go…
June 2019  /  Computer musiC  /  45
>  make music now  /  producer masterclass

Kicking off with chords

00.23 For Matrix & Futurebound, every track starts in its

own way, and in the case of Let It Go, it all began
with a big loop, as Brendan explains. “Sometimes you can attack
it by just going straight to the drop and working on the beats
and the bass. On this occasion, we started around a 16-bar loop,
with just a simple Massive patch, and getting some nice chords in
place, and then building on layers until we were happy building it
towards a drop.”
“The starting point of the track is basically a set of chords
that we really liked,” Jamie adds. “It’s got a kind of nice, hypnotic
vibe about it, almost like the sort of thing you would find in a
progressive house tune, say. We’re big fans of that kind of stuff,
and a lot of those tracks, they arrange them in a certain way,
where it’s a long journey and the high point of the track is pretty
much the breakdown. So that was the general idea: how can we
keep this simple chord loop building and sounding interesting?”
“The general vibe of the chords that we got in place, and
adding delays and reverbs for that atmospheric vibe, led us down
the path to a progressive, building track,” continues Brendan.
“The basic chord part is made in Massive, and it’s a classic saw
wave synth patch,” says Jamie. “What we’ve done is a bunch of
automation on the filters, added a load of delay…”
“Delays and reverbs always play a really big part when it
NI’s Massive softsynth played a big role in Let It Go,
comes to our overall sound,” Brendan concludes. providing the progressive house-inspired chords

Opening out
the chords
02.37 The catchy Massive chord line
continuously builds in size as
it heads towards the first drop. “Over [the
first] 32 bars, we want the synth to start nice
and small, and gradually build, open up, put
the reverb in, etc, and switch when it drops,
when it goes very dry,” says Jamie.
“The release of the stab is quite short
here,” adds Brendan, “as the sequence is
rolling through, and we gradually automate
it so it’s opening up.”
With reverb and automation in place, a
filter is applied. The whole part is then
rendered, rather than run ‘live’.
“We’ve bounced that synth down with a
Waves [OneKnob] filter plugin to an audio
file,” continues Jamie. “The reason we’ve
bounced it down is because even though it’s
filtered right up by bar 32, if you leave that
plugin activated, it can mess with the very
high frequencies. So just that opening 32 has
got a filter plugin on it.”

46  /  Computer musiC  /  June 2019

 producer masterclass  /  make music now  <
Melodic arps with Spector
07.50 Gently underpinning the
Massive chords is a
layered pair of arpeggiated synth lines,
generated by Spector, one of the virtual
instruments included with Cubase.
“We’re big fans of arpeggiators,” says
Brendan. “They seem to feature heavily
in our tracks – definitely in the melodic
ones, anyway.”
“I don’t think [Spector] is an
especially regular synth for us to use,”
says Jamie. “It might be one that we
happened to delve into that day.”
“When we started this track,” chimes
in Brendan, “we were on some down
time in LA in between shows, and we
were just round the pool, so we were
June 2019 / Computer musiC  /  47
Matrix’s clean, compact
London studio
limited in the synths that we were
working on on our laptops.”
“It’s easy to bypass the stock plugins
that come with Cubase or whatever
DAW you’re using,” points out Jamie.
“People assume they’re not very good,
but a lot of them are quite decent.
“The part is quite low in the mix – a
little bit of extra ear candy. When you’re
listening to the track, you don’t pick up
on it specifically, but it’s all part of the
whole idea of just taking one simple
chord progression and making it sound
interesting, moving and developing and
changing. It’s all about adding quite
subtle things like that around it to make
it feel bigger.”
 >  make music now  /  producer masterclass

Drumming up a hit

Building beats Tuning the snares

17.05 Brendan: “We grew up drums, as it’s most likely going to

14.15 The drums in Let It Go

came from an earlier
“prep session”.
writing tracks in E-MU and
Akai samplers, and that was the way
of doing beats – standard procedure.
But then we found that they sounded
mess up your transients. You either
want to put them in a sampler or find a
way to do it which is just playing your
sample back at a different pitch,
a lot fatter just coming out in audio, so rather than pitchshifting.
Brendan: “When we do tracks, we’re we stopped doing it that way.” “The other thing you want to be
For snare drum tuning, Jamie and doing is experimenting with flipping
not always writing from scratch Brendan use Cubase’s élastique Pro – the phase of [your snare drum layers],
Tape timestretching algorithm. “As because you’re probably going to find
– sometimes we’re doing prep you timestretch it, it’s not actually that one way sounds really good and
sessions where we’re just writing timestretching, it’s just playing it back the other way cancels out all your low
at a different pitch,” says Jamie. end against the other layers. Your
beats, bass, patches or whatever. “Some people use actual pitchshift rules are: get them in time, get them
algorithms, which I would never do on tuned the same, get them in phase.”
When you’ve got a vibe like this
going in the studio, [it helps] if you’ve
got a lot of beats to choose from, as
not every beat’s going to work, and
sometimes it’s a long process to get
the right ones working together.”
Jamie: “The main snare is basically
a whole bunch of layers. The key to
layering snares up like that is having
them tuned so that the fundamental
tone of each snare is working
together with the others.”

48  /  Computer musiC  /  June 2019


Processing the drums
28.03 Jamie: “Processing-wise,
there’s not much going on. It’s
just combining the right elements, and then
it’s all – or mostly – going to a drums group,
which has got FabFilter Saturn doing a little
bit of compression, and a Slate Digital
FG-Grey compressor, which we use quite a
lot. We often use it with the Mix somewhere
around 50% – not all the way wet, because it
just lets the transients of your drums remain
a bit more intact. You have the compressor
set to do a bit more compression, but then
back off the mix so you get the same effect
but with the dry signal, too.”
Working on the bassline
30.56 Let It Go’s bassline is a
composite of five layers, all
told: three main synths, a “squelchy”
sampled layer and a bass pad. The three
primary layers are generated by Xfer
Records Serum, Steinberg Retrologue and
Native Instruments Massive.
“Those are going to our bass group,
which has FabFilter [Saturn] subtly warming
it up, and they’re also sent to another
parallel group, which has got Quadrafuzz 2,”
explains Jamie. “It’s giving it a bit more
producer masterclass  /  make music now  <
Ride cymbals and
white noise
24.41 The ‘metalwork’ top end of the
drums comprises a mix of
hi-hats, ride cymbals and a dusting of noise.
“We’ve got some ride layers,” says Jamie.
“That’s like an old live break – I don’t know
where we sampled it from.
“Then there’s a nice ride from a sample
pack that was made by our friends
Pendulum from way back. And then there’s a
bit of white noise with a sidechain on it,
buried in the drums. That’s not a thing you
want to use too much of, but it can be nice
just low in the mix.”
midrange, making it sound a little bit more
interesting and helping it come across nicely
on smaller speakers, where you’re not
necessarily hearing the sub. You can make a
bass that sounds really great on full-range
speakers, but if you’re listening on little
speakers or a laptop, it can go missing, so
you need to keep an eye on that.”
“With a lot of drum ’n’ bass, there’s a lot of
bass going on as the track progresses,” says
Brendan. “But this one’s got a sort of rolling
bassline – not lots of edits everywhere.”
June 2019  /  Computer musiC  /  49
M&F’s five
favourite
plugins
LennarDigital Sylenth1
113 > 10/10 > €139
Jamie: “It sounds great, and it’s also a very
easy synth to create sounds with. It’s all well
and good if you’ve got a plugin that’s
amazingly powerful, but if you’re constantly
scratching your head trying to remember
where a parameter is, it kills the vibe a bit.”
lennardigital.com
Soundtoys Decapitator
$199
Jamie: “A really nice distortion plugin, which
we use quite a lot. It’s quite versatile, as you can
just do subtle saturation with it, ranging up to
total annihilation of your signal, so that’s one
which features quite regularly for us.”
soundtoys.com
FabFilter Saturn
179 > 10/10 > £114
Jamie: “Great on drums if you play around with
the Dynamics control, because it can give you a
good pumping compression sound if you want
that, or just more straightforward saturation.
We’re fans of FabFilter stuff – it sounds nice.”
fabfilter.com
Native Instruments Kontakt
170 > 9/10 > £339
Brendan: “One thing I like doing is getting
some bass action working in Serum, bouncing
it out, putting it into Kontakt and trying some of
the things you can do in there.”
native-instruments.com
Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch
FREE
Jamie: “When you want that epic background
pad, just to give something a big, expansive
atmosphere, it’s perfect. And it’s very easy to
make an amazing sound with very little work.”
hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch
>  make music now  /  producer masterclass
Talking tech
Although both of them are currently
toying with the idea of investing in some
hardware synths, Jamie and Brendan
work almost entirely in the box, using a
range of plugin instruments and effects,
hosted in Steinberg Cubase. What’s the
thinking behind their choice of DAW?
“We’ve used it since day one, really,” says
Brendan. “We’re going back to the 90s here,
when we were first coming through. I
ventured out a bit – I tried Logic and Pro
Tools – then me and Jamie started working
together and it made sense to go back to
Cubase. It felt a lot more comfortable than
those other two, for me, so yeah, we’ve
always used it. Some people use Ableton as
well, alongside Logic or Cubase, but we just
find we can do everything within Cubase.
We’ve mastered it over the years.”
“Changing DAW would be quite a big
move,” adds Jamie, “as we’ve been using
Cubase for ten plus years and we know it
very well. It’s almost more important to
know your software well than what software
you actually use, because you don’t want to
be constantly Googling something and
stalling your creative vibe.
“In the early days, if I remember rightly,
Cubase was one of the first – maybe even
the first – one where you could properly run
synths and plugins. VST was the revolution
of DAW software, where you could record
50 / Computer musiC  /  June 2019
directly into your software rather than
having to use lots of outboard stuff. So
originally it was ahead of the game
compared to all the other native DAWs.
That’s probably why we first started using it.
And having VariAudio built into the software
is absolutely brilliant.”
Is there anything about Cubase that
they’d change if they could?
“I would really like it if they did more
development of EUCON,” laughs Jamie,
“because I’ve got an Avid S3 control surface,
which is really good with Cubase, but there
are certain aspects of that that I’d like them
to improve. But Cubase has got to the point
where it’s got everything you want, really.”
As well as enabling them to collaborate
easily over a long distance, advances in
technology that have arrived since they first
joined forces in 2005 have profoundly
changed the way Matrix & Futurebound
now approach music production.
“We’re quite bad for
disappearing down
the rabbit hole and
tweaking forever”
“It’s enabled us to work on tracks for a
very long time, rather than in the days when
we were working on hardware, where you
have a track up on the mixing desk and
you’d need to get it finished and mastered
before you could move on and work on
something else,” says Jamie. “When we
used to make music on hardware, you’d
work on one track at a time, get it finished
and then start a new one; whereas now,
obviously, you can be dipping in and out of
tracks at will. Potentially that’s slowed us
down, but it’s given us the freedom to
explore whatever we want to explore.”
“There was a good side to the days of no
recall, wasn’t there?” laughs Brendan.
“Yeah, there are upsides and downsides,”
Jamie replies. “We’re quite bad ones for
disappearing down the rabbit hole and
tweaking a mixdown forever!”
“I think we start a lot of ideas as well, and
kind of delve back in, be it a few months or a
couple of years later,” agrees Brendan.
“The tracks on the album that had the
longest development period,” continues
Jamie, “would have been multiple years
from when they were started to when they
were finished. So it can be a long process.
Usually, the track idea happens quickly, like
in an afternoon – the sort of foundations of
it come together over hours. But getting to
the finish line can be a long process.”

Into the drop with Valhalla Shimmer
10.00 The boys automate an epic reverb
build, then dry it all out for the
drop. “Every element goes through this one
group, and the Valhalla Shimmer plugin is
automating so it sounds huge.”
Repurposing drums for a top loop
27.21 Jamie: “There’s a track we did a few
years ago called The Wall, and this isn’t
something we would typically do at all, but we just
got the whole drums out of that track, high-passed
and compressed them a fair bit and used it as
almost a sparkly, hi-hat, top-end layer.”
Brendan: “Sometimes, when you’re showing people
how you’re doing things like this, they’re like, ‘Why
are you adding more and more stuff?’. But when
you mute a few things out, it does make a
difference, and it’s adding to the flavour of what the
drums are doing.”
A/B referencing the mix
53.57 As every producer should,
Jamie and Brendan always refer
to tracks in a similar vein to the one they’re
working on when mixing and analysing.
Jamie: “In our [Cubase] template. we’ve got
these four tracks – Ref 1, 2, 3 and 4 – and the
faders all the way down, and you can use
these Cue sends to send them to each of your
cue mixes. Then, if you use Control Room,
which is a really good feature in Cubase, you
can instantly compare what you’re working
on with up to four other tracks.”
Brendan: “And that’s without the tracks that
we’re referring to going through our main
master chain.”
producer masterclass / make music now <
Ditto the drums. “Automation isn’t perfectly on
time. If I’d automated those drums with that
reverb fully wet, and brought it back dry on the
drop, it’d miss the first hit. So drum parts were
bounced to one file and reverb applied then.”
Recording and
processing the vocal
37.33 “The main vocal is a recording of
Jamie singing, ‘Let it go’, layered,
pitchshifted and processed to bed it into the
track. “I basically made that by just singing
really badly into a microphone,” laughs Jamie. “I
put it into VariAudio in Cubase and repitched it:
that one up there, and that one down there. And
then you’ve got it going to this group, which has
a filter automating [Xfer Records] OTT, which is
a [free] multiband compressor.”
Further processing comes courtesy of
Waves CLA Vocals and the formant shifter in
Steinberg PitchCorrect. “And then, basically, a
load of reverb and delay,” Jamie continues, “so
we go from a terribly sung bit of vocal to a nice,
cool additional texture for the tune. It’s running
all the way through: sometimes it’s filtered
down so it becomes a pad, atmosphere thing,
and it comes up more prominently at certain
points in the track.”
The kick drum
22.03 The kick drum is a tried-and-
tested construction – combining
multiple layered elements – that was first
created for the single All I Know (2012) and has
been redeployed in many an M&F track since.
Jamie: “When you find that nice kick that works,
a lot of people tend to stick to it.”
Brendan: “It just always seems to work with the
type of tracks that we make.”
Jamie: “What you want from a kick with drum
’n’ bass is weight and punch and snap; but it’s
got to not be super low-end, as that’s going to
mess with your bass. This particular kick just
seems to work really nicely with sub bass.”
HEAR MORE
Magnetic Eyes
bit.ly/MF_Mag
Mystery Machine
bit.ly/MF_Myst
viperrecordings.co.uk/artist/matrix-
WWW
futurebound
soundcloud.com/matrixandfuturebound
twitter.com/matrixandfuture
facebook.com/matrixandfuturebound
June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 51
Print or Digital
subscriptions
available!
Delivery of MAXIMUM PC,
in your choice of
Apple Newsstand,
Google Play, or Zinio

Search for MAXIMUM PC

on your device’s
d i ’ app store
to download now

MAXIMUM PC AT ITS BEST

ANYTIME, ANYWHERE!
http://bit.ly/sub-maxpc
> free software / thenatan trax cm

> Free software

TRAX CM DOWNLOAD
How to use this issue’s free version of Thenatan’s hard- Get the plugin and the video
tutorial on your PC/Mac at

hitting, sample-based drum machine for PC and Mac filesilo.co.uk/computermusic

Trax CM is a cut-down version of
Thenatan’s Trax drum machine, a self-
contained source of sampled drum and
percussion sounds for trap, EDM, hip-hop
and other electronic genres, presented in a
mixer-style interface that facilitates filtering,
distortion, pitch adjustment, reverb and
much more.
We say ‘cut-down’, but actually, the only
thing differentiating Trax CM from its fully-
fledged sibling is the number of prefab kits it
comes with. While the full Trax rocks 50 of
the blighters, Trax CM reduces that number
to a still-respectable 20, each one comprising
eight lovingly produced kicks, snares, hats,
cymbals, claps, sidesticks and FX sounds of
various kinds. Apart from that, everything
you get with the full Trax is present and
correct, from the tasty analogue distortion to
the four vibe-enhancing Noise Layers.
Running as a VST plugin on PC, or a VST and
Audio Units plugin on Mac, Trax CM is very easy
to get around in general terms, but it does have
a few operational quirks that might not be
immediately obvious, which is where this
tutorial and its accompanying video will help
you. Over the next few pages of this article, we’ll
take you on a tour of Trax CM’s controls, and
show off some of those 20 awesome kits while
we’re doing it.
If you find yourself smitten by Trax CM’s
percussive charms, be sure to check out the full
Trax at thenatan.com

INSTRUMENT LIST VELOCITY

AMP LOW/HIGH
Apply low and high-
frequency distortion
Load Trax CM’s 20 drum kits
from this drop-down menu
REVERB
Three MIDI compression
Dial in a short,
levels for incoming notes
percussion-appropriate
reverb across the kit

MODULATION FILTER
An onboard LFO for Sweep the cutoff of a
modulating Pitch, low-pass or high-pass
Expression or Pan filter on the main output

AMP ENVELOPE
PAN Apply an ADSR envelope to
Position each every instrument in the kit
kit piece in the
stereo field with
its Pan knob
OUTPUT
Set each drum to
PITCH one of 16 stereo
LEVEL FADER NOISE LAYERS outputs, including
Set the volume of Pitch the kit up or
Four sampled noise layers, the main pair
the kit pieces here down to get it in key
triggered by MIDI input
with your track
54 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019

> Step by step 1. Getting started with Trax CM
TUTORIAL
FILES
To install Trax CM, move the file(s) for
1 your operating system to the relevant
folders. On PC, the .dll file and instruments
folder go in your VST Plugins folder. On
Mac, the .vst and .component files go in
2 with eight drum kit pieces mapped to
the VST and Components folders in your
Library/Audio/Plug-ins folder.
Trax CM includes 20 of the full Trax’s
4 50 kits. Switching between them is
done via the Instrument List menu at the
top. There’s no built-in preset
management system, but you can save
5 mixer control the volume and stereo
any changes into a VST or Audio Units
patch file via your plugin host.
The Reverb knob to the left of the
7 Filter determines the amount of
global reverb effect applied. The reverb
itself is short, as befits drums and
percussion, and proves useful for adding a
8 routed to any of 16 outputs into the
general layer of ambience to the kit.
thenatan trax cm / free software <
drum sounds, while D2 in between
Trax CM loads as a virtual instrument, Notes D2 and E2 trigger a pair of snare
a fixed set of notes. Audition sounds by
clicking the buttons below their level
faders. You get two kick drums, the first
3 on the kit. The hi-hat lives on F2, and two
fires either a clap or sidestick depending
FX sounds (which can be anything from
impacts) reside on G2 and A2.
sustained and incorporating a bass or sub percussion and cymbals to vocals and
and punchy, and mapped to C2.
element, assigned to C2; the second short
The Gain faders and Pan pots in the At the top right of the interface, the
positioning of each kit piece, but both also
have global equivalents at the bottom of
the plugin. The adjacent Pitch control
6 Filter offers a choice of Low Pass and
High Pass types, selected from the drop-
down menu. Sweep the cutoff frequency
with the Filter knob to apply high or low
pitchshifts the whole kit up and down, and frequency attenuation to the main output,
is the only parameter that maintains its and set the type back to None to switch
setting when a new kit is loaded. the filter off.
Each of the eight channels can be Now you can adjust the level and pan
host mixer via the menu above its trigger
button. Select an output number for the
sound you want to ‘break out’, then set
9 position of that sound within your
DAW, and apply plugin effects to it away
from the rest of the kit. Helpfully, the Filter
and Reverb only affect Trax CM’s main
that same output as the input to the outputs, so routing sounds like this is also
channel in your DAW’s mixer on which you the way to go when you want to take them
want the sound to appear. out of those processing circuits.
June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 55
>  free software / thenatan trax cm
> Step by step 2. Using Trax CM’s distortion and modulation
1 2
The Amp Low and Amp High knobs
overdrive the virtual preamp stage of
the input, introducing analogue-style
distortion. Turn Amp Low clockwise to
apply saturation to the lower frequencies
– it’s a relatively subtle effect, but it can be
good for adding a bit of weight.
4 5
Alternatively, any one of three
standard MIDI streams can be set to
modulate the LFO. Select Mod Wheel,
Aftertouch or Velocity from the Source
menu to hand control of the LFO depth
over to that signal instead. With Velocity
selected, say, hitting your keys or drum
pads harder gives more LFO modulation.
> Step by step 3. Adding attitude with Trax CM’s Noise Layers
1 2
Trax CM incorporates four discrete
sampled Noise Layers, for adding dirt,
grunge and attitude to your beats. Layer A
is pink noise; Layer B is vinyl crackle; Layer
C is a blend of wind and foley sounds; and
Layer D is the mechanical noise from an
old tape recorder. Activate the button for
each Layer you want to hear.
56  /  CoMpuTeR MusiC  /  June 2019
3
Amp High rotates anticlockwise,
dialling in rather more overt high-
frequency distortion, bringing much more
in the way of crunch and harmonic energy.
While all this distortion can result in quite
a boost in volume level, a limiter is in place
to keep any excessive overs in check.
6
Further modulation is onboard in the
form of an an ADSR amp envelope,
which shapes the volume profile of all
eight sounds. The three Velocity options –
Weak, Normal and Strong – apply varying
degrees of ‘compression’ to the MIDI input
by enforcing three different velocity
mapping curves.
3
All four Noise Layers are triggered as a
group with every incoming MIDI note,
tracking velocity to control volume, but
with the Layer Gain control setting a
baseline volume level. The Layer Pan
knob pans the noise layers left or right.
Trax CM features an LFO for animating
the sounds of all eight kit pieces
together by targeting Pitch, Expression
(volume) or Pan, as selected from the
Destination menu. Choose from one of
five waveforms, set the speed of the LFO
cycle with the Rate knob, and raise the
Depth to apply the modulation.
The Kit 3 140bpm MIDI clip in Tutorial
Files has plenty of velocity variation
baked in. Load it onto your Trax CM track
(with Kit 3 called up, ideally) and hear how
the dynamics of the beat change
– particularly the hi-hats – with the three
Velocity settings.
Although the noise layers are included
to add crunch and character to Trax
CM’s drum sounds, you can also use them
on their own as a continuously looping
signal by sending the plugin any single
sustained note that’s not assigned to a
drum sound.
Thenatan Trax
With no compromises whatsoever made in terms of features and
controls, Trax CM is every bit as powerful as the full Trax, the only
difference being the number of drum kits included. Trax CM should
keep you busy for quite a while with its 20 impactful, mix-ready
eight-piece setups, but when you’re ready to step up, Trax adds 30
more, taking the total to 50 kits made up of 400 individual sounds.
The full Trax is also able to load in expansion packs, one of which
– X25 For Trax – is available now, with
more of them planned for release on a
regular basis.

thenatan.com
> make music now / mixing with distortion

Give your tracks professional

warmth, grunt and bite with
our ten essential tips for
turning up the heat

58 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019


Whether it’s a subtle amount of tape
saturation to add warmth to a clean synth
part, retro bitcrushing to give a reverb send
that crunchy 1980s digital feel, or over-the-
top trashy distortion grunging up an entire
drum kit, the various distortion plugins we
have in our toolbox can open up new worlds
of possibilities when mixing.
Ironically, back in the day, mix engineers
were always trying their hardest to avoid the
characteristics of the hardware they were using,
and dreamed of absolute sonic clarity; now, in
the all-too-perfect software domain, we’ve since
realised that in-the-box mixes can easily sound
sterile and – dare we say it – digital. The best
way to counteract this? With an expert
mixing with distortion / make music now <
application of saturation and distortion effects,
of course!
These heat-inducing tools allow you to
impart individual sounds, subgroups and mix
busses with a near-endless range of colours and
tones, and when applied properly, you can add
the perfect amount of bite, character and
energy to even the most vanilla of sounds.
So to help raise your distortion game to pro
levels, we’ve assembled ten expert tips on how
to give your signals and mixes a unique edge.
Expect some killer info as we explore techniques
including multiband distortion, multistage
saturation, vintage tone emulation and even
stereo applications. Grab our Tutorial Files, fire
up your DAW… and turn up the heat!
June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 59
> make music now / mixing with distortion

01 Clipping
peaks
Peak reduction is not only a transparent
technique for mixing or mastering, but can
also be an incredible creative tool when used
correctly. Both limiting and clipping work by
chopping off the loudest part of a signal’s
waveform – usually the transient – when said
signal breaches a user-defined threshold.
As transients are of such a short duration, a
moderate amount of peak reduction is fairly
unnoticable, up to a point. In general, limiting
is the more transparent process of the two,
while clipping induces more noticable
harmonic distortion – ideal for assertively
flattening and fattening drum hits.

Distorting
02
An advanced way to add punch to drums is
to force those transients up into a stage of
clipping. For example, add attack to a snare
with an attack-boosting transient shaper,
followed by a limiter or clipper. As you increase
ambience
the attack, the limiter will stop the snare’s
loudening transient, increasing the perception
Adding a splash of distortion before or after auxiliary
of front-end punch while keeping its physical
peak level the same.
return effects such as delay or reverb is a superb
hack for giving those spatial effects some character.
This works well for spicing up dub delay, as you
distort the signal as the echo’s feedback level rises.
A more subtle use for this is to place tape
saturation before a drum reverb, giving the ’verb
warmth and depth to fill out your drum mix in a way
you wouldn’t get by processing the drums directly.

03 Multiband heat
Multiband distortion plugins such as FabFilter’s Saturn offer an endless variety of
options for getting creative with distortion and saturation in the mix. Let’s use Saturn
to warm up a thin-sounding dance track...

By splitting this track’s bass across To bulk up the midrange of the drums, Saturn’s modulation lets us use

1 two Saturn bands, we can drive the

sub and mid frequencies separately.
Adding Clean Tube warmth and reducing
the Dynamic range below 90Hz beefs the
2 call up three bands in a new Saturn,
sub up, while some aggressive Power
Amp distortion with around 10% of Drive
gives the midrange more edge.
then Bypass bands 1 and 3. After setting
the crossover to 200Hz and 2kHz
respectively, drive the second band with
3 Smudge distortion as a stuttering
effect that sounds ace on this tune’s intro
pad. We’re using an LFO in Slot 1 to
modulate Drive amount, then automating
Heavy Saturation to add some weight the Slot 1 Level and LFO Speed over the
without crunching up the rest of the bass’s first 24 bars to help create a build-up.
frequency content.

60 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019

 mixing with distortion  /  make music now  <

04 Heating
up beats
There are few better tools for shaping the sound
of a drum mix than saturation or distortion. If
your percussion bus is sounding too spiky, for
example, try applying some moderate tape
saturation: the emulated effect of magnetic tape
will naturally smooth harsh transients, giving
the overall drum sound a less brittle, digital feel.

05 Keep
If you’re after aggression instead, parallel
distortion mixed on an aux return will give you
the grunt you need, with the added advantage
of being able to further process the distortion
signal in isolation. it tidy
Plugins such as iZotope’s Trash 2 or
Cableguys’ WaveShaper CM allow you to go It’s surprising just how much high-frequency noise
even further and radically change drums with
digital distortion or waveshaping. Ramming a distortion can exacerbate or generate, even on low-
drum through this kind of processing will
instantly give you a tough, smashed sound that pitched sounds like bass guitar. When mixing
is superb for harder music styles. Although this
can sometimes work on entire busses, you may
distorted guitars or synths, counteract this by
bring out extreme artefacts that can spoil the dialling in a 1kHz high-shelf EQ cut to tame those
effect – instead, for more control, process
individual hits first, then edit out any upper harmonics – this’ll give percussion and vocals
overlapping artefacts afterwards.
more breathing room, resulting in a smoother mix.

06 Mono
distortion
You’ll often find that superficially
impressive stereo parts such as synth
leads or vocal acapellas will sound
incredible when heard in stereo, but
often fail to cut the mustard when
listening in mono thanks to excessive
phase cancellation between the left and
right channels when they’re summed
into one.
In these scenarios, you can improve
mono compatibility by sending the
original signal to a mono aux return
containing a distortion plugin. Not only
does this make the sound stronger and
beefier in mono, but it also doesn’t affect
the stereo imaging one bit. You can even
automate the offending track’s send
volume to add emphasis at certain points
in an arrangement – perhaps to make a
naturally soft-sounding vocalist cut
through for the chorus.

June 2019  /  Computer musiC  /  61

>  make music now  /  mixing with distortion

07
retaining
transients
Thanks to Dynamic Transient
Control tech, Softube Harmonics
adds grit when mixing, without
squashing the sound’s ‘snap’
08 Vintage
tones
Want to take your mixing back in time? Try using
some age-appropriate processing! If you’re after
a classic 1980s pop sound, say, start your signal
chain with some tape saturation followed by
some API-or SSL-flavoured analogue emulation
EQ and compression. This’ll mimic an 80s
analogue signal path, giving you a more
convincing sound. With the multitude of plugins
that emulate iconic studio gear from the 1940s
onwards, a bit of research will give you all the
information you need to create those retro
sonics in the box.

09 Bass
translation
Sometimes, bass that rocks on big studio
monitors can get lost in translation when heard
on smaller systems such as phones, tablets or

1
First, group drum parts, then load
Harmonics on the group. Choose
the Tube drive type, then set Drive to
8. The drums sound more gelled, but
with dulled transients. Setting the DTC
Amount to 8 restores lost snap, with
1dB Output gain rebalancing volume.
Bluetooth speakers, resulting in a hollow-
sounding mix. In this situation, you can add
extra weight by routing a bit of bass signal to a
distortion FX aux, followed by some high- and
low-pass filtering to isolate the frequencies
between 100-400Hz. This lets you mix in extra
richness and depth to the mix’s all-important
low-mid frequencies, increasing the perception
of bass weight on small speakers without
distorting the low or high frequencies.

10 Chaining Placing multiple saturation in series can give

you a truly unique sound. For example, route
saturation one saturation stage into another, then
automate the first plugin’s drive amount to
As with compressors and EQs, all saturation imbue an overly clean synth signal with custom

2
Some Transformer drive on our
bass channel brings out the low-
mid frequencies in a clean and clear
manner. Setting Drive to 4 and
Character to 7 adds some extra
ruggedness and tone, with a DTC
Amount of 2 bringing out the initial
attack of each bass guitar note.
plugins differ in character – one tool may
emulate a particular piece of outboard gear,
while a clean, digital saturator may impart a
more modern timbre.
Once you’re familiar with the palette of drive
flavours at your disposal, why not stack ’em up?
grunt and movement.
Alternatively, try pairing classic tape drive
with a digital-sounding saturator. Gentle tape
saturation offers character without crushing the
sound, which can then be pumped up by the
cleaner plugin’s crisp weight.

3
Harmonics is an ideal tool for mix
bus saturation. We put it on our
master, and set it to Master mode.
Increasing Character to 3 adds
brightness, with a hard Drive at 8
gluing the mix together. A little DTC
improves transient definition, with a
15kHz low-pass filter tidying things up.

62  /  Computer musiC  /  June 2019

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The guide to
FATHOM CM
Plumb the depths of modular synthesis
with Seaweed Audio’s mega virtual
instrument, free in Plugins
Dedicated readers have doubtless already
discovered our recent addition to the
Plugins bundle, Fathom CM. Added only last
month to our suite of free music-making
tools, this leviathan of a synth offers up an
infinitely deep sonic playground that puts
many a paid-for plugin to shame. Fully
modular and flexible, Fathom CM has enough
features to leave even seasoned synthesists
gasping for air. Despite its bottomless
potential, Fathom CM is really easy to, erm,
fathom, with a sleek and intuitive interface
that gives immediate and impressive results.
> Step by step 1. An overview of Fathom CM’s interface
In case you missed out on last month’s
1 get-started tutorial, here’s a brief recap
of Fathom CM’s easy-to-grok interface. As
you can see, there are four main parts to
the interface visible at any given time. The
bottom section contains global controls,
master EQ, and a pair of 2D control pads.
the cm guide to fathom cm / make music now <
And unlike more complex modular
environments, Fathom lets users start
making sounds with the very first module.
As easy as it is to get going, modular
synthesis is all about options. Seaweed Audio,
Fathom CM’s developers, are well aware of this,
and have generously dumped a versatile array
of oscillators, filters, effects and modulators into
the synth’s list of included modules. With only
minimal exclusions from the premium version,
there’s more than enough onboard to craft
unique and powerful synthesis patches for
decades to come.
The large central window is where
2 most of the action takes place. That’s
where we’ll cable up the various modules
that define the signal path. These modules
– or ‘components’ – can be dragged in
from the menu on the left. If we click on a
category – say, Oscillator – the category
and any subcategories therein expand to
show us the various components on offer.
DOWNLOAD
Get the videos and tutorial
files on your PC/Mac at
filesilo.co.uk/computermusic
With so many tools to explore, Fathom CM
can get as complex as you like, and we’re ready
to help you navigate through its many features
with our step-by-step walkthroughs. We’ll take
you from the very basics of building a classic
analogue synth patch with all the trimmings, all
the way through to the more exotic possibilities
offered by this many-tentacled beast.
In fact, we’ve so much to show you that we
can’t fit it all into a single feature, so what follows
will only be the first chapter in our studies of the
mighty, mysterious, and magnificent Fathom
CM – stay tuned for part two coming soon.
We’ll also be making frequent use of
3 the Modulation Matrix on the right.
Though there are no modulation tools in
play by default, this is where we’ll be
adding such functions as envelope
generators, low-frequency oscillators,
sequencers and much more. Here, we’ve
selected a parameter for modulation. We’ll
show you how to do that a bit later.
June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 65
> make music now / the cm guide to fathom cm
> Step by step 2. Building a synth voice with Fathom CM
Now we know our way around, let’s
1 build our patch. For this, we’ll cobble
together a virtual analogue synth. Every
synth starts with the oscillators, so let’s
expand the Oscillator category in the
2 that we can immediately hear our
Audio Components menu on the left,
then the Alias Free subcategory, and drag
a Basic Waveforms module to the central
window area.
You’ll note that in addition to the
4 oscilloscope in the top, there’s a
waveform display to the right of the
Oscillator parameters. It now shows a
square wave, which is made up of odd
5 knob to -1.00 for a low bass sound.
partials with an integer relationship to the
fundamental tone. If we increase the
Fundamental knob, we get a rounded
wave shape and a beefier sound.
Now for that filter… go to the Audio
7 Components, expand the Filter
category, and then to the Virtual Analog
sub-category where there’s a Diode Low
Pass module. Drag that in. Click and drag
8 behaviour of simple diode-based
virtual cables from the Oscillator outputs
(right-most circle) to the Filter’s input
(component’s left).
66 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019
The cool thing about Fathom CM is
waveform – we needn’t add amplifiers or
output modules as in other modular
environments. If we play a note from our
3 parameters using the controls that
DAW or attached MIDI controller, we can
hear a sawtooth wave and, conveniently,
see it too, as the central window also acts
as an oscilloscope.
We’ll now lower the Pitch Octave
Next, drag a second Basic Waveforms
component to our central area. The
outputs of both are automatically mixed.
6 Detune parameters. We’ll activate the
Reduce the Volume of our newly-added
oscillator to around 0.30 so that we hear
more of our treated square wave than we
hear of our new oscillator.
This filter simulates the sound and
filters like those found on synths such as
the legendary EMS VCS3 and Steiner-
Parker Synthacon, not to mention the
9 1000 by default, which is quite
Roland TB-303. It can get quite squelchy,
which you’ll hear if you crank the
Resonance up to 10.00.
We can edit the Component’s various
appear at the bottom of the GUI. You can
choose which of the available parameters
are displayed using the five buttons on the
lower-left – and there are a lot! For now,
we’ll keep it simple by changing the
Waveform to a Square wave.
Go to the lower left and select the
Detune function, which gives us a much
thicker sound. This provides some density
for our filter – as with any subtractive
patch, the more frequencies plumbed
through the filter, the more interesting the
sound we can shape with it.
Our Filter’s Cutoff Frequency is set to
aggressive and muted. Set it to around
3000. That gives us a lot of presence, but
still provides the bite we’d expect from
this type of filter. Our patch sounds pretty
good now, but there’s so much more we
can do, as you’ll find out…
 the cm guide to fathom cm / make music now <

> Step by step 3. Using Fathom CM’s Modulation Matrix

Fathom CM differs from most modular To lash the chosen parameter to a Clicking the check mark seals the deal.

1 environments in that its modulation

options are presented in a dedicated
matrix, not as individually patchable
modules in the main view. Adding
2 modulation source, click Add Mod.
modulation is simple – click the target
parameter’s knob to highlight it, as seen
with our filter’s Cutoff Frequency.
This makes a new component in the
Modulation Matrix, labelled to show the
selected modulation target – Cutoff
3 Crank our filter’s Cutoff Frequency all
Frequency here. Click Select Modulator
to expand the modulation sources menu,
then choose Note Velocity.
the way down, then use the small knob on
the left of the new modulator to adjust
modulation amount to be applied, which
is then detailed on the targeted parameter.
Set it so that the max value hits around
3000 on our filter’s Cutoff Frequency.

> Step by step 4. Adding an ADSR envelope

Our patch’s timbre is a lot more Find our master Volume knob among Note that our modulator component

1 dynamic thanks to our velocity-

controlled filter. However, the amplitude is
utterly static. That’s because our synth is
lacking one of the most basic of all
2 the global parameters, then click on its
modulators: an envelope generator. Click
the Signal Flow button in the lower
section to bring up our global window.
centre to select it as a modulation target.
Click Add Mod. This time, however,
choose the New Modulator category, to
3 itself has a set of five knobs to control
get the ADSR Easy modulator. Again, we’ll
pull the target parameter down, but we’ll
crank our new modulator’s amount to full.
Attack, Attack Level, Decay, Sustain, and
Release – hence why it’s an easy ADSR!
Adjust these, or click the vertical bar on
the left to open a full complement of
envelope controls. We’ll leave ours alone –
the default settings are fine for now.

> Step by step 5. Modular-style filtering with Fathom CM’s Sample & Hold

Our patch is taking shape. It’s got Click Add Mod and select New Change the Units Random to

1 interesting timbral dynamics and a

squelchy, vintage sound, but we want a
random element, so try one of our fave
modulation sources – sample-and-hold. At
2 Modulator, from which we’ll choose a
the filter, click the Cutoff Frequency knob
to pick a modulation target.
Random Sample & Hold modulator. Set
the amount of modulation to around
0.26200 or so. Play and hold a note, and
3 Seconds. Increase the Time Period to
0.8984. This makes a slow yet distinct
shift in timbre – maybe too distinct. Set the
Smooth function to Sin and increase
we hear a classic sample-and-hold sound. Smooth Amount to 0.713. Now these
It’s subtle, but that’s what we want. changes are still random, but less overt.

June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 67

> make music now / the cm guide to fathom cm

Panel play
Note that even the most basic
> Step by step 6. Exploring Fathom CM’s envelopes
single-oscillator patch can be
used in a meaningful way
without adding a pile of
components. This is made
possible by Fathom CM’s copious
front panel controls, found in the
Global Controls area – always
available by clicking the Signal
Flow button. These controls
include the aforementioned 2D
control pads, each of which may
be assigned to various
modulation targets using the
Modulation Matrix. There’s also
that sizable 13-band equaliser
The envelope we added earlier looked Along with our new oscillator, we’ll

1 2
listed earlier. This gives loads of
control over the frequencies in ‘easy’, but the possibilities are add a new Virtual Analog filter. This
play – it’s easy to dial in apparent once we dig into Fathom CM’s one is a Voltage Control High Pass. Set its
deep editing features. To do so, we’ll add a Cutoff Frequency to 3860, and
everything from subtle bass cuts
third oscillator from the Alias Free Resonance to 6.85. Click its Cutoff
to spiky midrange boosts. category. This will be the Analog Saw. Frequency knob, then Add Mod and
Plus, you’ll find a means to Envelope from New Modulator.
adjust the pitch (handy for
playing along with acoustic
instruments); a knob for
choosing the number of voices in
play; a Velocity control for adding
dynamics; Glide type and Time;
and a Panel Overlay knob
providing control over what is
displayed and where. Sometimes,
one oscillator and these controls
might be all you need to get a
stellar performance going.

A new editor window appears, along Why did we do this? Because we’re

3 with a new set of controls down

Give those global controls a good twist
to wring the most out of a simple patch
below. Or are they? Indeed not – these are
the same parameters available to our
earlier Easy ADSR. Before diving in,
4 using a high-pass filter, and we want
however, we click on the ‘+’ in our
Modulator and choose Subtract from the
list. Set the mod amount to 0.29265.
our envelope to decrease the cutoff
frequency, which will add more low end
over time. Increase the number of
Segments to 8, then use the nodes in the
envelope graphic to help draw an
interesting shape.

> Step by step 7. Crafting a custom LFO shape

As cool as our sound is, it’s a bit too Reduce the Analog Saw’s Volume It’s a bit fast, so let’s set the LFO

1 ‘in-your-face’ now – we don’t want our

newly-added multi-segment-modulated-
filter to overwhelm the sonic spectrum.
Let’s use yet more modulation to bring it
2 control to 0, then click its centre to
in and out of the patch. Click back over to
the Signal Path and then open our
Analog Saw oscillator.
select it as a modulation destination. Click
Add Mod and select LFO Draw from the
New Modulator category as the
3 Period to 54.10000. Now, we can
modulation source. Set the new LFO’s
modulation amount to around 0.20000
– this brings our Analog Saw into play a
little, but in a cyclical fashion.
drag the bezier handles in the display to
shape the LFO’s curves, and use the
handles to drag the edges of the
waveform around until we have
something we like. We’ve gone for an
asymmetrical shape. We also tweak the
Attack Period.

68 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019

 the cm guide to fathom cm / make music now <

> Step by step 8. Fathom CM’s sequencing features

Sequencers are an integral part of any What do you know? It’s the same Back in the Sequencer (or, erm,

1 well-appointed modular synthesis

system. Fathom CM has one, found among
the instruments modulators. We open our
very first Waveforms oscillator, and arm its
2 interface we used when discussing
Pitch Note for modulation. This time, we
choose the Sequencer from the New
Modulators category.
envelope generators. Returning to our
oscillator, we crank up the amount of
modulation coming from the Sequencer.
3 envelope) editor, set the number of
Note that the mod amount is bipolar; set
to fully up, it gives our Pitch Note knob a
range of -12 to +12, or two octaves.
Segments to 8. This gives us eight notes
to play with. We’ll need to set the
Quantize Amp parameter to a value of 24.
This forces our steps to a 12-tone musical
scale. Let’s click on the segments in the
grid to create a musical pattern.

Our sequencer is obviously only Let’s now return to our sequencer Our notes all blur together. It’s as if the

4 modulating our first oscillator’s pitch.

We can assign the Pitch Note parameter
of our second oscillator to the same
sequencer by selecting it for modulation,
5 editor for some final touches. Our
clicking Add Mod, and choosing the same
Sequencer module from the Edited
Modulator category and increasing its
amount, like we did for Oscillator 1.
sequence is a bit frantic, so let’s slow
things down a bit. We can adjust the rate
of our sequence by tweaking the value of
6 gate time of each step is set to full. We
the Period knob. Currently, it’s set to 1.0.
Double that and halve the tempo by
setting it to a value of 2.0.
can alter this by reducing the Segment
Width parameter. We set ours to
0.78000. This gives us more of a staccato
sound. Savvy synthesists will have noticed
that nearly all of the Sequencer’s
parameters can be modulated, so don’t be
afraid to experiment.

> Step by step 9. Adding effects to our Fathom CM patch

Our patch has come a long way since Locate the Digital Delay LCR As a modular system, Fathom CM

1 we kicked off, and there is a lot going

on. It’s hard to imagine that it could get
any sweeter, but it can with the help of one
or more of Fathom CM’s excellent effects
2 component and drag it to the central
components. Return to the Signal Flow
window and open the Effect menu in the
Audio Components Browser.
window. We patch our topmost Filter (the
Diode filter) into the new effect. As the
name shows, there are dedicated delay
3 offers the flexibility of running
lines for left, right, and centre. Adjust Wet
Mix for each line. These parameters may
be modulated, if you feel adventurous.
different signal parts through different
effects. We add a Phaser effect to our
Analog Saw-plus-High Pass filter, and then
patch that Phaser component into a
Reverb Easy module. A bit of tweaking
gives a super-lush sound.

June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 69

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 tutorials <

with pro advice, expert videos and audio

examples from our computer music gurus

74 Exotic
scales

Theory virtuoso Dave Clews goes

Easy Guide beyond minor and major with a
Music theory
with Dave Clews look at more unusual scales

76 Polishing
weak samples

ACM tutor Shea Stedford shows

Studio Strategies
Advanced production
you how to scrub up bland
with Shea Stedford samples with custom processing

78 Polyrhythms,
Part 2
Go cross-rhythmic and mash
Dr Beat
Beat and drum design
together multiple time signatures
with Ronan Macdonald with our resident drum doc

June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 73

Dave Clews’
#78
Exotic scales
East meets west as our theory guru travels around the world in
80 bars in search of some flavoursome musical formulas
For the most part, us computer musicians
are quite happy to stick with the usual
major or minor keys that make up 95% of the
stuff we hear on the radio or in clubs today.
Every now and then, though, wouldn’t it be
cool to colour outside the lines?
The major and minor scales we’re all familiar
with are key parts of the music that satisfies us
as listeners, but there’s a whole new level of
sophistication that opens up when you start to
>Step by step Exploring exotic scales
TUTORIAL
FILES
As a basis for comparison, here’s the A
1 natural minor scale: A B C D E F G. The
relative minor of C major, this uses all the
white notes on the keyboard, so it’ll be
easier to spot which scale tones have
been altered to build our exotic scales.
formula 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.
The natural minor scale has the numerical
1-2-3-4-5-6-7, referring to the
The numerical formula for this scale is
4 degrees of the major scale. Here’s how the
melody looks and sounds using these
altered notes. Just by raising the pitch of
those two notes, the tune has taken on a
distinctly eastern European flavour.
74 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019
explore the vast number of permutations and
variations on those scales that exist outside that
major and minor sandbox.
A lot of these scales are based around very
simple tweaks of the church modes – the ones
you get when you play through regular major or
minor scales from a note other than the root.
Some of them combine two scales together,
smooshing them into a sort of Franken-scale,
and many of them are rooted in cultures other
Our example track features a marimba
2 part playing an A natural minor
melody over an A root note held down by
the bass. As nothing plays any minor or
major thirds, it should work with pretty
much any scale, so let’s examine how it
sounds with just a couple of the notes
shifted to fit more exotic scales…
A close relative of the Romanian scale
5 is the Hungarian Gypsy minor scale.
This is made by shifting the 4th and 7th
degrees of the natural minor scale up by a
semitone. In the case of A minor, this
resulting scale of A B C D E F G .
would be the notes D and G, giving us the
DOWNLOAD
Download the accompanying
video and the MIDI/audio files at
filesilo.co.uk/computermusic
than western music, such as eastern European
gypsy and folk, traditional Middle-Eastern
music, Indian and Japanese. They can be used in
solos, improvisation, and even melody writing to
add a touch of exotic flavour to your tracks.
This month, then, I’m going to focus on some
of these lesser-trodden paths that lead nicely to
the western mainstream, show you how to build
them, and give you a couple of practical
examples of their usage.
We can spice things up a bit by
3 changing just one or two notes in the
scale and conforming our melody to those
notes. For instance, the Romanian scale
sharpens the fourth and sixth degrees of
the natural minor scale. In the case of A
get A B C D E F G.
minor, these are the notes D and F, so we
1 2 3 4 5 6 7. When you compare
The numerical formula for this scale is
6 these two scales, even though the only
difference is in the last two degrees – a flat
6th and a major 7th, rather than a major
6th and flat 7th – you can almost hear us
taking a trip to the Middle East.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE -
DON’T HOLD THE WALL
Lots of influences here,
rhythmically and melodically.
Most of the tune is regular F
natural minor, but one bell
melody is played in F Romanian.
bit.ly/jt_dhtw
CHRISTOPH - THE DUEL
This hypnotic house cut shows
how using just one chromatic note
(the main hook’s shift from C to C#
over a Cm7 groove suggests the
Byzantine scale) can inject just the
required amount of spice.
bit.ly/cristoph_td
Originating from Saudi Arabia, but
7 common in western jazz, the Al Hijaz
scale (also known as Phrygian Dominant
or the Spanish Gypsy scale) can be used
over dominant chords that resolve to a
played as A B C D E F G.
minor chord. In A minor, this scale is
With this scale applied, our melody
10 takes on even more exotic flavour, as
more flattened 2nd malarkey keeps us
rooted in the Middle East. The eastern
sound of these last two scales derives
from the augmented interval between the
Byzantine Scale is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.
2nd and 3rd degrees. The formula for the
NEXT MONTH Dave tackles the relatively interesting topic of relative keys vs parallel keys
easy guide / make music now <
PRO TIPS Dave Clews
SCALE IT UP In a studio career
You don’t necessarily have to practise or memorise spanning almost 25
these scales to begin using them – let your computer years, Dave has
help you out! Most DAWs have some kind of MIDI input
transposer or transformer that will apply a custom or
engineered,
preset scale over the incoming MIDI data stream, so programmed and
any note you play will conform to your chosen scale. played keyboards on
Hardware controllers such as Ableton Push and NI’s records for a string of
Komplete Kontrol series also have a scale input feature
that does the same thing. artists including
George Michael, Kylie
SCALE IT DOWN Minogue, Tina Turner
By the same token, there’s no need to use all of the and Estelle. These
notes from an exotic scale to get the feeling across.
Just the same as in cooking with chillies, you can get days, he writes articles for and
the right flavour just by adding as much or as little as other magazines and websites,
you like. Throwing the odd flat 2nd into an otherwise and is the author of Avid Pro Tools
natural minor progression can make all the difference
Basics. Follow him on Instagram:
you need.
@electricdave67
Here’s how our melody sounds played A further tweak and we get the
8 using the Al Hijaz scale. We’re now in
flattened 2nd territory, which instantly
spirits us away to foreign lands. The flat
2nd derives from the Phrygian mode,
9 Byzantine scale. Also known as the
Maqam Hijaz Scale or the double
harmonic scale, the Byzantine scale is
actually the same as a major scale with
of A minor, this equates to A B C D E F G.
while the presence of that flat 7th gives it a flattened 2nd and 6th degrees. In the case
dominant character – hence the name
scale is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.
Phrygian Dominant. The formula for this
Egyptian pentatonic scale is 1 2 4 5 7,
Pentatonic scales – scales with only The formula for this particular
11 five notes – are very common in both
western and eastern musical culture, so it
would be remiss not to include one here. A
typical Egyptian pentatonic scale in A
12 and it can be derived by playing a mode of
a regular minor pentatonic – here, the
third mode of E minor pentatonic (E G A B
minor would work out to A B D E G. This is D). The image above shows how our
very similar to an A minor pentatonic, but melody might sound when played using
with a lowered second degree. only the five notes from this scale.
June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 75
Studio
strategies
with ACM
#34
Polishing weak samples
ACM tutor Shea Stedford shows you how clever processing can be
used to imbue lacklustre samples with missing density and depth
Many producers compose tracks using
audio one-shots and loops (ie, samples),
whether it be ready-rolled audio files from
commercial sample packs, loops they’ve
created themselves and squirreled away for
later use, or ‘naughty’ snippets lifted from
records or YouTube.
When digging for new samples or auditioning
through your collection, it’s all too easy to
disregard something because it lacks the
>Step by step Processing samples for a pro sound
To follow along with my tutorial, it’s
1 important to pick the right source
material. Look for a loop or a sample that
you’d normally skip past – for example,
you may like a sound’s composition or
groove, but not its character or timbre.
This could even be a loop that you’ve
created yourself. Here’s a basic house loop
I’ve created in NI’s Maschine.
Now for some processing. I send my
4 loop’s signal to an aux return track
containing SSL’s Native V6 Saturator,
which adds third-order harmonics for a
warmer, thicker sound. My settings are
extreme, but that’s fine, as this duplicate
signal is being mixed in tandem with the
untouched source sound.
76 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019
texture or the thickness you want, even if the
creative content of the sound might work. This
leaves you with a heap of unused samples that
could become the perfect raw material for
processing and making your own – exactly what
we want from a sample, after all!
Let’s not forget that, historically, sampling is
about turning pre-existing audio into something
unique, and doing it in a way to create your
sound. There are countless examples of ‘crate
I want to give the loop more life in the
2 most efficient way possible, giving me
a solid source sample that will slot straight
into a track. To do this, I’ll be using a
combination of parallel compression and
parallel saturation. Taking advantage of
Maschine’s drag and drop feature, I export
the premade loop by throwing it on my
Pro Tools arrange page.
As your dry sound is already in the mix,
5 remember to keep the parallel effect’s
mix control (if it has one) at 100% fully wet.
At this point, I recommend you try out
different settings and balance those level
faders. There are no ‘standard’ settings
here, so use your ears and experiment.
DOWNLOAD
Get the tutorial files and video
on your PC/Mac at:
filesilo.co.uk/computermusic
diggers’ – especially in genres like hip-hop and
house – who have transformed mundane audio
into musical gold through the magic of sample-
flipping, creative manipulation and processing.
In this tutorial and video, I’ll show you a quick
way of processing weak samples with basic
bussing and effects treatments. I’ll be using a
faux-sampled loop made with NI Maschine
before going further in Pro Tools, but it’s all
transferable to the sampler and host you use.
It’s time to prepare my loop for
3 processing. After chopping the sample
to the tempo of your choosing, make sure
your sample’s level isn’t too ‘hot’ – if it’s
already hitting 0dB on the meter, just turn
it down a bit. I like to try to level the
sample so it’s peaking at no more than
-3dBFS, giving me headroom to play with
at a later processing stage.
I now add another parallel effect on a
6 second aux return, and send the
original loop’s signal to it. This time, I’m
using parallel compression from IK’s Black
76. I dial in extreme compression until I
find the flavour I’m looking for – in this
case, I want a spikey, pokey characteristic
to complement the parallel saturation’s
thickness and density.
 studio strategies  /  make music now  <

Pro tiPs Shea Stedford

take stoCk
Although I’ve used a pair of third-party plugins in my
tutorial, the approach can easily be replicated using your
DAW’s excellent stock effects. For instance, pushing a
signal’s level into Logic Pro X’s Overdrive – set to 0dB
Drive and maximum 20kHz Tone – will provide beefy
third-order harmonics, resulting in a thicker, punchier,
warmer sound. This works a treat on everything from
individual tracks and subgroups to parallel aux tracks
and groups/busses.
Ableton Live users can draw for the bundled Auto
Filter plugin. I like to call up an instance, open up the
Cutoff to the max 19.9k, set Resonance at around 9-19%,
then pick a Drive circuit other than the default Clean – the
Korg MS-20-emulating MS2 mode is a personal favourite.
Once you’ve dialled in settings, simply crank up the Drive
knob for instant power and push.
Captain CrunCh Shea is a dance music
As I discussed last month, you should always experiment
with creative resampling techniques. By rendering your producer and tutor at
processed signals to audio, you’ll free up any fiddly ACM, a leading
routing and give yourself freedom to try out another provider of creative
round of plugins – a great way to add texture and
industries education
degradation at each stage.
Speaking of degradation, I love resampling crunched-
up drums. To get that old 8- or 12-bit drum machine Spotify: bit.ly/iklektix
sound, load a bitcrusher plugin over a modern drum Discogs: bit.ly/sheadiscogs
sample, then lower the bit depth to 8 or 12 bits, making
sure you leave the sample rate parameter alone. Instagram:
This adds what can only be described as fuzzy digital @sheastedford
hiss – great for giving your drum tracks and percussion a
bit of texture and grit. Then, once you’re happy with the
effect, render that sucker to audio and load your About ACM
processed beats into a drum sampler for triggering. Having trained musicians, producers,
songwriters, and entrepreneurs for careers in
the creative industries for over 20 years, with state-of-the-art
facilities and extensive industry connections, ACM offers
immersive programmes that develop students to their full
potential. Learn more at an ACM Open Day: www.acm.ac.uk

7 8
Again, you can be more extreme with
settings when compressing in parallel.
I switch Black 76 to the 1176’s famous ‘all
buttons in’ mode, which increases
compression ratio, boosts input signal and
changes attack and release times, giving
the compression a thrashy, ‘sucking’
character. This is why 1176 compression is
a go-to for parallel dynamics-shaping.
9
This is where things get a little more
interesting. By employing clever
routing within my DAW’s mixer, I send my
parallel compression aux signal into the
parallel saturation aux, which saturates
some of the spiky, compressed signal. I’m
effectively ‘paralleling the parallel’!
From here, balance your busses to
achieve the desired tone and weight.
This final fader-juggling act is completely
subjective and personal to you – but that’s
the beauty of it! Here, a louder saturation
signal gives my loop a trashier sound,
while increasing the level of the 1176 signal
adds more transient punch.

10
Doing things this way gives you the
most flexible workflow in the least
time, using the least CPU resources. And
working in a dedicated project lets you
experiment away from a multitrack
session, so you can focus on making that
sample sound as good as it can without
distraction. After refining your level
balances, try different plugin settings.
11
Keep checking your master fader’s
volume while you work. You can easily
breach the digital 0dBFS limit when
mixing multiple parallel signals, so always
balance each fader and reduce channel
levels to leave headroom. My final peak
volume is extremely close to the pre-
processed sample’s original peak level.
12
Many ready-made samples are heavily
limited. You may enjoy this increase in
perceived level on first listen, but it doesn’t
help if you want a more dynamic sound.
This is another reason to maintain proper
gain staging when creating or
customising samples – your sounds will be
less dominating, and have more chance of
slotting into a mix.

neXt month Shea combines famous mixing techniques for a unique sound June 2019  /  Computer musiC  /  77
Dr Beat
with Ronan Macdonald

#56

Polyrhythms, Part 2 DOWNLOAD

See it in video and get the

Our drum doc explores cross-rhythms for out-there grooves

tutorial files on your PC/Mac at
filesilo.co.uk/computermusic

Ronan Macdonald Last issue, we began our exploration of

polyrhythms by layering up multiple drum
Having and percussion elements, each in a different
previously time signature but all playing at the same
served as Editor tempo – aka polymeter. This time round, I’m
of drummer’s going to be showing you an alternative, even
bible Rhythm as madder approach to polyrhythmic beat
well as making: the cross-rhythm.
Computer In simple terms, a cross-rhythm is a
Music, Ronan is combination of two or more time signatures,
clearly the right playing together over the same period of time
man for this – ie, sharing the same barlines – and thus at two
particular gig. He’s been playing drums or more different tempos.
for over 30 years and making music The most rudimentary of cross-rhythms is
with computers since the 90s. the hemiola, or ‘two against three’, which you
can easily demonstrate yourself. Tap a repeating
three-beat pattern on a desk with your right
hand, then tap with the left hand on beat one
and in between beats two and three – and then,
voila, your left hand is in 3/4 time, your right is in
2/4 at a lower tempo.
In this walkthrough, we’ll be taking things to a
rather deeper level than that as we build up a
polyrhythmic drum and percussion groove. The
process, as illustrated below, is simple – make an
audio or MIDI clip of a certain number of beats
in length, then timestretch it to fit within a bar
length set by a regular 4/4 drum beat. You’ll find,
however, that the sonic results you get from it
are anything but simple…

>Step by step Building a polyrhythmic drum and percussion groove

TUTORIAL
FILES

The first thing to do is set out our 4/4 For our first cross-rhythm, let’s bring a Now, with Logic Pro’s Flex Time

1 base, which comes courtesy of a

Looptone kick-and-hi-hats loop, from
258, and a snare/clap backbeat. Rolling
along at 125bpm, this is the beat against
2 3/4 percussion part into play. I start by
which the following cross-rhythmic parts
will be juxtaposed.
importing a 4/4 percussion loop, then
simply dragging its right hand edge back
to get rid of everything after the first three
3 timestretching system activated for
the track, I stretch the three-beat clip out
to the length of the full four-beat bar – as
defined by the main drums – and loop it to
beats. The new clip is now effectively in fill the phrase. Playing this alongside the
3/4 time, as is apparent when it’s looped. drum loop totally transforms the groove.

4/4 and 3/4 are the most conventional In Logic Pro, MIDI is timestretched in In four-to-the-floor dance music, it’s

4 of time signatures, but things start to

get temporally weird with 5/4, as
demonstrated by this agogo bells line
– hear how the extra beat interrupts the
5 the same way as audio, by Option-
expected flow. While 3/4 crossed with 4/4
usually works well, getting 5/4 involved is
always an experiment…
dragging either bottom corner of the MIDI
clip. Pulling the five-beat agogo bells clip
back to fit the bar speeds it up so that it
6 best to keep your polyrhythmic
sits awkwardly over the 4/4 beat. At first it
sounds bizarre, but after a few cycles, the
brain starts to make sense of it.
activity to secondary percussion parts,
rather than the kick or snare. Here, for
example, I’ve shortened and stretched the
snare/clap part to put it in 7/8 time, which
breaks the backbeat. A cross-rhythm too
far? I’ll leave you to decide…

78 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019 NEXT MONTH Exploring time signatures

> interview / carl craig
CARL
CRAIG
The techno pioneer has adapted his
back catalogue for a full orchestra and
he’s bringing it to the Royal Albert Hall.
This is how he did it…
When you sit down for an afternoon with
Carl Craig, it’s not long before Detroit
glides into the conversation. Born there in
1969, it’s the place he’s always called home.
It’s also where he first heard the music of
other local kids like Derrick May, Kevin
Saunderson and Juan Atkins; the music that
came to be known as Detroit techno. And it’s
where he made and released his first record,
1989’s Neurotic Behavior.
But Craig’s very first memory of the city goes
back much further. To the early-70s, when he
was standing on the corner of Woodward
Avenue and Interstate 75, cheering the
Thanksgiving Day Parade with his parents.
“All the noise and dancing was happening on
the street, but, for some reason, I looked up,”
says Craig. “This building had a big ‘M’ on the
front. I didn’t know what it was or what it stood
for, but it touched me in some way. When I
looked up at that ‘M’, I felt I was looking at
80 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019
Detroit. Looking at the soul of Detroit. Years
later, I realised that it was the Motown building.”
Carl Craig is relaxing backstage at London’s
Royal Albert Hall. Craig is in the UK to talk about
his forthcoming live show at the prestigious
venue. The Royal Albert Hall has played host to
many leftfield legends such as Kraftwerk,
Hendrix and the Daleks, but its reputation was
built on names like Rachmaninoff, Elgar and
Coleridge-Taylor. It has classical music in its
blood. Well… in its bricks and mortar.
It seems the perfect venue, then, for the
debut UK performance of Craig’s Versus
project, which features tracks from his back
catalogue, adapted for synths, decks and full
orchestra. For this show, he’s joined by pianist
Kelvin Sholar, who’s worked with everyone from
Babyface and Q-Tip to Sean Lennon and
Common; and the Chineke! Orchestra, the first
professional orchestra in Europe with a majority
of black and minority ethnic musicians.
carl craig / interview <

Photo: Cristian Di Stefano

June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 81

>  interview  /  carl craig
“Versus goes back to 2008, when [Juilliard
piano prodigy] Francesco Tristano got stuck
into some of my songs. Taking them from the
electronic world into this strange classical/
electronic crossover world. I guess I’d never
really considered my music as ‘classical’, but I
loved the idea that we could take my songs in
another direction.
“For me, that’s what music has always been
about. Whenever I see an envelope, I just have
to keep pushing and pushing.”
: How did the idea for Versus first come
into being? Were you always ‘in charge’ or
was there a two-way process between you
and Francesco?
CC: “It was a two-way process, but there was
definitely a period where I let Francesco do what
he does. I mean, c’mon… he’s a Juilliard kid! He
was looking at the music in all kinds of different
ways. The parts weren’t written for violin or
woodwind, but I trusted Francesco to do what
needed to be done. I know my musical capacity
and I know what I’m capable of. Francesco, on
the other hand, is a fucking awesome musician
and it was a joy to watch him introduce all these
new sounds.
“Over the years, the arrangements have
evolved quite a lot. The Royal Albert Hall show
will feature the Chineke! Orchestra and Kelvin
Sholar, who comes from a much more jazz-
orientated background. Kelvin sees the music in
a different way and that means the
performances have new elements. And I feel
much more involved in these recent changes
because I’ve got a lot more experience than I
had in 2008. I have a much better idea of what
will work and what won’t.”
: What have you got up there on stage?
CC:“The computer running Ableton Live, with
an Arturia MatrixBrute, which is what I do all the
soloing on. And NI Maschine.”
: And a very nice suit, might we add.
There’s some great footage of you rocking a
snazzy grey two-piece!
Carl Craig and Chineke!
Orchestra founder
Chi-chi Nwanoku
82  /  Computer musiC  /  June 2019
“Synths allow you to make sounds that no one else
has made. It doesn’t matter if someone tells you it’s
wrong or it’s not real music. So what?”
CC: “Ha ha! You’ve got the whole orchestra in
tuxedos… it’s not like I can turn up there in jeans
and a T-shirt!”
: Presumably it feels different to a club or
festival gig?
CC:“Of course, but the power of the music is still
there. Ever since I first started making my own
songs, I’ve always tried to make sure I don’t keep
the music locked in a box. I’m not a ‘mono’
person; I’m a ‘poly’ person.
“I can’t just think about one sound or one
style every day of the week. People say, ‘I only
listen to techno’ or ‘I only listen to house’ and I
feel sorry for them because they’re missing out
on all this other wonderful music. Imagine
saying that you were only going to see the
colour blue. Think about how dull the world
would be if you only had one colour.
“Music is a bit like time travel… like that show
Quantum Leap. If you push today’s music into a
box and keep it locked away, then it won’t have a
chance to affect what’s going to happen in the
future. If we experiment today, our experiments
might change the future.
“When I made Bug In The Bass Bin, there
were a whole lot of jazz influences that were
going around my head and they automatically
fed into the music. Some people questioned the
sound of that track but, from what I’ve been told,
Goldie heard it and said, ‘I want that sound’. Bug
In The Bass Bin became part of the story of
drum ’n’ bass.
“One of the reasons that electronic music
exists is that it allows you to break the rules.
Synths allow you to make sounds that no one
else has made. It doesn’t matter if someone tells
you it’s wrong or it’s not real music. So what?
Music is about making a sound that you like.
That’s all that matters.”
: You played guitar as a kid but, from what
I’ve read, it was primarily electronic music –
in particular, the sound of the synthesiser –
that was what actually made you want to
write songs.
CC: “Gary Numan’s Cars was a big song for me. It
was huge on urban radio in the US. Then, of
course, you had Kraftwerk. Trans Europe
Express had been accepted by black and latino
radio, and they [Kraftwerk] seemed to expand
way beyond that with Man Machine. There was a
lot of funk in that album… a lot of funk.
“Image-wise, they were these un-funky
dudes, but the guy they brought in to engineer
Man Machine was Leanard Jackson. He’d
worked with Norman Whitfield… yeah, the
Norman Whitfield. The Temptations’ Papa Was A
Rolling Stone, Car Wash and a lot of Rose Royce
stuff, Marvin Gaye. Suddenly, you’ve got
Whitfield’s engineer working with Kraftwerk. A
meeting of two worlds.
“What else was there? George Clinton and
Parliament, The Gap Band, Roger Troutman and
Zapp. When people talk about synth pioneers,
Kraftwerk is the name that always comes up, but
Roger Troutman was one of the greatest artists
to ever touch a synth.
“And Sun Ra! You’ve got Sun Ra
experimenting with the Moog. He was key to
what was happening to the synth. His song,
Space is the Place… the use of different stage
names. Using different names was all about
shedding the restrictions of slavery. You had
black people in poverty in the US and they were
always talking about not wanting to be ‘here’.
Not wanting to be on this planet. They wanted to
go to heaven, to a place where there were no
restrictions. No slavery.
“The synth was part of that. It was an
instrument that had no restrictions, no limits.
You didn’t have to learn it like the piano. You
could just sit down and start creating sounds
from outer space. Like Sun Ra said, “space is the
place”. The synth would take you to outer space.
Take you away from the drudgery and the
poverty. It was a tool that was eagerly utilised
within black music.”
: What a time to be listening to music!
CC:“Definitely. And it wasn’t long after that when
I first heard Derrick May’s radio show on WJLB.
Hearing Strings of Life [released by May under
the name, Rhythim Is Rhythim]. That’s when my
mind was finally blown. But it was also when my
life finally made sense.”
: We’d imagine that a lot of people’s lives
suddenly made sense when they heard
Detroit techno.
CC: “It wasn’t just listening to the music. It was
the instruments… the synth, the drum machine,

Carl Craig performs on stage at
Barcelona’s Sonar Festival in 2017
the sampler. A cousin of mine was the first
person I knew who had a synth. I remember
going around to his house and there was a
Sequential Circuits Six-Trak, a DX7 and a 909. I
can still feel that thrill when I pushed down a key
on the Six-Trak. I wanted to be in that gang… I
wanted to make techno music.”
: You mentioned Gary Numan and
Kraftwerk earlier on, and there are some
people who will argue that the sound of
Detroit had a distinctly European flavour. The
music from Chicago and New York, on the
other hand, was American. Too simplistic?
CC: “Way too simplistic. Chicago had its own
European influences… Italian disco was huge. If
you’re looking for a theory behind the sound of
Detroit, the best place to start is with a very
early Juan Atkins interview. He was asked about
the music he was making, and he said: ‘the main
idea was that we didn’t want to sound like Berry
Gordy and Motown’.
“Even to this day, when I tell people that I’m a
musician from Detroit, they immediately
assume I’m a soul guy signed to Motown. When
“Growing up, Detroit was
dominated by Motown
and we were kind of
rejecting that sound”
carl craig  /  interview  <
Photo: Getty / Xavi Torrent
we were growing up, Detroit was dominated by
Motown and we were kind of rejecting that Kit list
sound. We wanted to break new ground.” HARDWARE
Apple Mac
: Gear-wise, how long did it take for you to Roland SH-101
get started? Pioneer Toraiz AS-1
CC: “The early mantra was beg, borrow or steal. Studio Electronics
That was the only way I could make music. I had Omega-8
a Prophet 2000, an Alesis MMT-8 sequencer Presonus Faderport 16
and a four-track that I borrowed and eventually Sontec MEP-250EX
stole. Make the drum sounds, record the drums. Lexicon PCM 41
Make the bass sounds, record the bass. It really Arturia MatrixBrute
was that basic. Native Instruments
“The first time that I got a hold of a computer Maschine
was probably around 1991. It was one of those
Macintosh Classics, running… I think it was SOFTWARE
Performer. The computer wasn’t really such a Ableton Live 10
big thing in Detroit. We preferred working with Harrison Mixbus
sequencers like the Alesis. Derrick May never Arturia V Collection
used a computer. Juan [Atkins] took a long time. Roland Cloud
Kevin [Saunderson] was there earlier than the FabFilter Pro-Q 3
rest of us because his brother was a computer Spectrasonics
programmer. Omnisphere 2
“Personally, I liked the way the Alesis made
my music sound. If you write with a standalone
sequencer, you write in a particular way. If you
write with an MPC3000, you write in a
particular way. Very different to working with a
DAW like Logic or Ableton Live.”
: And which one do you use?
CC: “I hate ’em all! Ha ha! My philosophy is that
you should use anything that will get the job
done. I’ve pretty much used every DAW out
there. Logic, Pro Tools, FL Studio, Ableton… and I
also use Harrison Mixbus.
June 2019 / Computer musiC  /  83
> interview / carl craig

Photo: Cristian Di Stefano

The Carl Craig
guide to pushing
the envelope
“If you’re in a regular band, it’s easy. I
saw a documentary about Queen the
other day, and they were all playing
each other’s instruments. That’s a
simple way to find inspiration.
“If it’s just you, making electronic
music with a laptop, it’s not so easy. But
why not try a different DAW? If you’re
used to working on a computer, switch
to GarageBand on your iPad. Find an
App on your iPhone you’ve never used.
Force yourself into a new corner and
see what you get. It doesn’t have to be
super-complex. Find something that
only does one or two simple things.
Bring it back to monophonic sound.
Restrict yourself to four tracks.
“My favourite way of forcing my
brain to wake up is shutting down
every plugin except one and saying,
‘Right, make a song with that one
synth’. It worked when I first started
out… why can’t it work today?”

“The harsh reality is that I only make use of
around 5% of what each of those DAWs is
capable of. But I can get them to do the things
that I need them to do.”
Could you live without a computer? Go back
to the sequencer days?
CC: “Are you kidding! I read Computer Music
religiously, and I am a plugin hoarder. I’m always
bitching about this on Twitter, but I can’t seem to
stop. If there’s a new compressor coming out
next week, I have to have it. I would say I’ve got
30 or more compressors on my computer. What
do I need 30 compressors for?
“If you’re on the road all the time – which I am
– what you actually need is a compressor that
will make your music sound correct when you’re
using headphones. But if I read about a new one
and it sounds like it will make my life a little bit
easier or there’s a special deal on it, I will buy it.
“And, like any hoarder, I never really get rid of
anything. Even if it’s a plugin that I never use, I
still end up keeping it. Hardware, as well. More or
less every bit of hardware that I’ve ever owned is the right room. It sounds kinda boring, but that’s
still in the studio. My first synth, my first guitar, the best thing I’ve learned in all the years I’ve
old four-tracks.” been making music. You can have 100,000
bucks worth of Eurorack gear, a fully-loaded
: Yeah… there are some pictures out there Mac and the best PMC monitors available, but if
of you sitting in front of a very well-stocked your room isn’t up to the job, the whole thing
studio. And you’ve got some seriously tasty will fall apart.”
analogue synths. Have you investigated the
softsynth world? Carl Craig will be joined by Kelvin Sholar and the
CC: “Oh, yeah! Like I said, I’m a hoarder. Chineke! Orchestra for a performance of Versus at
Omnisphere is a no-brainer. Maschine is getting the Royal Albert Hall on April 28. The show is part
interesting, but still hasn’t reached its full of the 2019 Love Classical Season. For more
potential. The Roland and Arturia collections. I details, visit royalalberthall.com
like libraries of sounds… something like the
Arturia Analog Lab. You can flick through a
whole heap of sounds without having to change
plugins. That makes sense to me.
“On the hardware side, I do have some
modern stuff, too. It’s not all vintage. The
Pioneeer/Dave Smith Toraiz AS-1 doesn’t seem to HEAR MORE
do a whole lot when you first look at it, but after
a while you realise that it does everything. The
Studio Electronics Omega8 is pretty cool.
“Better than the old synths? Hmm… even
after all these years, I still love my SH-101. It cost
me 50 bucks and the guy who sold it to me was
so mad when he found out how much they were Bug In The Bass Bin
worth a couple of years later. Maybe that’s why I bit.ly/IZ_BITBB
love it so much. It only cost me 50 bucks.” At Les
bit.ly/CC_AL
: And is that the one bit of gear you
couldn’t live without? WWW

Self-professed hoarder Carl has a mix of old and new
gear, including the Pioneer/Dave Smith Toraiz AS-1
carlcraig.net
CC: “No, the one bit of gear I couldn’t live
without is my room… my studio room. When soundcloud.com/carlcraignet
you’re starting out and you’re making your first
twitter.com/carlcraignet
tunes in your bedroom, it’s all about raw energy
and ideas. But when you start stepping up the facebook.com/carlcraigofficial
ladder, you begin to realise the importance of

84 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019

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the same stringent testing methods
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6 A decent product that’s only
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7 Solid. Well worth considering
8 Very good. A well-conceived

88 ROB PAPEN VECTO 9

and executed product
Excellent. First-rate and
With XY-pad oscillator blending, this former Rack Extension- among the best you can buy
only synth brings vector synthesis back with a bang 10 Exceptional. It just doesn’t get
any better than this!

90 92 94
Roland IK Multimedia DMG Audio
TB-303 Bassline SampleTank 4 Multiplicity

96 98 101
Krotos K-Devices Mini Reviews
Audio Igniter WOV + TTAP

Awarded to products A product has to really If the product In the opinion of the
that challenge existing impress us with its exceeds expectations Editor, the best product
ideas and do something functionality and for its price, it will reviewed in the
entirely new features to win this one receive this gong magazine this month

June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 87

 > reviews / rob papen vecto
XY PAD EDIT MODE FILTERS
Perform vector synthesis Shape the XY pad’s path of Two multimode filters,
and modulate anything travel by moving breakpoints working in series or parallel
WAVEFORM
Choose from
hundreds of
oscillator waveforms

AMP ENVELOPE
Featuring the Fade
SMA parameter for
Pulse width altering the Sustain
modulation by any
other name

MOD MATRIX FX
Make up to eight Two effects, each
modulation with its own choice
assignments of modules

FREE ENVELOPES
Assign these two
ADSRs (with Fade)
to anything you like FREE LFOS ARPEGGIATOR
Two simple but effective Arpeggiation, step sequencing
low-frequency oscillators and modulation

Rob Papen
Vecto £80
The latest virtual instrument from the renowned Dutch sound designer
and plugin developer brings back a classic 80s synthesis technique

Originally released only as a Rack Extension
for Propellerhead’s Reason DAW in 2015, Rob
Papen’s latest plugin instrument (VST/AU/AAX),
Vecto, employs a method of sound generation
that doesn’t come around too often these days:
vector synthesis. This powerful technique was
pioneered by Sequential Circuits with the
Prophet VS in 1986, and followed up most
famously by Korg with their legendary
Wavestation shortly after. Quite simply, it
centres on manual control and modulation of
the output blend of multiple oscillators using a
joystick or similar controller. The complex,
shifting tones of vector synthesis are well suited
to sustained sounds – pads, strings and the like –
and particularly favoured by cinematic sound
designers and ambient producers.
synth, with the oscillator mix governed by the
XY pad – see Vector director – unless it’s turned
off, in which case the individual oscillators are
balanced in the conventional manner, using
their Volume controls. Like other Rob Papen
synths, a huge variety of waveforms are
available for every oscillator, in categories
comprising Analogue (Sine, Square, Triangle,
“Vecto employs a
method of sound
generation that doesn’t
SineRez, Noise, etc), Additive (Glass, Organ,
Vocal, etc), Spectral, and seven Samples menus
including Big Samples, Tuned Percussive
Samples and FX Samples. The usual oscillator
tuning controls are in place, as is a Sub knob that
dials in a square wave in one direction and a sine
in the other, an octave below the main oscillator.
The Analogue, Additive and Spectral waves
can also be manipulated using a number of
further parameters. Spread applies unison-style
thickening by adding offset oscillators above
and below the main frequency; and Symmetry
Modulation is Vecto’s name for pulse width
modulation, controlled by the Symmetry (pulse
width), Speed (LFO rate, described as a
percentage, for some reason, but topping out at
around 30Hz) and SMA (mod depth) knobs.

Fantastic four
come around too Oscillators 2, 3 and 4 can be synced to Oscillator
1, and a menu built into each oscillator enables
Packed into a tidy but busy single-window
interface, Vecto is a four-oscillator polyphonic
often: vector synthesis” convenient selection (and, optionally, inversion)
of one of a range of volume modulation sources.

88 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019


“Papen is never one to
skimp on filters, and
Vecto has two, drawing
on a broad array of
types and slopes”
You can delay the onset of each oscillator after
triggering, too, in note values from 1/32 to 16/1,
making it possible to program short rhythmic
patterns around them. Output routing options
for every oscillator include the filters, the FX and
any other oscillator, the last for FM (frequency
modulation); and the sampled waveforms can
be reversed and set to retrigger repeatedly at
any of the above note values.
Papen isn’t one to skimp on filters, and Vecto
has two, drawing on a broad array of types and
slopes, from low- and high-pass, through band-
pass and notch, to Vocal, Comb and Formant, at
roll-off slopes from 6-36dB/octave. They can be
routed in series or parallel, pre or post FX, and
their dedicated ADSR filter envelopes feature a
Fade control for turning the sustain stage into a
second attack or decay segment. The Amp and
Free envelopes also incorporate this.
Mod complex
With eight assignment slots in its modulation
matrix, Vecto provides a decent amount of
parameter animation options. Alongside the
expected list of MIDI streams and CCs, plus
Oscillator Retrigger and Delay, White Noise and
a few other oddities, the onboard modulation
sources consist of two simple LFOs, four
envelopes (including those of both filters), Arp
Velocity (see below) and both axes of the XY
Pad. All parameters are available as targets,
even those of the modulators themselves and
the FX controls – always good to see.
The Arpeggiator features a comprehensive
menu of directions (Up, Down, Random, Chord,
etc) and a 16-step sequencer, with both free
running and retriggering modulation modes.
Swing and Length knobs bring the groove and
shaping, and the balance of programmed (in the
Velocity lane) and played velocity is adjustable.
Unusually, Vecto’s two FX modules aren’t
identical. Instead, FX1 handles modulation-
based effects – Chorus, Ensemble, Flanger,
Clicking the logo reveals the ‘back’ of the plugin,
housing a handful of global settings
rob papen vecto  /  reviews  <
Vector director
Although essentially the same in
design as its modulation-generating
equivalents on other Papen synths, the
XY pad at the heart of Vecto is where
the actual ‘vector’ part of vector
synthesis takes place. The red dot
serves as the virtual ‘joystick’ via which
the four oscillators positioned on each
corner of its containing square are
intuitively blended.
The red dot can be dragged around
with the mouse and assigned as a
modulation target in the matrix for
automated movement. The XY pad’s
killer feature, though, is the ability to
record and play back manual
movement of the red dot as a path
Phaser or Widener – while FX2 hosts Delay or
Reverb. As was the case with its stablemate Go2
(9/10, 258), we’re not impressed by the
inability to use reverb and delay together, but
other than that, it’s a decent spread of
processing options, and all of them offer plenty
of control and sound fantastic.
X, Y, see?
Vecto arrived in its new plugin incarnation with
little fanfare, presumably because the RE
version had already been around for quite a
while. It’s certainly a synth still worth getting
excited about, though, marrying all the Papen
staples we know and love – well-stocked
oscillators, superb filters, deep modulation, the
recordable XY Pad, etc – to the fun and easily
accessible sound design avenues opened up by
vector synthesis. Pads, ambiences and
modulated sequences are its obvious fortes, but
basses, leads and ‘shorter’ sounds are very
much on the cards as well, as even without the
vector functionality, it’s a very capable four-
oscillator synth with an extensive library of
waveforms ripe for exploitation. The pricetag is
spot on, too, making this a solid buy for any
electronic musician on the hunt for interesting
new textures and colours.
Web timespace.com
June 2019 /  Computer musiC  /  89
In Poly mode, each
voice gets its own
independent red
dot in the XY Pad
defined by up to 32 editable
breakpoints. The path can be looped
from any breakpoint; played back
monophonically (restarting with each
new note), polyphonically (each note
has its own red dot) or free (note input
doesn’t restart the path); sped up and
slowed down (with modulation of the
Speed control) by a factor of up to 16;
synced to host tempo; and quantised in
terms of both timing and breakpoint
positions on an underlying grid. A
useful menu of editing functions (Set to
circle, Rotate, Reverse, etc) facilitates
instant transformation of the path, and
the XY pad is also available as a general
modulation source, of course.
Alternatively
Korg Wavestation
N/A » N/A » $50
One of the original vector synths is
available in plugin form
Arturia Prophet V
101 » 7/10 » €149
Improved since our review,
Arturia’s emulation includes both
the Prophet V and Prophet VS
Verdict
For Four-oscillator vector synthesis
with recordable XY pad
So many waveforms!
Flexible oscillator and filter routing
Great sound
Over 1000 presets
Against Very basic LFOs
Delay or reverb, but not both together
Modulation isn’t visualised
Papen’s proprietary XY pad finds its natural
home in this versatile vector synth
8/10
 > reviews / roland tb-303 software bass line
PLAY MODE
VARIATIONS Choose one of five
Each Patch playback directions
comprises eight
variations
EDIT
Click this button
to reveal and
hide the step
sequencer
RANDOMIZE
Generate Patterns
with variable
randomisation ROTATE/TRANSPOSE
Shift the pattern left/
right, up/down
Roland
TB-303 Software
Bass Line Subscription
At long last, one of the greatest synths ever made gets the official
software emulation we’ve waited so long for
It took them an age to finally get into the
virtual instrument market, but over the last
couple of years, Roland have nailed it with their
Legendary Series of plugins. Available only by
subscribing to the Roland Cloud service, this
gradually expanding library of classic synths
and boxes reborn in software form – TR-808 and
909, SH-101, Juno-106, Jupiter-8, JV-1080, D-50
and more – has put the Japanese giant at the top
of the Roland emulation game, previously
dominated in their absence by Propellerhead,
AudioRealism and D16, amongst others.
The latest in the Legendary Series is one that
many dance producers have had on their
wishlist since the Cloud first appeared: the
TB-303 Bass Line. Launched on ‘303 Day’ (3
March 2019) to celebrate the 35th anniversary of
the original synth, TB-303 Software Bass Line is
built on the same ACB (Analog Circuit
Behaviour) modelling as its stablemates. If
you’re already a Roland Cloud subscriber, waste
90 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019
SYNTH CONTROLS PATTERN/PATCH
Tweak the sound with Patterns and Patches are
these knobs stored independently
SCALE MODE
Snap the randomiser
to selected pitches
no more time reading this review and go get it,
cos it’s flat-out wicked. If not, pricing is £18.50
per month, £185 for a year, £325 for two years, or
£745 for five years of membership. That gets you
not only TB-303 Software Bass Line and its many
Legendary Series siblings, but also the Aira
System-1 and System-8, and a ton of ROMplers
drawing on a wealth of sampled Roland gear.
TB confirmed
Designed to generate a very specific kind of
sound (see A brief history of the Roland TB-303),
the synth itself is as simple as they come. A
single oscillator, with a choice of saw or square
waveforms, feeds into a 24dB/octave low-pass
filter, with six knobs governing Tuning (up to an
octave either way), the level/filter boost applied
to Accented steps (see below), and the Cutoff,
Resonance, envelope Decay and (very quirky)
Modulation of the filter. And that’s it! It’s not
really possible to make the 303 sound ‘bad’,
EFFECTS
Distortion and
Delay modules for
effects processing
ACCENT/SLIDE
Light the buttons to
make steps louder
and/or legato
SEQUENCER
DISPLAY
Drag the bars to
change the notes
E E
which is a huge part of its charm and one of the
main reasons for its success and longevity.
Clicking the Panel button, however, pops out
extra Software-only controls, including VCF Trim
(extending or shortening the filter cutoff range)
and Condition, which dials in subtle tuning and
filter fluctuations to artificially ‘age’ the synth. It
also houses two simple effects modules: Drive
and Delay, with a couple of adjustable
parameters each – Tone/Depth and Time/(wet)
Level. Drive offers five distortion algorithms and
a Compressor option, while Delay lets you
choose between two Delays, two Chorus types,
Flanger and Delay+Chorus. They all sound good
enough for some easy glamourising.
Steps ahead
While you can trigger TB-303 Software via MIDI,
this is a synth that was absolutely built to be
sequenced. In the old days, that meant setting
note pitches, accents and slides one step at a

“While you can trigger
TB-303 via MIDI, this is
a synth that was built
to be sequenced”
time via a fiddly button-operated ‘workflow’, but
the plugin modernises things with a far more
practical step-sequencing interface, and a
choice of five playback styles (Forward, Reverse,
Fwd/Rev, Invert and Random). The global timing
is still set by the Scale and Shuffle knobs, but
note editing is done graphically. Either select a
step, then click a key on the six-octave keyboard
below to set its note, or drag the note bars
directly up and down in the display, which – very
weirdly until you get used to it – scales its range
based on the highest and lowest notes in the
sequence. Slides and Accents are activated
using the buttons at the top, the latter
represented visually by note-linking curves; the
pattern length is adjustable from 1-16 steps; and
Transpose and Rotate buttons enable vertical
and horizontal shifting of the entire pattern. A
variable Randomisation system generates
complete patterns (snapping notes to a user-
defined scale if required) and variations on
existing ones at a click; and patterns can be
dragged directly out from the plugin to the host
DAW as MIDI or audio clips. It’s a perfectly
effective setup, although we’re genuinely a little
sad to see that the original step-by-step system,
which, with its linear, old-school approach, could
engender very different results, isn’t an option.
In terms of preset management, TB-303
Software can address up to 64 Banks of up to 64
independently loaded Patterns and Patches
each, with eight variations per pattern switched
via MIDI or the buttons at the top left of the
interface. That’s a lot of sounds and riffs
accessible from directly within the plugin itself.
Head in the Cloud
If you’ve never used a 303 before, note that it
serves up a limited range of very identifiable
sounds. Think Chicago/acid house and techno –
aggressive, rolling basslines and screaming,
filter-swept leads. Its magic lies in its ‘playability’:
bash out a pattern, map the six main synthesis
knobs to your MIDI controller (automatically, if
it’s a Roland TB-3 or TB-03) and go wild with the
Manage and rename Patterns, Patches and Banks in the pop-out Memory Select window
roland tb-303 software bass line  /  reviews  <
A brief history of the Roland TB-303
The battery-powered and totally
analogue Transistor Bass 303 was
launched in 1981, alongside the TR-606
drum machine, to provide ‘realistic’
bassline accompaniments for
guitarists. Sounding nothing
whatsoever like a real bass player, and
being less than intuitive to program, it
only sold around 10,000 units and was
discontinued in 1984.
Three years later, Chicago-based
group Phuture (featuring the
legendary DJ Pierre) got their hands on
a 303 and set dance music careering
down a new path with the release of the
seminal Acid Tracks. Acid house was
born and suddenly the 303 was a must-
envelope, filter and pitch. It’s as much fun as
you’ll ever have with a synth, and we can happily
report that Roland’s virtual take sounds as close
to the real thing as we’ve heard in software.
Yes, it’s an issue that you can’t just buy
TB-303 Software outright, but Roland’s Loyalty
Program does let you choose one instrument for
each year you subscribe, so full ‘ownership’ is
eventually possible. Want the 303 sound in your
DAW, with easier sequencing than the original?
This is one of the best ways to get it.
Web rolandcloud.com
This dinky silver box
accidentally changed
dance music forever
have instrument for every DJ and
electronic producer in the States, then
the UK and Europe. Indeed, for many,
it’s remained equally indispensable
ever since, commanding silly prices on
the second hand market to this day,
despite the introduction of the
impressive TB-03 remake in 2016.
In 1996, Propellerhead famously
changed the music software game with
the watershed release of their ReBirth
RB-338 application, emulating two
303s, along with an 808 and a 909.
Since then, there have been a few other
software versions of the mighty silver
box, but Roland’s is the most authentic
yet, as you’d expect.
Alternatively
AudioRealism Bass Line 3
229 » 10/10 » £80
Packed with clever additions to the
303 formula, AudioRealism’s
version sounds fantastic
D16 Phoscyon
N/A » N/A » €59
Superb 303 emulation with built-in
distortion and loads of added
features and controls
Verdict
For Sounds very close to the real thing
Much improved sequencing
Built-in effects are handy
Flexible randomisation
Against We wish we could just buy it
The option to sequence it ‘old school’
would have been welcome
The definitive software 303 emulation is
easy to sequence and sounds great, but
the subscription could be a turn-off
9/10
June 2019 /  CompuTer muSiC  /  91
 > reviews / ik multimedia sampletank 4 max
MIXER LIVE MODE
LAYER EDITOR Apply effects and adjust Set up set lists and songs PART CONTROLS
Set up key and volumes, pans and sends for instant Multi switching Adjust various
velocity ranges for parameters for the
each Instrument selected Instrument

PART SELECTOR
Switch between the
16 Instruments with
NEW GUI
this menu
The Edit Panel now
has interactive
graphical elements
PLAYER PANEL
The Arpeggiator,
Strummer and MACROS
Phraser live here Click to reveal eight
Macros, preassigned
for every preset

EFFECTS RACK
A lunchbox-style DRUM PADS
rack for viewing Switch the virtual
multiple FX keyboard for a row
MODULATION MATRIX
32 freely assignable slots of pads
with modifiers

IK Multimedia
SampleTank 4
MAX €600
Sized up by a factor of seven, and redrawn to be easier on the eye and
brain, this venerable ROMpler is looking and sounding better than ever

It’s been four and a half years since the
arrival of the last full version update to Italian
software/hardware powerhouse IK Multimedia’s
SampleTank (VST/AU/AAX/Standalone) sample
playback synth. Described in our review of
version 3 as “big and beautiful, if not particularly
bold” (8/10, 210), this 16-part multitimbral
workstation aims to put an enormous and
comprehensive library of lovingly recorded
drums, basses, keys, guitars, synths, strings,
brass, ethnic instrumentation, FX and anything
else you can think of at your fingertips, quickly
and easily, but with plenty of sound-shaping,
processing and customisation options.
Hey, good looking
SampleTank 3 introduced a completely new –
and much improved – interface and engine, Live
Sets (for quick switching between ‘songs’) and
more, and increased the size of the sample
library from 8GB to 33GB, amounting to over
4000 instruments. As well as the new features
that will be the focus of this review, SampleTank
4 MAX smokes those numbers, weighing in at an
insane 260GB, with 120,000 samples fuelling
over 8000 multisampled instruments (see In
the ’Tank) and 7500 loops, plus 4000-odd MIDI
patterns. Two lesser versions – SampleTank 4
and SampleTank 4 SE – reduce the figures
“SampleTank 4 makes
an immediate good
impression with its
redesigned, resizable,
Retina-compatible GUI”
considerably, for €180 and €360 respectively.
See the IK website for a content comparison.
Getting this gargantuan library installed is
quite a chore if you opt for the download rather
than the USB drive version. The sample folders
for each instrument type have to be manually
downloaded as 97 separate installers, although
you can download multiple files at once. Having
finally nabbed them, you then have to run each
one individually – 16 of them just to install the
new acoustic pianos, for example. It’s by far the
most tedious, long-winded library installation
routine we’ve ever seen – second only to that of
IK’s 23-file Syntronik, in fact – and it really is time
the company put some of that hard-earned cash
into the development of a proper download/
installation manager.
Fortunately, once that’s all done, SampleTank
4 makes an immediate good impression with its
completely redesigned, resizable, Retina/HiDPI-
compatible GUI. The whole thing looks fabulous,

92 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019


“IK have made
SampleTank feel more
‘synth-like’ with the
addition of a full-on
Modulation Matrix”
doing away with the old-fashioned visuals of ST3
and making every component infinitely prettier
(especially the effects); and the workflow
throughout has been enhanced in terms of
logical layout and general ease of access. The
Browser, for example, now features tag filtering
(Style, Timbre, etc), as well as details of each
sound, including effects and Macro
assignments; and the Part Edit window is a
night-and-day improvement, with graphical
representation and editing of envelopes, LFOs
and filter response curves, amongst other
tweaks. Hard disk streaming is now supported,
too, for faster loading, but ST4 is fully backward
compatible with older versions, as well as IK’s
other libraries: Syntronik and Miroslav
Philharmonik 2.
IK have had a good stab at making
SampleTank feel more ‘synth-like’ with the
addition of a full-on Modulation Matrix,
expanding exponentially on the established
hardwired mod routings. Up to 32 assignments
can be made for each Instrument, drawing on all
available internal sources (LFOs, envelopes and
Macros), as well as external MIDI streams and
CCs, and targeting all meaningful Zone and
Element parameters, complete with ‘via’
modifiers. It’s a powerful and flexible setup.
In the processing and mixing departments, 13
new effects have been added, bringing the total
to 70. They’re all built on IK’s proven T-RackS and
AmpliTube technology and thus sound superb,
and you can now view, adjust and assign Macros
to all five of an Instrument’s modules together in
a gorgeous new lunchbox rack-style interface
(but not the Send or Master effects, oddly, which
can still only be accessed via the Mixer page).
Players gonna play
On the performance side of things, four new
‘Players’ open up various avenues of MIDI and
audio manipulation, and are catered for in Live
Mode by the addition of a Tempo field for each
Multi. The Arpeggiator is well appointed for
The Effects Rack at last gives SampleTank’s outstanding
effects the graphical showcase they deserve
ik multimedia sampletank 4 max  /  reviews  <
In the ’Tank
Once you’ve made it through the ordeal
of installation, a vast and – for the most
part – impressive world of
multisampled instrumentation is yours
to command, adding over 200GB of
entirely new material and previously
separate expansion packs to the
SampleTank 3 library (also included).
Recorded at numerous studios
around the world, as well as IK’s new
facility in Modena, the ST4 library
prioritises the depth of its headline
instruments as much as it does the
sheer volume of its sounds. The new
Yamaha C7 grand piano (145GB), with
its multiple mic setups and treatments,
is absolutely beautiful, and the other
arpeggiation and sequencing; the Strummer is a
deeply programmable rhythmic chord
strumming engine that works particularly well
with SampleTank 4’s stunning guitar patches;
and the Phraser lets you assign complete MIDI
sequences from the 4000-strong internal
Pattern library, and external MIDI files (with a bit
of faffing), to note triggers. The Loop Manager,
meanwhile, assigns audio loops to triggering
keys, with three distinct algorithms (Resample,
Beats and Stretch) enabling basic control of
pitchshifting and timestretching, and
granularity or harmonic content. This last is the
least obviously useful part of the software, if
we’re honest.
More is more
By far the biggest and most transformative
update to SampleTank yet, ST4 feels so much
more fluid, capable and contemporary in its
design than v3 that it would be worth upgrading
just for the new UI, Modulation Matrix and
Player modules alone –particularly the
Strummer. However, that extraordinary sound
library brings incredible sonic range to the
package, too, surely qualifying it as the most
expansive – and, indeed, expensive – ROMpler
ever made. Immense.
Web ikmultimedia.com
June 2019 /  CoMpuTer MuSiC  /  93
SampleTank 4’s
huge library of
sounds will keep
you busy for years
keyboards (electric pianos, clavs, etc)
aren’t exactly shabby, either. ST3’s
awesome selection of acoustic and
electric guitars was already a triumph,
but ST4’s 25GB stash trumps it for both
depth and variety.
Similarly, the fresh multi-articulation
strings, brass and woodwinds can be
made to sound wonderfully realistic,
and a ton of drums (12 new acoustic and
107 electronic kits – 65GB) and
percussion provide the source material
for polished beats of all kinds. And for
electronic musicians, a veritable
goldmine of dance music sounds
includes 22GB of colourful new basses,
leads, pads, plucks, sweeps and FX.
Alternatively
Steinberg HALion 6
243 » 9/10 » £282
Steinberg’s sampler/synth isn’t
short on preset sounds
Native Instruments Kontakt 6
N/A » N/A » £339
With over 1000 instruments, and
the new Play Series ‘synths’
Verdict
For Bursting with great sounds
Much better interface than v3
Acoustic and electric instruments are
amazingly expressive
Excellent effects
Arpeggiator and Strummer modules
Against Installation routine is absurd
MAX edition is very expensive
No Multis in main ST4 library
SampleTank hits a new level of refinement
and versatility with its cavernous
soundbank and supercharged interface
9/10
 > reviews / dmg audio multiplicity
BAND NODE
PRESETS SLOPE
Drag around to set
A collection of presets is Drag to set the band’s roll-
the Frequency and
included for guidance off from 6-96dB/octave
Gain of the band

BAND CONTROLS
Select a band to DRY GAIN
access its Bring up the
parameters below dry signal level
for parallel
processing

SIDECHAIN EQ
Shape the RATIO BELOW
frequency response Apply discrete
of the sidechain processing below
the threshold

TOOLTIPS
A helpful
description of
whatever’s under
the mouse pointer
STEREO PROCESSING DYN/TRANS DUAL RELEASE
Balance Left/Right or Set the processing balance Set up separate
Mid/Side between pre/post-attack Slow and Fast
Release times

DMG Audio
Multiplicity £175
One of the world’s leading plugin developers reckon they’ve taken
multiband dynamics processing to the next level…

DMG Audio founder and DSP guru Dave
Gamble has made it his mission to make
100% in-the-box mastering a genuinely viable
proposition, and Multiplicity (VST/AU/AAX) is the
latest fruit of that obsession. A combination of
multiband compressor/expander and dynamic
EQ, it claims to give a “degree of control that
isn’t possible with anything else”.
Bands on the run
Multiplicity has a lot going on within its user
interface, but the layout is totally intuitive. The
top section houses the curve/response display
and makes certain settings graphically
interactive; metering and global controls are in
the right hand vertical strip; and all the per-band
parameters appear in the main tabbed Band
Controls section at the bottom. Up to eight
bands are invoked by clicking the + button next
to the rightmost tab, which opens a new band
and adds it to the display. Every band is set to
one of three types when instantiated (although
they can be changed at any point): Xover, Pre or
Post. A Xover is exactly what you’d expect: a
straightforward crossover, dividing the
frequencies on either side. The Pre and Post
types are dynamic EQ bands, Pre routed before
the crossovers, and Post working on the
recombined post-crossover signal.
In Xover mode, a band applies dynamics
processing to the input signal within its covered
frequency range, like a regular multiband
“It’s complicated stuff,
for sure, but not as
hard to work with as it
might sound”
compressor/expander. The upper (or lower for
the highest Xover) frequency and roll-off slope
are adjusted in the Band Controls or directly in
the display, the latter from 6dB/octave to an
impressively steep 96dB/octave.
In Pre/Post dynamic EQ mode, dynamics
processing is combined with equalisation,
targeting very specific frequency ranges within
the wideband signal for compression or
expansion. You could, for example, use it to
surgically cut a harsh hi-hat within a mix only
when it exceeds a certain volume level. Eight
filter types are available: low-pass, high-pass and
band-pass, in regular, steeper Butterworth, and,
for band-pass, super-sharp EE modes, plus Flat
for broadband processing.
Sweet release
With the exception of Pre/Post’s Q setting, the
Band Controls are consistent across all three
modes. Threshold sets the volume level above

94 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019


“We’ve never come
across a dynamics
processor as versatile
as Multiplicity”
which compression/expansion is applied; Ratio
ranges from 1:2 (expansion) to inf:1 (limiting), or
1:inf to -1:1 in Extended mode; and the Ceiling
control caps the amount of gain change applied
at up to 96dB. Crucially, popping out the
Advanced panel reveals equivalent controls for
processing the signal below the threshold, too:
Ratio Below and Floor. These are accompanied
by Deadband, which opens up a range below the
Threshold, up to 96dB deep, in which no
processing takes place; Dry Gain, for parallel
processing; and Shape, which defines the shape
of the attack and release curves.
Back in the main Band Controls, the Dyn/
Trans control allows processing to be applied
only to the ‘transient’ (pre-attack) or ‘dynamic’
(post-attack) parts of the signal, or 100% of one
and any percentage of the other. The Attack
parameter (0.2-200ms), then, sets the ‘cutoff’
time between the transient and dynamic stages.
The Release, meanwhile, switches between two
separate timings – Slow (10-2000ms) and Fast
(1-2000ms) – depending on whether or not the
signal exceeds the RMS level (within the
20-4000ms Release RMS window) by the
number of dB specified by the Crest parameter.
It’s complicated stuff, for sure, but not as hard to
work with as it might sound, and the shaping of
dynamic response around transients that it
facilitates really is something to behold.
The flexibility continues into the stereo realm,
where each band is able to operate in L/R or M/S
mode, with free control given over the balance
of processing between the two channels.
Multipl’ choice
We’ve never come across a dynamics processor
as versatile as Multiplicity. Its unique
combination of conventional multiband
compression/expansion and dynamic EQ is
liberating, affording unrivalled freedom when it
comes to detailed shaping of dynamic response
in both the time and frequency domains.
Precision and transparency are its two
defining traits, with the dual-stage processing,
separate Slow/Fast Release and ability to apply
There’s plenty of under-the-hood tinkering with
Multiplicity’s interface to be done in the Setup page
dmg audio multiplicity  /  reviews  <
Sidechain supreme
Many compressors and limiters offer
processing of the sidechain signal
before it hits the detection circuit in
order to alter the dynamic response of
the effect ‘at source’, but Multiplicity
goes considerably further than most in
this regard.
First of all, clicking the SC EQ button
flips the bottom left panel from
showing the transfer curve and
dynamic response to hosting the
controls of a capable three-band EQ.
The low and high bands are switchable
between resonant low/high-pass and
high/low shelving behaviour, with
6-96dB slopes for the filters and up to
+/-24dB gain for the shelves. In
compression/expansion independently above
and below the threshold pushing the – ahem –
envelope of dynamics control even further than
the benchmark previously set by its stablemate,
Limitless (10/10, 230). And although clearly
intended for mastering above all, mix engineers
will also find endless uses for it, from
transforming drum tracks and sweetening
guitars, to potentially rescuing even the most
dynamically wayward vocals and indulging in all
kinds of sonic experimentation – although high
CPU usage means you certainly won’t be
running it on every channel and bus.
Multiplicity looks great, too, and boasts a
wide array of Global and Instance preferences
for customisation of the interface, metering,
ballistics and more. More importantly, though, it
succeeds in yielding an incredible amount of
control without becoming overly intimidating –
although total newcomers to audio engineering
will, of course, be just as flummoxed by it as they
would any other plugin of this type.
DMG Audio may well have scored more 10s in
than any other developers, and we have no
hesitation in adding Multiplicity to that count.
It’s a confident shot across the bows for high-
end mastering hardware, and an essential
addition to any ITB engineers’s arsenal.
Web dmgaudio.com
June 2019 /  CoMputer MusiC  /  95
The sidechain
EQ gives you
three bands to
play with
between those, the mid band serves as
parametric peaking or band-pass filter.
Then it’s on to the pop-out Sidechain
panel, wherein up to 50ms of
Lookahead can be dialled in to hone
transient handling; and the same L/R/
M/S balancing parameters found in the
Band Controls, as well as the degree of
channel linkage, can be tweaked to
tailor the response in terms of stereo
behaviour. As for the keying signal,
rather ingeniously, the Source menu
not only permits selection of the band
being processed itself, the wideband
signal or an external source as the
sidechain, but also the input of any
other Xover band.
Alternatively
FabFilter Pro-Q 3
266 » 10/10 » £134
FabFilter’s treasured EQ at last gets
a dynamic option with this
excellent update
Blue Cat Audio MB-5 Dynamix
268 » 9/10 » €249
Five bands of dynamics processing,
with internal sidechaining,
waveshaping and more
Verdict
For Ridiculously flexible and versatile
Gloriously transparent
Multiband dynamics and Pre/Post
dynamic EQ is a winning combo
Huge range of configuration options
Against Er… can’t open Sidechain and
Advanced panels at the same time?
DMG’s ambitious, innovative and
technically flawless plugin sets a new gold
standard for dynamics processing
10/10
> reviews / krotos audio igniter
Krotos Audio
Igniter £539
This unique vehicular sound design plugin puts you in the driving
seat with a heady fusion of synthesis and sample playback
The latest in Scottish developers Krotos
Audio’s series of sound design plugins is
geared up for the creation of real-world and
‘imagined’ vehicle sounds – cars, trucks,
motorbikes, helicopters and planes – using a
combination of granular and conventional
sample playback, and a five-oscillator synth.
Igniter is available in two versions: Igniter,
which we’re reviewing here, incorporating 6GB
of samples, and Igniter Full Tank, which adds
another 70GB of samples (“onboard recordings,
ramps, static rev bands, Foley sounds, skids and
slides”) for those who crave the ultimate in sonic
detailing – and don’t mind paying £881 to get it.
Start your engine
Igniter loads as a virtual instrument (VST/AU/
AAX), and all you have to do to get started is
load a preset (see The cars are the stars), hit the
Engine Start/Stop button and manipulate/
automate the Revs knob. This ties into Igniter’s
eight modulators and serves as a master macro
control, adjusting multiple assigned parameters
to ‘accelerate’ and/or otherwise intensify the
sound of the vehicle.
That may well be all you need to get your
onscreen vehicle sounding the part, but Igniter
is bursting with customisation options
nonetheless, in the shape of four ‘generators’,
and a comprehensive array of modulation,
mixing and effects controls.
The cars are the stars
Igniter ships with around 200 presets, each
one configuring the whole plugin for a wide
range of ready-to-go vehicles and engines.
While the helicopter and plane presets have
all been constructed entirely using sets of
samples in the Loop engine (and not to their
detriment, we might add – they sound
fantastic), the wheeled options make full use
of the more flexible Granular engine,
combining complex Engine and Exhaust
sounds in a proprietary ‘package’ format that
96 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019
The Granular generator lets you balance
sample-based Engine and Exhaust sounds
imported from the library in any combination,
set the engine to Manual or Automatic, and
accelerate/decelerate. The Synth generator
facilitates the addition of an overtly electronic
layer, its five oscillators each able to blend two
waveforms, and apply FM, AM and vibrato.
In the One Shot tab, four samples can be
dragged in (from the library or elsewhere) and
triggered in various ways, including via an
onboard sequencer of sorts, for ‘sweeteners’,
such as skids, ignition sounds, horns and so on.
In the Loops generator, up to four looping and
crossfaded samples (again, internal or external)
are arranged on a timeline and swept through
with the Revs knob, providing road noise,
windscreen wipers and other continuous layers,
as well as Igniter’s aircraft sounds.
The four generators meet in the mixer, where
five insert effects can be loaded onto each, as
well as a send bus and the Master out, from a list
that includes EQ, Compressor, Convolution
Reverb and the awesome Doppler. The system is
brought to life with the aforementioned eight
Modulators, which work as LFOs or envelopes,
applied on the fly using the Revs control.
Pedal to the metal
Igniter is yet another triumph for Krotos. The
effort that’s gone into building the sample
allows for a great deal of tweakability,
whether deployed for realistic emulation or
sci-fi sound design.
The 14 Engine/Exhaust packages in the
library are enough to get any petrol head
drooling. The Porsche Carrera, Audi R8,
Aston Martin Rapide and Ferrari 348 top the
list, followed by the rather more mundane
Subaru Impreza, Honda Civic and Toyota
Chaser, a handful of trucks and SUVs, a
U650M tractor, and a Harley Davidson hog.
library is clearly immense, and the level of
control granted over it is mindblowing. The
synthesis engine works well, too, whether you
just need to add a bit of sub-bass rumble, or a
fictitious layer of noise; and the effects sound
wicked and offer plenty of customisation.
While there’s nothing here that musicians
should feel any compulsion to drop over 500
quid on, for cinematic and game sound
designers, Igniter enables the conjuration of a
literally infinite range of utterly convincing real-
world and sci-fi vehicle sounds within a
powerful, flexible but approachable interface.
Absolutely amazing.
Web krotosaudio.com
Alternatively
Boom Library Turbine
$219
Generate realistic aircraft and ‘flight
path’ sounds – without a sample
anywhere in sight
Le Sound SpaceMotors
€149
This madcap synth is dedicated
solely to sci-fi vehicle sounds
Verdict
For Totally realistic and eminently
customisable vehicle sounds
Impressive degree of real-time control
Superb sample library
Allows use of external samples, too
Synth engine is surprisingly useful
Against If you’re only producing
music, you can almost certainly pass
If you make vehicle and/or engine noises
as part of your job, you need Igniter
9/10
> reviews / k-devices wov+ttap
K-Devices
WOV+TTAP
The Italian Max For Live specialists transition to full plugin
developer status with a pair of intriguing effects processors
The first two releases in their Phoenix Series,
WOV and TTAP mark the move for Max For
Live developers K-Devices’ into self-contained
plugin effects for Mac and PC. An amplitude
modulator and a delay, respectively, we’re
reviewing them together here as the WOV+TTAP
bundle, but they’re also available separately for
€59 each.
WOV file
WOV is essentially a gate sequencer, cycling
through anywhere between two and eight steps
at synced or unsynced rates from 1/128 to 16/1
with triplet and dotted options, or 0.1 to 30Hz.
The relative level of each step is adjusted using
its Accent slider, and the shape of the steps is
defined by the Wave, Peak and Warp controls,
which between them provide plenty of curving/
cornering, skewing, widening/narrowing and
positional offset.
Interestingly, the Response control dials in an
envelope follower for modulating the Rate with
input amplitude; and a couple of randomising
elements up the interest even further – see
Random fandom. Switching the Stereo Mode to,
er, two dots enables the Right Channel Offset
function – which applies a one-step delay to the
Accent sequence in the right channel when
activated – and separates out the left/right
processing in the Response and Silence circuits
for a wider sound.
Random fandom
Although it doesn’t feel particularly intrinsic
to their design, randomisation plays a role in
both effects.
With WOV, it’s brought into play using the
Variation and Silence knobs. Variation
specifies the percentage chance of any
sequencer step being either half
(anticlockwise) or double (clockwise) the
prescribed length; meanwhile, raising Silence
increases the chance of any given step being
silenced from zero to 100%.
98 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019
€99
TTAP works like a dual tape delay, with
adjustable delay time for the first buffer or ‘tape’
(Time) and continuous offset of the second
buffer from the first (Section and Gap); a Balance
control for mixing them; and independent
Reverse switches and shapeable amp envelopes
for each, the last allowing attacks to be softened
and interesting textural curves to be created.
The Feedback control works as expected, and
the bipolar Cut knob sweeps a low-pass filter
anticlockwise from centre, or a high-pass
clockwise. LFO-modulatable pitchbend can be
applied to the delays, too, with the bend length
and LFO rate determined by the Section time.
TTAP’d out
WOV and TTAP (or, indeed, WOV+TTAP) are
surprisingly powerful sound design and
production tools, WOV delivering everything
from rhythmic trance-gating and cool tremolo
to smashed-up granular noises, and TTAP
excelling at unusual dub-style delays, weird
pitching effects and smooth, ambient echoing
(we really love those envelopes). Our only
significant complaints are with the visuals. The
flat, minimalist styling of both plugins’ interfaces
looks good, but having to toggle them between
showing parameter names or iconography is
pointless – why not just have both at once?
Similarly, parameter values aren’t displayed on
the controls – you only ever get the value of the
TTAP allows for a touch of chaos as well
with its Repeat and Spread controls. Spread
simply places each delay tap randomly within
the stereo panorama, with its percentage
value defining maximum distance deviation
from the source signal position. Repeat
establishes the likelihood of each delay
buffer repeating rather than overwriting
itself with the input signal, throwing up crazy
results when automated, and effectively
freezing the buffer when cranked up to 100%.
last operated knob or slider in the top right
corner. There’s also no animation in WOV’s
sequencer, which remains unnervingly static,
giving no indication as to progression.
It all looks very sexy, but ease-of-use and
accessibility have certainly taken a back seat to
graphic design here; and while it isn’t a
showstopping issue, with no bearing on
functionality and sound it does detract from the
‘finish’ somewhat, and certainly won’t be helpful
for inexperienced producers. Nonetheless, for
creatively inspiring gating and delay, K-Device’s
artful plugins make for an impressive pair.
Web k-devices.com
Alternatively
Kilohearts Trance Gate
$39
Not as feature-packed as WOV, but
offers up to 64 steps and eight
switchable sequences
Unfiltered Audio Sandman Pro
237 » 9/10 » $99
Incredibly versatile delay plugin
with tons of modulation and the
brilliant Sleep buffer
Verdict
For Interesting, sonically distinctive
plugins that invite experimentation
WOV makes rhythmic gating a cinch
TTAP’s envelopes are a great feature
Against GUIs are a bit too cool for
school, and some of the text is tiny
WOV’s sequencer isn’t animated, and
eight steps aren’t enough
Mildly perverse GUI aside, WOV+TTAP are
deep, original and wonderfully creative
8/10
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 mini reviews / reviews <

mini reviews
Boom Library
ReCenter £69

Web boomlibrary.com more forceful. Response

Format PC/Mac, VST/AU/AAX adjusts the correction
speed, and Lookahead
Soundware and plugin developers Boom Library trades latency off against
really grabbed our attention with the superb accuracy. Mono Filter sets a
Enforcer last year (9/10, 258), and their latest cutoff frequency, from
is a VST/AU/AAX stereo centering effect. In a 20Hz-10kHz, below which
nutshell, ReCenter constantly analyses and everything is monoised;
rotates your wayward stereo (L/R or M/S) signal and Width ranges from
to keep it fixed at any angle you choose, while mono to ‘200% wide’, and
maintaining the integrity and positioning of the can be inverted to flip left
stereo field. Most of the magic happens behind and right. Finally, the
the scenes, and it often gets the job done in its Multiband option switches
default state: just slap the plugin on any stereo in three crossovers for
or mid-side signal in which the main element – independent processing of
or the whole thing – is off to one side or the four discrete bands,
other, and marvel as it miraculously snaps to yielding better results with
dead centre without affecting all the stereo info complex signals.
around it. ReCenter is obviously most at home in the guitar, calm down a wide synth pad with a
You can set the target angle manually if post-production studio, or fixing up field and roving focal point, or reposition anything else in
you’re not aiming for the centre, or automate it dialogue recordings, so it’s not necessarily the stereo field without kludging around with
for re-panning; and the Intensity knob can be something most electronic music producers will panning, however, ReCenter is most assuredly
used to under- or over-play the correction if you find a great deal of regular use for. If you do ever the best way to do it.
want to relax the centre enforcement or make it find yourself needing to centre a wonky vocal or n8/10n

Signum Audio Universal Audio

Bute Limiter £69 (£99 for V76 Preamplifier £115
surround version) Web uaudio.com
Web signumaudio.com Format PC/Mac, VST/AU/AAX
Format PC/Mac, VST/AU/AAX/AudioSuite
Released as part of UAD Software
The followup to Signum Audio’s v9.8, V76 Preamplifier is a DSP-
Bute Loudness Suite analyser/ powered emulation of the V76 mic
limiter combo (and now included preamp for UAD-2/Apollo. Designed
with it) is a more versatile True by the German Institute of Broadcast
Peak brickwall limiter for general Technology and manufactured
mixing and mastering, as under the Telefunken brand in the
opposed to the specific targeting 1950s, this revered box was known
of official loudness standards. for the sheer amount of clean gain it
Available in separate stereo and could deliver – an enormous 76dB –
surround versions, Bute Limiter and its flattering 40Hz-15kHz
shares the same graphical styling as its sibling, with collapsible frequency response. In development for a year, with seven
main histogram-style display showing how much limiting is hardware units used for circuit-modelling reference, UA’s virtual
taking place over the full-length of your project, and numerical incarnation utilises Unison technology, reconfiguring the gain
meters for Gain Reduction and true peak level. Up to +/-20dB of staging and impedance of the Apollo interface’s preamps to
input gain can be applied, there are five release curve options deliver hardware-like response and authenticity. The stepped
and the Release can be adjusted manually from 1ms to 5s, or set Gain control dials in from 3dB to the full 76dB of drive, while the
to Auto (an intelligent algorithm that takes into account pitch Mic input option can be used for heavy distortion of line-level
changes and crest factor) and scaled from x0.10 to x10, for signals – UA have added an Output Gain control for reining the
tailoring to different instrument/source types. The transparency results back in afterwards. Low- and high-pass filters are
of Signum’s waveshaping algorithm and its ability to unfailingly onboard for easy clean-up, too. Adding palpable weight,
catch inter-sample peaks are as impressive with Bute Limiter as character and tasty saturation to drums, vocals, guitars and
with Loudness Suite. For those who don’t need the industrial other miked signals of all kinds, V76 Preamplifier is another fine
specs of the latter, this is a more affordable alternative. addition to UAD-2/Apollo’s palette of sonic colours.
n9/10n n8/10n

June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 101

> reviews / mini reviews
Soundware round-up
Sample Tools by Cr2
Heavy Techno £16
Packing far more sounds into its
865MB frame than their usual
20-of-everything fare, Cr2’s latest is all
about hard techno of the kind
purveyed by Pan-Pot, Charlotte de
Witte, Victor Ruiz et al. The 50 superb
stemmed drum loops (315 files) would
be worth the asking price on their own,
but throw in 51 raw and rolling
basslines, 50 synth loops – from darkly
atmospheric to spiky and aggressive –
and 200 one-shot drums and you have
a confidently produced and genre-
correct bargain. Dare we say it, their
best yet.
sampletoolsbycr2.com
n 10/1
102 / COMPUTER MUSIC June 2019
Niche Audio
Disko Tekk £25
15 funky house projects for Ableton Live and NI
Maschine, each one comprising a Drum Rack or
Group housing all the elements required to construct
a complete groove – individual drum hits, top loops,
separate bass notes, chords, FX, etc – and a few MIDI
files with which to demonstratively trigger them.
We’re fans of Niche Audio’s production in general,
and Disko Tekk doesn’t disappoint: the samples are
bright, vibey and have a ‘crate dug’ feel, and the kits
are inspiring and useful, although it’s a shame Live
and Maschine’s effects don’t see any action beyond
compression on the master output.
loopmasters.com
n8/10n
Sample Magic
Progressive Trance £30
Around 1GB of loops (at 126 and 128bpm) and one-
shots for producers of uplifting trance and similar. 28
stemmed drum loops (143 files) get the party started
with their driving kicks and tight snares, followed by
30 useful top loops, 60 melodically satisfying
basslines and 100 hands-in-the-air synth riffs. 33 mini
music construction kits provide instant inspiration,
and the 70 vocal loops and atmospheres are
beautifully engineered. The reverberant/delayed
one-shot chords cut off abruptly, which limits their
utility a bit – but that’s our only complaint.
samplemagic.com
n9/10n
Apollo Sound
Soulful Urban Funk £20
700MB of drums, basses, guitars, keys, synths, brass,
scratches and vocals for soul, R&B, hip-hop and the
like. 53 drum loops vary between live-sounding drum
kit grooves and electronic beats, and four-to-the-floor
and syncopated kick elements. Electric and synth
bass are there too, though the latter aren’t very
interesting; and with each instrument folder except
the drums including multiple variations on a small
number of themes, it’s not very extensive. There are
great live instrumental and turntable performances
to be had, though, and the price is very fair.
loopmasters.com
n8/10n
Poldoore
Lucid Dreams Subscription
An interesting sample library from another
interesting Noiiz roster artist. Lucid Dreams only
houses 59 and 145 one-shots, but they’re mainly
winners. There are just three loop categories – phat
and perfectly wonky drums, wobbly and atmospheric
keys, and earthy foley-based percussion lines – while
most of the one-shots are drums and noise textures,
with a comparatively inconsequential smattering of
brass, flutes, basses, guitars and keys. There isn’t a
particular genre angle, but producer Poldoore does a
fine trade in off-kilter timing and dynamic sensitivity.
noiiz.com
n8/10n

Zero-G
Psychoacoustics £56
The fruit of a three-way collab between Zero-G, sound
designer Si Begg and “sound artist” Sam Underwood,
this 2.6GB scripted Kontakt library comes with two
distinct interfaces: one for mapping multiple samples
up the keyboard, and the other layering two samples
up at a time over the full note range, with a button for
randomly changing them without affecting the
controls. The samples are truly remarkable, drawing
on a variety of acoustic, electronic, organic and
found sources, and the big, scary cinematic noises
that can be made from them are breathtaking.
timespace.com
n10/10n
Native Instruments
Indigo Dust £44
“Festival-ready techno sounds” are the theme of NI’s
latest Expansion, produced in collaboration with
Torsten Fassbender. Consisting of 37 and 47 kits for
Maschine and Battery respectively, made up of 476
drum and other one-shot samples, plus 380
construction kit loops bounced out of the Maschine
Groups, and 19 Monark and Reaktor Prism presets,
Indigo Dust is a dark, mesmeric tour de force of epic
techno sound design with which complete tracks
could be created in entirety. Highly recommended for
Maschine users in particular.
native-instruments.com
n9/10n
ModeAudio
Relic £18
Bringing together 12 cinematic and synth-heavy
construction kits (organised by instrument type and
including tail samples) and assorted extra loops, Relic
has a ‘new age’ vibe throughout and is certainly
consistent in its energy – perhaps at the expense of
variety, particularly with regard to the basses, some
of which are very similar. The chords, riffs and pads
are more diverse, however; the deliciously analogue
drum loops are accompanied by culled one-shots;
and MIDI files are provided for most of the parts.
Ambient and synthwave producers will love this.
modeaudio.com
n8/10n
Raw Cutz
Nu Skillz £60
The follow-up to Raw Skillz (8/10, 239) brings
another 50 golden era-style hip-hop kits and
demonstrative MIDI files/patterns for Maschine, Live’s
Drum Racks and Reason’s Kong drum machine, this
time available individually (as we requested!) or in a
bundle for £80, the latter also including loops
rendered from all patterns in regular and crackly
‘vinyl’ versions. Every kit is full stocked with 16 ‘crate
dug’ drum, bass, guitar, keys, FX and other sounds,
and the production is every bit as superb as we’ve
come to expect from Raw Cutz mainstay Turf Smoke.
loopmasters.com
n9/10n
mini reviews / reviews <
Sample Magic
Techno Textures £15
Sample Magic’s new ‘white label’ release is a 730MB
collection of loops and hits on the deeper, more
dystopian side of techno, with the former at 120, 125
and 130bpm. It’s moody, understated stuff, with the
drums favouring atmosphere over power, the
basslines making good use of reverb and delay in
their basement-rumbling sensibility, and the
arpeggiated and sequenced synth lead lines
crackling with tension. We particularly like the
granular loops, however, which don’t overdo the
glitchiness. Lots of highly usable stuff for the money.
samplemagic.com
n9/10n
Toontrack
EZkeys Urban Jazz MIDI £22
This affordable add-on for all versions of EZkeys adds
a wealth of jazzy keyboard performances to your
library of MIDI clips. The collection is divided into
Straight and Swing folders, between them contain ning
ten complete songs at tempos from 64 to 142bpm m.
Each song is separated out into eight-bar Intro, Ve erse,
Pre Chorus, Chorus and Bridge sections, with fourr
variations for each one – 250 clips in all. The
performances are great, from funky staccato liness to
smooth chord progressions, and the EZkeys interfface
makes customising them… well, easy!
timespace.com
n8/10n
Loopmasters
West Coast Grunge £35
The ninth in Loopmasters’ Vibes series of sample
packs (which take “inspiration from exceptional
moments in musical history”) serves up 1.1GB of loops
and one-shots aiming to encapsulate the sound and
spirit of classic grunge. The main event is clearly the
set of 22 construction kits, each hosting multiple live
drum, bass and guitar variations (no vocals, which is
fine with us), but oddly – and maybe unhelpfully – not
including a bounced mix. It may not be a very busy
field, but this is probably the best grunge library
we’ve heard.
loopmasters.com
n8/10n
UNDRGRND Sounds
Deep Melodic Horizons £25
Focusing on its titular theme, UNDRGRND’s latest
quickly skips past the drums (just 12 stemmed and
well-crafted loops – 81 files) and gets down to melodic
business with its 26 basslines, 27 synth loops and 13
totally synth-based inspiration kits, plus 42 bass and
synth one-shots. The sound design and
compositional ideas are all solid enough, and the
intended ‘festival’ feel is achieved with the effects
processing and production, but it doesn’t feel like
particularly great value, even with the inclusion of 89
MIDI files.
undrgrndsounds.com
n7/10n
June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 103
>  free samples  /  power synths

SampleS giveaway
PowER SYnTHS
From assertive arp lines to
cutting-edge supersaws, this
month’s exclusive sample pack –
as ever, lovingly crafted by Cyclick
and Groove Criminals – is here to
provide your projects with
synthetic punch and potential.
All of the samples come in .wav
530 EXCLUSIVE SAMPLES format, and there’s a dozen
including… multisamples patches included,
140 Arpeggiator Loops
84 Chord Hits
too. You’ll find the pack in the
20 Moog Bass Loops
25 MS-20 Loops
download
Get these exclusive samples
Samples folder on the print
edition’s DVD, or log in to FileSilo
on your PC/Mac over at

20 Power 5th Loops filesilo.co.uk/computermusic

21 Stack Bass Loops

10 Supersaw Loops (se p5) and download the zip
12 Multis
folder from this issue’s
Miscellaneous Files category.

> Step by step exploring this month’s Power Synths samples

1 2
Want access to powerful bass
captured from renowned analogue
and digital hardware synths? Then head
straight for the Groove Criminals >>
Loops folder, where you’ll find
categorised, BPM-labelled loops from the
Access Virus B, Moog Mother-32, Korg
MS-20 Mini and more.
3
Cyclick’s Arpeggiator Loops folder,
divided across five tempos, comprises
a collection of synths triggered
monophonically, layered for density, then
funnelled through choice processing
chains. Use these riffs as they come, or
chop out sections and recombine them in
creative ways.
For compositional flexibility, we’ve
thrown in 12 multisampled synth
patches for you to load up in your
favourite multisampler. The four patches
in the Cyclick folder also include Kontakt
(.nki) and SoundFont (.sfz) patches ready
to go. Fire them up, then layer and process
them to customise them further.

104  /  ComPuTER muSiC  /  June 2019

 loopmasters / free samples  <

loopmasters 269 samples

Get them on the DVD or download from filesilo.co.uk/computermusic

01 Artisan Audio Techno Percussion Bible 05 Loopmasters Neo Soul

02 LM Salaryman DNB Propulsion Vol. 2 06 Frontline Vintage Electric Piano
03 SD Future Latin & Trap 07 LM Speakin & Preachin
04 Loopmasters Jacking Deep House 08 rv_samplepacks Sonar Techno

June 2019  /  ComPuTER muSiC  /  105

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ISSUE 262
November 2018
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106 / COMPUTER MUSI
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ISSUE 261 ISSUE 260 ISSUE 259 ISSUE 258 ISSUE 257
Autumn 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018
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182 onwards. See bit.ly/cmvaultfaq.
/ August 2013

plugINS
You get more than 80 instruments and
effects with every issue of . Keep on top of
this exclusive plugin suite with our directory
The Plugins collection is a
suite of complete, limitation-free
instrument and effects plugins. It’s
an incredible resource, boasting
more than 80 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,
u-he, AudioRealism, Ohm Force,
KV331 Audio, Cableguys, XILS-lab,
AudioThing, Vengeance-Sound, Rob
Papen, zplane and more.
frequently
asked
questions
Enough talking! Where do I get
these plugins?
You can grab them all on the cover
DVD with our print edition, or as a
download from FileSilo (see p5 for
instructions on how to access).
How do I install Plugins?
It depends on the plugin. Some have
dedicated installers, while others
plugins  <
download
As well as on our DVD, you’ll
find all these plugins at
filesilo.co.uk/computermusic
just drop into your plugin folders. What happened to…?
There’s a bit more info on p113, As of 209, almost all Plugins
and there are specific installation are 64-bit compatible. The few
instructions for each in the How To older Plugins that remain
Install file in the CM Plugins folder. 32-bit-only – such as Amplifikation
CM, Rhino CM and KR-Delay/
What do I need to use them? KR-Reverb – are now included in
A PC or Mac and a music program the 32-bit only subfolders. These
(aka DAW) to host them. You need plugins require either a 32-bit host
a DAW that can host VST or AU or a suitable ‘bit bridge’ (eg,
plugins, such as Ableton Live, jBridge) for use in a 64-bit DAW.
Reaper, FL Studio (PC), Cubase,
Sonar (PC), Logic (Mac) or Still got questions?
GarageBand (Mac). A free See the full FAQ at
PC/Mac option is Tracktion 6. bit.ly/cmpluginsfaq
FEATURED PLUGIN
NoiseAsh
SpeakerSim CM
Load up this convolution-based
plugin and call up one of the four
modes – an old phone, megaphone,
walkie talkie or radio – to funnel your
signal through the chosen playback
system. There’s also a three-band EQ,
mix and internal drive/limiting.
noiseash.com
June 2019  /  CoMputer MuSiC  /  107
 PLUGINS

INSTRUMENTS
HYBRID SYNTHS
Our synths have been created
by the best software developers
in the world to bring you a
suite of sound-making tools for
all music production scenarios u-he Zebra CM
s Blendable oscillator waveforms
KV331AudioSynthMasterCM
s Dual wavescanning oscillators
Synapse Audio Dune CM
s VA and wavetable oscillators
s Super-programmable step LFOs s Multimode filter and built-in effects s Powerful per-voice modulation
s Slick delay, reverb and chorus s FM/AM synthesis modes s 12-slot modulation matrix
s Original synth designed just for CM s Based on SynthMaster 2.5 s Based on the full version of Dune
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST/RTAS, 32-/64-bit
u-he.com kv331audio.com synapse-audio.com

PLUS…
Enzyme CM
s Scanned synthesis instrument
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
humanoidsoundsystems.com

u-he Bazille CM
s Patchable modular synthesiser
s Sequencer and Mapping Generator
s Audio-rate modulation, Fractalizer
s Huge how-to guide in 232
s AU/VST 32-/64-bit
u-he.com
Dmitry Sches Thorn CM
s Dual spectral oscillators
s Analogue and Harmonic Filters
s Spectral and real-time effects
s Glitch Sequencer and Arpeggiator
s VST/VST3/AU/AAX, 32-/64-bit
dmitrysches.com
Psychic Modulation
Phonec CM
s Retro-inspired four-voice synth
s Two oscillators, noise osc and sub
s EchoShifter, Chorus and Melt
s Four envs, two LFOs, Arp and Seq
psychicmodulation.com
Seaweed Audio Fathom CM
s Monster modular polysynth
s VA, FM, wavetable, additive + more
s Envelopes, LFOs and sequencing
s Tons of filters and effects
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
fathomsynth.com
Klevgränd Enkl CM
s Fun, quirky one-osc monosynth
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
klevgrand.se
Cableguys Curve 2.6 CM
s Design-your-own-waveforms synth
s Phat 16-voice Unison mode
s AU/VST/RTAS, 32-/64-bit
cableguys.com

VIRTUAL ANALOGUE SYNTHS

Get the sounds
of sought-after
circuits with our
classic collection LinPlug Alpha CM XILS-lab PolyKB II CM Madrona Labs Aalto CM XILS-lab XILS 3 CM
s Dual oscillators with wave blending s Models the ultra-rare PolyKobol s Unusual oscillators with FM s Modelled on the EMS VCS 3 modular
s Mod matrix, slick chorus effect s Packed with mix-ready presets s Intuitively patchable modulation s Authentic circuits of the original
s Polyphonic glide between notes s Assign knobs to main parameters s Onboard reverb s Step sequencing s Added chorus and delay effects
s Based on the commercial Alpha s Based on XILS-lab’s PolyKB II s Based on the full Aalto synth s Pin matrices to ‘patch’ signal flow
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST/RTAS, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
linplug.com xils-lab.com madronalabs.com xils-lab.com

DRUM MACHINES
Get heads
nodding
and design
better beats DopeVST Beat Machine CM
s 50 ready-mixed royalty-free kits
AudioRealism ADM CM
s Old-school-style drum machine
brunsandspork Grooove CM
s Load in two samples per sound
XILS-lab StiX CM
s Drum synth with sequencer
s 50 MIDI beats included s Emulates Roland’s TR-606 and set their velocity response s Load preset kits and grooves
s Kick, Snare, Hi-hat and Misc parts s Also contains custom samples s 50 built-in Micro Kits to play s Apply effects and mix each sound
s Level, Pan, Pitch and Reverb s Based on the full ADM s Based on the full Grooove s Polystep modulation and more
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
dopevst.com audiorealism.se brunsandspork.com xils-lab.com

108 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019

 plugins <

SAMPLERS
Import, slice and loop your audio
files with these creative and
highly customisable instruments

Expert Sleepers Loomer Cumulus

XFadeLooper CM
s Creative crossfade-looping sampler
s Hard Sync mode and modulation
s Saturation section, flexible looping
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
expert-sleepers.co.uk
s Granular sampler with sequencing
s Scenes function to sequence slices
s Not based on an existing plugin
s AU/VST 32-/64-bit
s RTAS/Standalone 32-bit
loomer.co.uk

OTHER

DopeVST Bass Engine CM Kirnu Cream CM Monoplugs B-Step CM zplane vielklang 2 CM Eisenberg Einklang CM
s 45 authentic hip-hop bass patches s Get more out of plugin instruments s Step sequencer for beats and chords s Pitch-correct and retune audio s Morph between a trio of oscillators
s Three eras of faux-sampled bass and master arpeggios with this tool s Easily creates chord progressions s Harmonise melodies with ease s Envelope and timbre controls
s 50 MIDI riffs included s Program and store complex patterns s Seven pages of controls to dial in s Level and pan harmony voices s Modulate tone with the LFO
s Envelope and note controls s Musical controls for rhythm/notes s Based on the commercial B-Step s Algorithms by zplane’s experts s Based on the full Einklang synth
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
dopevst.com kirnuarp.com monoplugs.com zplane.de eisenberg-audio.de

Rob Papen RG-Muted CM AudioThing miniBit CM Squaredheads Nora CM RF Music Scale Player CM AutoTonic CM
s Create realistic funk guitar grooves s 15-waveform chiptune synth s Input up to four notes, Play scales in new, creative ways s Always stay in key with this MIDI app
s Onboard sequencer s Envelope and LFO modulation output chords and arpeggios s Set a ‘home’ note and scale s White keys play notes while black
s Effects and modulation options s Bit-depth/sample rate reduction s Program velocities & store patterns s Play other keys to alter settings keys select the scale you’re in
s Based on Rob Papen RG s Based on the commercial miniBit s Mac users require macOS 10.8+ s Based on the full Scale Player s Choose from a variety of scales
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s Standalone, acts as your MIDI input
robpapen.com audiothing.net squaredheads.com rfmusic.net autotonic.net

> Step by step

plug ns reloaded / make mus c now <

11 Piano and vintage syn h sounds

CM PLUGINS TUTORIAL BANK

versat e nsp r ng synth the atest
P ug ns fam y
We turn our at ent on to th s

V DEO
add t on to the

Satson and on

1 2
foc

To help you get the most out of our immense with tutorial PDFs and videos on using Plugins
CURVE 2 CM

plugin collection, we’ve assembled the Plugins for sound design, mixing, and even creating entire
3 4

> Step by step 12 Risers and e fects with Alchemy Player CM

Tutorial Bank, containing over 100 guides and tracks. You’ll find all of this as a handy download
tutorials for our Plugins, specially selected from from FileSilo – go grab it now and start getting
>

V DEO

1 2 3
past issues. You’ll find Getting Started PDFs and more out of your plugins!
videos for most of the individual plugins, along filesilo.co.uk/computermusic

June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 109

 PLUGINS
EFFECTS
DYNAMICS
Check out this huge collection of
processors – from classic
compressors to modern digital
creations, we’ve got everything
you need to shape your signals
Unfiltered Audio G8 CM
s Get tight dynamics or creative FX
s Includes advanced gating controls
s Real-time waveform display
s Use MIDI as a trigger or output
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
unfilteredaudio.com
D16 Group Frontier
s Superb mixing/mastering limiter
s Set Threshold and Output
s Choose detection and release styles
s Soft Clip control for drive/distortion
s AU/VST/AAX, 32-/64-bit
d16.pl
ANALYSIS
Rule the waves and make
your music come alive before
your very eyes with the help
of these pro visualisation tools
110 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019
HoRNet Fat-FET
s FET-style compressor
s Similar to the classic Urei 1176LN
s Ultra-fast attack as low as 0.02ms
s Based on HoRNet MultiComp
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
hornetplugins.com
Ignite VST Vice One
s Talented compressor sold for $49
s Choose between analogue or
digital response characteristics
s In/out and gain reduction metering
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
ignitevst.com
eaReckon CM-COMP 87
s Slick, punchy compressor
s Mix knob for parallel compression
s Limiter to keep the output in check
s Clear VU- and LED-style metering
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
eareckon.com
HoRNet DrumShaper
s Instant EQ & compression for drums
s Dial in effect amount & in/out gain
s 7 algorithms: kick, snare, loops, etc
s Based on HoRNet TrackShaper
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
hornetplugins.com
Toneboosters
Barricade CM
s Intelligent mastering-grade limiter
s Dynamic response controls
s Stereo options, versatile metering
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
toneboosters.com
Blue Cat Audio
FreqAnalyst CM
s Pro-quality, feature-packed analyser
s Numerous customisation options
s Based on Blue Cat FreqAnalyst
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit, RTAS 32-bit
bluecataudio.com
Acustica Audio Violet CM
s Three-band multiband compressor
s SHmod to shape attack response
s Impart analogue-style valve tone
s Ideal for mixing and mastering
s VST/AU/AAX, 32-/64-bit
acustica-audio.com
audioD3CK SunRuys CM
s Characterful bus compressor
s Dry/wet mix and blend controls
s Advanced options to go deeper
s Based on the full SunRuys plugin
s AU/VST/RTAS/AAX, 32-/64-bit
audio.d3ck.net
SKnote Snap
s Boost or tame transient brightness
s Brighten or dull a sound’s sustain
s Uses two intelligently-linked filters
s Not based on any existing plugin
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
sknote.it
Photosounder Spiral CM
s Musical, note-based analyser
s Useful for figuring out notes in
audio and grasping music theory
s Based on the full Spiral plugin
s AU/VST/AAX, 32-/64-bit
photosounder.com
Audiority TS-1 CM
s Flavoursome transient shaper
s Set attack and sustain gain
s Blend control for parallel processing
s Based on the full TS-1 plugin
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
audiority.com
WA Production Puncher CM
s Three-pronged mixing multieffect
s Boost transients for punch
s Four-band multiband compressor
s Weighty parallel compression
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
waproduction.com
PLUS…
Toneboosters
Sibalance CM
s Pro de-esser and de-harsher
s Four modes for different use cases
s Reduction and Attack parameters
s (AU/VST, 32-/64-bit)
toneboosters.com
LVC-Audio Transector CM
s Transient tweaking and saturation
s Define and process envelopes
s Useful metering and visualisation
s (AU/VST, 32-/64-bit)
lvcaudio.com
Vengeance-Sound Scope
s Spectrum for frequency analysis
s Oscilloscope for waveform view
s Stereo phase and level metering
s Tons of advanced analysis options
s AU/VST/AAX, 32-/64-bit
vengeance-sound.com
 plugins <

EQ/FILTERS
From basic clean-up filters to
juicy, analogue-style EQ units
and creative effects, get your
spectrum sorted with these
Acustica Audio Pink CM DDMF CM EQ Pack Vengeance-Sound Philta CM
virtual signal-sculptors s Analogue-modelled API-alike EQ
s Four EQ bands, two with shelf toggle
s Two superb equalisers
s IIEQ Pro CM: 19 filter types
s Dual high- and low-pass filters
s Four slope settings: 12/24/48/96dB
s Output adjusts to match Input Trim s LP10 CM: Linear phase EQ s Resonance and width controls
s Cut from the full Pink channel strip s Based on commercial DDMF plugins s Link function and notch mode
s AU/VST/AAX s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
acustica-audio.com ddmf.eu vengeance-sound.com

More EQ/Filter plugins

eaReackon CM-EQUA 87
Three-band EQ with high/low shelves
(AU/VST, 32-/64-bit)
eareckon.com

AudioThing The Orb CM OverTone DSP AudioThing ValveFilter CM Overtone DSP

s Morphing vowel formant filter
s Choose five vowels from a list of ten
s Move the dot to change the sound
s Smooth, Gain and Mix to refine
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
audiothing.net
Program EQ CM
s Pultec-style vintage EQ emulation
s Dual bass boost/attenuate knobs
s Tube amplifier circuit-only option
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
overtonedsp.co.uk
s Gorgeous filtering and drive
s Low-pass filter circuit emulation
s Vintage valve saturation section
s Based on Valve Filter VF-1
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
audiothing.net
AF2-10 CM
s Four-band EQ with ten filter types
s Band gains adjustable +/-24dB
s Flatten and clear curve, resize GUI
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
overtonedsp.co.uk

DELAY/REVERB
More Delay/Reverb plugins
Add space Acon Digital CM Verb
s Simple-but-versatile operation
and ambience, s Five modes: hall, plate, studio, etc
s Based on Acon Digital’s Verberate
or throw your s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
acondigital.com
sounds into LiquidSonics
Reverberate CM
PSP Audioware cmDelay
s Modulatable delay with LFO
Surreal Machines Microfuse
s Delay/reverb hybrid plugin Ignite VST Areena
a completely s Convolution reverb with real-world
presets and processing controls
s Dial in delay time, filtering and width
s Feedback and ping-pong operation
s Modelled on hardware effects
s Broad palette of timbres
s Beautiful algorithmic reverb
s As sold for $49, but yours for free!
new dimension s Import your own impulse response
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
s Based on the full stompDelay
s AU/VST/AAX/RTAS, 32-/64-bit
s Nine modes, plus presets
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
s Room and plate algorithms
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
liquidsonics.com pspaudioware.com surrealmachines.com ignitevst.com

MULTIEFFECTS
Get your
creativity all
in one place
with these
Subsonic Labs LVC-Audio T-Chain CM Inear Display Eurydice CM Tek’it Audio CrossDr CM
all-purpose Wolfram CM
s Pitchshifting, distortion, phase-
s Take your choice of six effects
s DynoPhuzz CM distortion effect
s Stutter, buffer and edit signals
s Buffer override, repeat, delay,
s Three independent bands of drive
s Drive, Warp, Crush and Clip signals
plugin effects shifting, panning, delay and filter
s Flexible modulation
s Two dynamics processors to try
s EQ, ClipShifter and filter effects
bitcrusher and filter with modulation
s Custom signal routing
in three parallel bands
s Per-band Balance and Level
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s Customisable waveform display s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
subsoniclabs.com lvcaudio.com ineardisplay.com tekit-audio.com

June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 111

 PLUGINS
EFFECTS
DISTORTION/SATURATION
Fuzz up your signals with custom
dirt – from waveshaping
to saturation and soft clipping,
this diverse bunch of plugins are
guaranteed to play as rough as
you like with any audio material
Sonimus Satson CM
s Classic mixer channel emulation
s Subtle warming saturation
s Gentle, musical high/low filters
s Full Satson Buss also available
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
dsp.sonimus.com
OTHER
More esoteric
and incredibly
useful plugins
from recent
issues of
Dotec-Audio DeeMonitor
s Handy monitoring utility plugin
s Emulate NS10, Genelec and
Auratone 5C speakers in your DAW
s Invert and Solo left and right feeds
s Mid/Side balancing + Output gain
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
dotec-audio.com
112 / COMPUTER MUSIC / June 2019
Rop Papen RP-Distort CM
s Five crunchy distortion algorithms
s EQ, dynamics, widener, modulation
s Filter and parallel
processing controls
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
robpapen.com
Auburn Sounds
Panagement CM
s Psycho-stereo toolkit plugin
s Place sounds with Binaural Pan
s Edit perceived distance and width
s Stereoise mono sounds
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
auburnsounds.com
Inear Display Litote CM
s Granular effect to slice and dice
signals on a microscopic level
s Tweak speed and introduce jitter
s Adjust the Timbre Frequency,
Feedback and Diffusion
s AU/VST/AAX, 32-/64-bit
ineardisplay.com
Continued
Audio Assault
GrindMachine CM
s Five amp and ten cab emulations
s 3-band EQ plus depth and presence
s Djentbox to tighten low tunings
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
audioassault.com
Shattered Glass Audio
Inferno CM
s Two analogue preamp models
s High-and low-pass filters
s Dry/wet Mix knob
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
shatteredglassaudio.com
JST & Boz SideWidener
s Add stereo width to mono sounds
s Signal retains mono compatibility
s Goniometer for stereo visuals
s Three widen modes, Width & Tone
s AU/VST/AAX/RTAS, 32-/64-bit
joeysturgistones.com
bozdigitallabs.com
HoRNet FreMo
s Mini frequency modulator effect
s Oscillator frequency can be set
manually or follow input pitch
s Scale the oscillator from 1x to 10x
s Set mod amount and osc waveform
s AU/VST/AAX, 32-/64-bit
hornetplugins.com
NoiseAsh SpeakerSim CM
s Four speaker models
s Onboard EQ and HP/LP filters
s Internal limiter and distortion
s In/Out level, Mono/Stereo
s VST/AU/AAX, 32-/64-bit
noiseash.com
Cableguys WaveShaper CM
s Graphically editable distortion
s Design curves by dragging nodes
s Input vs output oscilloscope
s Not based on an existing plugin
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
cableguys.com
New Sonic Arts Freestyle CM
s Host and chain together
your Plugins VSTs
s Route and split signal paths
s Event Player to simple sequences
s Save snapshots of whole setups
s Runs as AU/VST/Standalone
newsonicarts.com
Audio Vitamins Life CM
s Modulation and widening plugin
s Vary pitch or amplitude
with LFOs
s Widen, sweeten and improve
audio to a mix-ready state
s AU/VST/AAX, 32-/64-bit
audiovitamins.com
PLUS…
Kuassa PreMix CM
s Subtle saturation or overdrive
s Three-band Baxandall EQ
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
kuassa.com
Audiffex STA Enhancer CM
s Valve-style signal exciter/enhancer
s Choose from five tube circuits
s AU/VST/AAX, 32-/64-bit
audiffex.com
Audio Assault
BassAmp CM
s Ampeg-inspired bass amp sim
s Gain and Deep controls for drive
s AU/VST/AAX, 32-/64-bit
audioassault.com
Mercuriall U530 CM
s Emulation of ENGL’s E530 preamp
s Customisable Clean & Lead circuits
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
mercuriall.com
HoRNet Graffio CM
s Flexible three-flavour distortion
s Saturator module with DC offset
s Exciter and bit reducer
s AU/VST/VST3/AAX/RTAS, 32-/64-bit
hornetplugins.com
Lindell 6X-500 CM
s Classic preamp emulation with EQ
s High/low boosts for musical tone
s AU/VST, 32-/64-bit
lindellplugins.com
Nyrv Agent CM
s Create custom effects chains
with this valuable utility plugin
s Host your VST/AU plugins
s Design your own interface
s Based on the full Agent plugin
s AU/VST/AAX, 32-/64-bit
nyrvsystems.com
 plugins <

Loading plugins in your DAW

Though there are a wide variety of DAWs, each
with its own unique interface, there are
similarities when it comes to loading up and
using plugins, and most stick to one of two
approaches. The first – as seen in Steinberg’s
Cubase, Apple’s Logic, and Cakewalk’s Sonar –
involves insert slots on a track or mixer channel.
These are used in the same way as an insert
effect would be used on a hardware mixer. In
other words, the effect is placed ‘in line’ on that
mixer or track channel. Plugins might be loaded
in by use of a dropdown menu tree or right-
clicking in the effects slot. Clicking in the insert
or effects slot in some DAWs – Cockos’ Reaper,
for instance – will reveal a dedicated browser
from which the desired plugin may be selected.
It’s common to stack multiple effects plugins
together to form an effects ‘chain’, much in the
way a guitarist might connect various
stompboxes together to form a custom sound.
In some DAWs, these effects chains may be
See how to load plugins in eight different DAWs with our videos at the URLs below
saved and recalled at a later time.
If your DAW uses a sidebar browser, here you
can find your plugins displayed and possibly dropped from a browser onto a specific track. We’ve prepared videos for eight major DAWs
arranged into categories. The plugins may be However, many DAWs distinguish between showing you the basics of loading plugins, along
dragged into the project and placed directly instrument and audio tracks, so you’ll need to with a few handy tips you won’t want to miss:
onto a track or channel. Ableton Live, Bitwig keep this in mind. Those that allow you to drag > Cockos Reaper – bit.ly/LPIreaper
Studio, Cakewalk’s Sonar and PreSonus Studio instruments in from a browser might offer the > Cakewalk Sonar – bit.ly/LPIsonar
One can all open effects and even instrument choice of using an existing instrument track or > PreSonus Studio One – bit.ly/LPIstudioone
plugins in this manner. creating a new one. Some DAWs (Cubase, Sonar) > Apple Logic – bit.ly/LPIlogic
On the subject of instrument plugins, we allow you to open instruments in a ‘rack’ and > Image-Line FL Studio – bit.ly/LPIflstudio
should discuss the different methods you might then connect to them from MIDI or instrument > Steinberg Cubase – bit.ly/LPIcubase
encounter when loading up instruments. As tracks. Others (Logic) make a plugin menu > Bitwig Studio – bit.ly/LPIbitwig
mentioned, sometimes they can be dragged and available from the track itself. > Ableton Live – bit.ly/LPIableton

Plugin folder locations

So how does your DAW know where to look
for your plugins? Actually, it might not. Mac
users have it easy, as there are OS-specified
folders into which plugins are installed. These
folders can be found by going to your Library
folder (if you can’t find it, go to the Finder’s Go
menu, hold Alt, and a Library option should
appear). Find the Audio directory, and then
the Plug-Ins folder within. There you will find
more folders still. One will be labelled
Components – this is where your AU plugins
reside. Other folders will be found alongside it
for VST and VST3 plugins. If you’re a Pro Tools
user, you’ll find your plugins in an Avid or
Digidesign folder. If your installers don’t
automatically install the plugins into the
proper folder, you should manually copy them
into the relevant folders listed above.
One caveat: there will likely be two sets of
folders under two different Library locations.
One is for all users, the other is for
administrator use. If your DAW has trouble
seeing a plugin, you might need to move it
If you’re using Apple’s OS X, all your VST, VST3 and
Audio Units go into pre-determined locations
from one Library to the other, though the
system folder is usually the one to use.
Uninstalling plugins from OS X usually
requires little more than putting the
Component or VST file in the Trash.
Sometimes an uninstaller will be offered to
you, though.
On Windows, you can choose the location
of your VST plugins folders. Some DAWs will
create one when you install them, but both
DAW and plugin installers will often give you
an option of pointing to the plugin directory
you’d like to use. It usually looks something
like C:\Program Files\Steinberg\VST Plugins.
Some plugins are delivered as only DLL
files, and need to be copied to your chosen
directory. Once you’ve installed your plugins,
think twice about moving them. Some plugins
rely on support files installed into the same
directory. To duplicate plugins elsewhere on
the drive, use shortcuts on Windows (right-
click to create one) or aliases on Macs (Cmd-
Alt-dragging).

June 2019 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 113

>  make music now  /  blast from the past
Initially released as a companion to PPG’s
legendary Wave 2.2, this giant slab of silicon
put considerable sound-shaping power into the
hands of many a noted synthesist
PPG Waveterm
Wavetable synthesis is undergoing
something of a revival at the moment,
with multiple hardware and software
variants on the theme available to musicians.
Maybe the same old analogue waveforms are
growing a bit stale.
This is precisely what happened the first time
around, when German company PPG unleashed
the PPG Wave, a hybrid instrument with
oscillators that offered the ability to draw from a
vast collection of digitally-stored single-cycle
waveforms that had been strung together in a
‘wavetable’. Unlike the static sample playback
offered by the ROMplers that followed, PPG
instruments could dynamically modulate
through the waves of the selected wavetable.
The results were sounds with timbral movement
the likes of which had never before been heard.
PPG perfected its design with the addition of
an analogue filter and VCA, reducing the
harshness of the 8-bit waves found in the Wave
2 and 2.2. The 12-bit Wave 2.3 was the most
successful of the lot, with over 700 units sold.
As powerful as they were, the Waves offered
a finite number of factory-defined wavetables
which, though a vast improvement over the
analogue synths that preceded them, seemed
Three great plugin alternatives
9
€9
PPG WaveGenerator
The PPG WaveGenerator is Wolfgang Palm’s
modern take on the PPG Wave/Waveterm
combo, offering custom waveform
generation, wavetable creation and a whole
slew of interesting modulation options. It’s the
logical evolution of wavetable synthesis,
designed less to fulfil a vintage fantasy than to
create entirely new sonic vistas.
wolfgangpalm.coml
114  /  Computer musiC  /  June 2019
limited compared to the early samplers that
were coming into vogue in the early 1980s.
PPG’s Waveterm would put paid to those
limitations, and a whole lot more. Housed in a
hulking blue 7U steel case, the Waveterm
provided Wave 2.2 users with sampling and
sample editing, additive and FM waveform
creation, custom wavetable creation, an unusual
type of resonator-based synthesis and the
ability to edit the Wave’s sequences.
The first version of the Waveterm was
powered by a 6800 processor and sported dual
8” floppy drives. An upgraded version designed
to work with the Wave 2.3’s added features
upped the ante with a 68000 processor, 5 1/4”
drives and longer sampling times.
This was heady stuff in its day, but the
operating system was easy to grok, if sometimes
tedious to use. A Wave-Waveterm system could
perform all of the most advanced sampling and
sequencing functions of the time, though its
price put off casual musicians – and the fact that
the Waveterm couldn’t be used without the
Wave made it more expensive still. That, of
course, didn’t stop the likes of The Stranglers,
Tangerine Dream, and Gary Numan, all of whom
peppered their records with PPG sounds.
EE
FR
herMann seib WaveterM C
Waveterm C was meant as a means of
recreating the features of the Waveterm on a
Windows PC, with the aim of connecting and
controlling an actual PPG Wave. However, it
works well on its own, and with the ‘demo’
version of Seib’s free PPG Wave clone called
WaveSim. Worth a look if you want the exact
experience of using an 80s-era PPG system.
hermannseib.com
tech SPecS
Year of manufacture
1982
Original sale value
$10,650
Current price
Unknown
Number made
Approximately 300
Astonishingly, in 2012 PPG mainman
Wolfgang Palm updated the Waveterm B’s
software to 1.01, allowing it to work with the
Wave 2.2 and creating a whole slew of new
Resonator files for the few remaining Waveterm
users. That’s some serious longterm support!
There’s nothing like the crunch of a sample or
wavetable spat forth from a Waveterm, but
vintage units are as rare, and usually cost a lot.
Moreover, the disks used to store the OS, sounds
and samples are becoming difficult to source,
and even harder to trust. Floppy disks weren’t
meant to last three decades, and alas, many
haven’t. However, modern software variants are
around, particularly if you’re just out to create
your own wavetables.
EE
FR
Mathias Gurk audioterM
Designed as a programming exercise, this is a
Windows-based wavetable creation tool
inspired by the Waveterm. It can seem
impenetrable to the modern user, but those
who fancy whipping up their own wavetables
for use with various compatible hardware and
software instruments love it. It’s hard to find,
but there’s a valid link at the following url…
muffwiggler.com